1 August 1987
Fake news and misinformation existed in 1987 too, you know. I remember everyone at the time saying that ‘la bamba’ in Spanish meant ‘the goat’ and that this song was about a goat. In provincial Ireland in 1987 the only Spanish speakers we ever saw were the impossibly exotic Spanish students who came to our town on language exchanges every summer, and I certainly wasn’t going to approach them to ask about a goat. (If you need to know, a goat in Spanish is ‘cabro’ or ‘cabra’, so let’s say the Dublin suburb of Cabra is named after a Spanish nanny goat. You’ve read it here on the Internet so it must be true.)
Turns out ‘La Bamba’ is just a made-up word for a dance, and this is a Mexican folk song that got the ’50s rock n’roll treatment by Ritchie Valens. The film of the same name in 1987 told the story of Valens, who was killed in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly. So, this is another of 1987’s movie soundtrack number ones. The song itself is as catchy as hell, and Los Lobos have the sound and the cultural background to do it justice. I just find the glossy ’80s soft rock production a bit bland and stultifying here, as if any cultural knottiness has to be sanded off to make it commercial. The Valens original, by the way, has even worse production, as if the wood percussionist is right beside the microphone and everyone else is crammed into another room down the hall. But Los Lobos and ‘La Bamba’ add some welcome variety to our charts, and I shouldn’t let the passing fads of rock production get on my goat.
