5 May 2017
The 15 weeks of ‘Despacito’ were finally overtaken by Kingfishr’s ‘Killeagh’ in January 2026 as second only to ‘Riverdance’ on the all-time list of songs with the most weeks at number one in Ireland. ‘Killeagh’ had the power of local Gaelic football and hurling, a folk music resurgence and a prominent Late Late Toy Show appearance behind its multiple trips to the top of the Irish charts; ‘Riverdance’ was fuelled by the sensation of its Eurovision half-time show plus, I suspect, a whole summer’s worth of tourists to Ireland buying it as a souvenir. How did a Puerto Rican reggaeton dance-pop number in Spanish by two unknown acts topple the Ed Sheeran regime to get to number one in Ireland—not a reggaeton-in-Spanish stronghold—and then stay there untoppled itself for three and a half months?
Well, I’d love there to have been a unique pop-cultural happening or weird local factoid at the root of it, but the simple reason is that the ‘Despacito’ we get a number one is not the Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee original but a remix billed as “featuring” but really starring Justin Bieber. His voice and his colonising replacement English-language verse are the first thing we hear on the record; the back of his head and neck are the first thing we see on the cover. Fonsi is effectively relegated to supporting act on his own track; there’s a particularly clunky edit where his bouncing vocal drops out completely to usher back in Bieber to sing the title word and chorus hook in the completely differently register of Sheeran-esque sad-boy trop-house folk-pop. Its valuable natural resources duly land-grabbed by Bieber, the rest of the track is then left to its own devices almost begrudgingly: Fonsi’s boyband-esque power-ballad mid-section; Daddy Yankee’s energetic rap in Spanish.
The original ‘Despacito’ is more of a Luis Fonsi – Daddy Yankee two-hander, with a greater sense of breezy energy and fun. It could well have been a hit in Ireland on its own steam, maybe even still a number one. Repackaged as a Bieber vehicle, though, this Irish-chart-topping remix is just another dreary trop-pop bore in the high Bieber-Sheeran style of 2015-17: desesperado.
