Spanish is the language of majority in the world. With 1.12 billion total speakers, Spanish is the official language in 20 countries. The language originated in Spain, during the reign of the Spanish Empire, which led to the colonization and annexation of a multitude of countries. Over centuries, these countries took on the Spanish tongue as their own.
Despacito is a 2017 pop song that topped the charts of 47 countries and was the first Spanish song to top the Billboard 100 in 20 years. It is the first Youtube video to achieve the milestones of both 3 and 4 billion views and currently holds the title of most video views of all time with 5.4 billion views (2018 September). It can easily be said that Despacito is one of the most popular and most influential Spanish songs to ever sweep across the Americas. Yet, what might not be noticed are the meanings of the song. You might hear this song on the radio or hummed along with it as it plays in a bar, but the meaning of the lyrics were never known. Whatever the reason behind you singing along, the true meaning of the song is not so innocent.
The theme of Despacito might not be as innocent as the catchiness of the song. The song resides in the sexual nature of modern rap songs on its Spanish part, yet has the melody and English lyrics of that a love song. This unique combination of themes allows the song to enter a space of passionate romance. Perhaps this mixture of ingredients has allowed Despacito to climb the charts so well.
Modern day pop music have entered into an age of rap. More and more, slower love songs like Whitney's Houston's I Will Always Love You have faded with the establishment of sexually explicit love. I realized some time ago that this genre of love songs have faded from modern music. While studying Chinese culture, I found that the dominant pop song theme from the 2000s to early 2010s was the expression of romantic, unconditional love. The same can be said for English pop songs in the same era. Popular music has more so landed on the expression of sexual acts and gangster characteristics and actions. Despacito is an example of the integration of these two eras of pop. As a result, it has become a global phenomenon and showcased a genre of music never heard before.
imán - magnet
metal - metal
corazón - heart
respirar - breathe
kisses- besos
cabello - hair
peligro - danger
rompecabezas - puzzle
manuscrito - manuscript
favorito - favourite
The Spanish language takes a lot of similarities from English. Both the languages use the Roman alphabet. So, it is quite easy to learn new vocabulary as we have the same phonemic and phonological foundation. Moreover, 30%-40% of English words have a related word in Spanish. In the previous page, a huge chunk of those words were really close related with English. Lastly, sentences in both of these languages use the same basic structure, which is unseen in comparisons between English and other non-Latin languages.
The song was really fast and it was very hard for me to make out every single word! I had to look at the lyrics page to make out and understand the song. Here are some questions I had when listening:
1) The first line translated literally would be "yes, you know for a long time I've been looking at you". Is this something to do with the sentence structure of Spanish or did the author deliberatly structure the sentence like this?
2) When I read the line "Tú, tú eres el imán y yo soy el metal", I kept thinking "iman" to mean the literal meaning of iman in English. This made me weirded out as it would translate into "you, you are the iman and I am the metal". Haha.
3) What does the word "despacito" even mean? I did not know this word and this was my last question as the song ends with the word "despacito". Upon searching, I found that "despacito" meant "slowly" in English.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whwe0KD_rGw
http://www.metrolyrics.com/despacito-lyrics-luis-fonsi.html
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/latin/7873132/despacito-lyrics-translation-english-meaning
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