Pros: '50s rock in Spanish, aimed at children but entertaining for all ages.
Cons: Hearing it sung by a female voice in Spanish takes getting used to.
The Bottom Line: Tatiana has taken on many different musical styles over her career, and done a great job at all of them. '50s rock 'n' roll gets her treatment this time.
Tatiana continues to be a popular children's entertainer in Mexico, and continues to make new episodes of her high-rated TV show there even at late stages of her pregnancy (her second child, a boy to be named Andrik, is due in about a month). However, her fortunes north of the border haven't been so favorable lately. Her show (El Espacio de Tatiana) has been taken off the air on the Spanish-language network Univision. Her U.S. tour last summer as the star of a Hispanic circus fell apart halfway through due to a dispute between its business partners. And she wasn't even sure herself whether her latest album, released late last year in Mexico, would even make it to the United States, since her recording contract with Universal had run out and wasn't being renewed, and they hadn't seemed to be showing much interest in promoting her outside Mexico lately.
Fortunately for her fans, Universal did release the new CD, Acapulco Rock, in the United States. When it came out, I noticed an error on the CD case, repeated from the earlier Mexican version; where it gave her official website address, instead of showing it correctly as www.tatilandia.com, it instead said www.tatilandia.com.mx, with the .mx country-code domain of Mexico. Many websites around the world use addresses in their appropriate country codes (except in the United States, where the .us domain doesn't get very much use except for the occasional local or state government site), but Tatiana's wasn't one of them; in fact, as of the U.S. release date, the tatilandia.com.mx domain remained unregistered, vulnerable to cybersquatters who often grab domains with the names of other people and companies in order to draw traffic to their own sites.
At that point, I took matters into my own hands and registered that domain myself with the Mexican registrar (www.nic.mx). It turned out you didn't have to be Mexican to register Mexican domains. I pointed it at a web page that linked to both her official site and my Tatiana fan site (www.chicadehoy.org). Then, since I'm not like the exploitative cybersquatters who take others' names for profit, I let her know what I'd done, and offered to transfer the ownership to her at no charge. I was a little worried I'd still get in trouble for cybersquatting, still technically illegal even if I did it with good motives -- could I be dragged into a Mexican jail for it? (Well, I don't think so; it's just a civil offense, not criminal, and I don't know if Mexico has even passed a cybersquatting law like the U.S. did recently!) Fortunately, she was thankful that I had done this, so that her fans could find a site at the address on the CD and real cybersquatters couldn't do something sinister with the address, and she liked my approach of linking to all the major sites about her, so that's still what you get at the address.
But enough about that; I'd better get on with reviewing the CD, shouldn't I?
Acapulco Rock represents a change in style for Tatiana -- this is nothing new, as she's been reinventing herself constantly throughout her 17-year career. She's still aiming her music at children, as shown by the colorful CD cover with cartoon characters, but the style now is '50s rock 'n' roll. Elvis has left the building, but Tatiana has arrived with her own take on the style of a musical era from before she was born. You can see her on the CD cover rocking along with her cartoon characters in a leather jacket... in a scene which happens to be taking place underwater. On the inside page, she appears as a mermaid (she's always been fascinated by mermaids, and can't resist the opportunity to become one!), and the booklet folds open into a poster of her in a different leather jacket (but without a mermaid tail) being served sundaes from each of the Rocktopus's eight arms as he mans the counter of a '50s-style malt shop. Yet another side of the booklet has her in a leather jacket of a different color showing off some dance moves. Nice pictures... but it would have been nice if she had included the lyrics too.
The songs, like I said, are in a '50s rock style, mostly remakes with Spanish lyrics of old hit songs. It sounds a bit unusual to hear this musical style in a female voice singing in Spanish (since the originals were sung by male vocalists in English), but she does her usual great job at interpreting them. Here are the songs:
1) Acapulco Rock: The title track sets the style for the CD with '50s rock rhythms, though I don't know if this particular song actually dates back to that era. Acapulco is one of several popular Mexican beach resort towns, and the site of a Hard Rock Café. Is there a Puerto Vallarta Rock or a Cancun Rock? (Well, I do remember some silly Saturday Night Live skit where they were singing that "There Is No Cocaine in Cancun", but that doesn't really count...)
