Billboard is celebrating the 2010s with essays on the 100 songs that we feel most define the decade that was — the songs that both shaped and reflected the music and culture of the period — with help telling their stories from some of the artists, behind-the-scenes collaborators and industry insiders involved.
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Before “Despacito,” there was “Bailando” — the Enrique Iglesias smash featuring Cuban singer/songwriter Descemer Bueno and Cuban duo Gente de Zona. The 2014 track broke all records on the Hot Latin Songs chart by a considerable distance, remaining at No. 1 for 41 weeks.
“I remember ‘Bailando’ making me feel exactly like I felt when I released my first album. It excited me,” Enrique tells Billboard today. “And I remember thinking, ‘F–k, this is the reason I started to do this, and this is the reason I’ve been at it for a bunch of years.’ It’s weird to describe. It just made me feel extremely happy.”
If “Despacito” broke ground with its mix of Latin reggaeton and pop, rapping and singing, “Bailando” opened the door to that possibility, marrying Iglesias’ up-tempo melodic fare with Descemer Bueno’s singer/songwriter vibe and, the coup de grace, the urban beats and gritty vocals of Cuban duo Gente de Zona. At a time when Cuban-based artists had long been absent from the Billboard charts, “Bailando” brought them back, with a vengeance; in 2014 Gente de Zona became the first Cuban-based act to ever top Billboard’s airplay charts after they were featured on “Bailando,” which they co-wrote.
Despite the results, “Bailando” coming together as it did was a musical accident that nearly never happened.
Iglesias wrote “Bailando” with Bueno, his frequent collaborator, in one of many writing sessions the two had in Iglesias’ house. Bueno brought him the track, which he had begun to pen in 2009, and the two finessed it and added to it — but Iglesias wasn’t fully convinced. The pair even sent it out to other acts, and it languished until the singer-songwriter, who lived in Miami, went to his native Cuba and connected with Gente de Zona — at the time the most popular group on the island. They put their mojo into the track, including the bridge: “Yo quiero estar contigo, bailar contigo.”
Suddenly, it clicked. Bueno released his version of the song with Gente de Zona, and Iglesias eventually heard it. “This is when you realize that a song that makes you feel like there’s lightning in a bottle is extremely difficult, and all the stars have to align,” muses Iglesias.
He and Bueno re-recorded the track yet again, this time with Gente de Zona in the mix. Reaction was combustive. Soon after, Iglesias met with Republic Records chairman/CEO Monte Lipman and Charlie Walk (at the time EVP of Republic), who asked him for a new single. Iglesias played them “Bailando.” “And Monty said, ‘Translate that s–t,’” Iglesias recalls.
Iglesias then called Sean Paul for a new bilingual version of the song, “Because I knew he would get it. He was good at taking songs that were not in English [and making] them sound great.” Aided by the Sean Paul remix, “Bailando” rose to No. 12 on the Hot 100.
Had “Bailando” been released even two years later, it would likely have benefited from the augmented streaming universe that served “Despacito” in its path to Hot 100 immortality. As it was, Universal Music Latin and Interscope made the track into one of the biggest global hits of the decade anyway.
“The song still sounds current,” says Bueno. “In fact, there are a lot of similar songs that went after that same energy. It’s not like we invented anything. We used a harmony that doesn’t belong to anyone. But perhaps it was something no one was doing at the time.”