2) La Favorita del Profesor: A song on the softer, lighter side, where she sings about wanting to be the teacher's pet. While her range as a performer lets her do a good job at styles from hard to soft, I think her voice and personality are at their most natural nearer the soft end of the scale, so I'm glad she featured some of this even on a more "rocking" CD.
3) Despeinada: A mid-tempo song, picking up the pace a bit from the previous track, but not really "hard" in style. A catchy tune, and she shows interesting vocal variety in singing it.
4) El Gato Loco: More of a beat now. You can hear cat noises in the background, and what sounds like a tiger roar. This is the first place on the CD where it might be considered to sound like a "children's record", since the use of animals is a common feature on kids' songs (including Tatiana's earlier releases).
5) Popotitos: A remake of "Bony Moronie" by Larry Williams. Thanks to godspeede for the original titles and artists for the remake songs; the '50s were before my time, so I wouldn't have recognized all of them myself. He wrote his own review of this CD before Epinions had it available for reviewing, and it can be seen in the Chica de Hoy fan site at:
http://www.chicadehoy.org/music/reviews/ar-godspeede.html
6) Hasta Luego Cocodrilo: Well, even though it was before my time, I did recognize this one -- it's a remake of "See You Later, Alligagor" by by Bill Haley and the Comets.
7) La Plaga: Remake of "Party", which has been recorded by Elvis and separately by Wanda Jackson.
8) Rock del Reloj: "Rock Around the Clock", another Bill Haley and the Comets classic that I knew already even though I wasn't born yet when it came out. This song is usually credited with launching the "Rock Era" when it hit #1 on the Billboard chart in the mid '50s. Tatiana's version opens with a ticking sound, and the Spanish lyrics include frequent mentions of "rock 'n' roll" (not really a Spanish phrase, but one of the many borrowings that have entered that language from English, to the consternation of language purists, of which Spanish has some, though not as many or as loudmouthed as does French). Incidentally, the original English lyrics to this song didn't actually contain the phrase "rock 'n' roll", though "rock" appears many times.
9) Niña con Vestido Azul: "Devil in the Blue Dress", by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. In the Spanish version, the "devil" gets less Satanic and is simply a "girl with a blue dress", perhaps to make the CD more kid-suitable. Incidentally, Tatiana was actually accused at one point of having Satanic messages in her songs when they were played backwards. This was in the '80s, when such fundamentalist nuttiness was sweeping not only the U.S. Bible Belt but Latin America as well, and people were listening to every record backwards to see what they could find, imagine, or make up, though no reputable scientist has ever proven that backward messages even have any sort of subliminal mental effect on anybody who isn't specifically listening for them. Supposedly one of Tatiana's pop songs from the late '80s, "Peligro en El Elevador", had her saying she was the "Beast" when you heard it in reverse.
10) Perro Lanudo: Another "animal" song, complete with animal noises, this time a dog.
11) Rock del Angelito: She left out the Devil a few tracks back, but there's a little angel in this one. A nice catchy song.
12) Mahna-Mahna: A rather weird song, with a "scat singing" style and lots of odd sound effects. I don't think the lyrics mean anything in any language.
13) Popurri: "I'll take Potpourri for $1000, Alex." You don't have to answer this one in the form of a question, and it won't put you in jeopardy; this is simply a medley of a few songs: "Bule-bule", "Hanky-panky", and "Pata-pata". In Spanish, I think "Hanky-panky" is just used as nonsense syllables without the adulterous connotations it has in English.
14) El Día: Tatiana likes to end her albums with a nice pleasant ballad, and she does it again here.
Overall, another well-done effort from Tatiana, and despite the kid-friendly packaging, it's not really a "children's album" -- it's great for kids, but it's nice for grownups too, with only the occasional animal noise to remind you of the children's audience it's aimed at.
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