26/3/12: Cazzu, Latinaje (2025)
a relisten (see mini-thread), even more impactful after having absorbed the videos and follow-up singles. great angry/sad/wise breakup album, even better journey through latin american music history, one of the best records of 2025. y no lo dudo, te lo aseguro.
i'd only glanced at this tweet, not read through the full list until just now, and AFHV still going with an audience about a tenth the size of the average youtube short presenting the same material without any superfluous host banter is wild to me
but srsly though
Spoiler alert: no Benito, Rauw, or Myke in this list of my favorite boricua songs. (Padme: because you're saving them all for the finale, right?) But there's good stuff even without the superstar dudes:
www.jonathanbogart.net/blog/2026/3/...
#TheTenX5 14. Créol, “VIP” (2018)
I knew virtually nothing about Francophone African pop when this floated into my Youtube recommendations in 2018, but Gabon's Creol Fantastik, with her overtly sexy dancehall-zouk-soukous, hooks on hooks on hooks, made me need to know more.
youtu.be/07WwEVaA-6A
spain would be surprised to be credited with it, it’s a very american, even californian comic
good for clearing out the soul
Rec. Nov 22 1939, NYC. Leo Warney: drums, Olin Aderhold: bass, Kenneth Roane: trumpet, Sidney Bechet: clarinet, Willie "The Lion" Smith: piano
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uH-...
top of my head: urszula dudziak, las grecas, françoise hardy, france gall, akiko yano, novos baianos, always & forever celia
Toshiko And Her International Jazz Sextet, United Notions (1958)
26/3/11: Toshiko And Her International Jazz Sextet, United Notions (1958)
good post-bop small-combo jazz, swings and cooks in equal measure, a bit anonymous but i guess that's what you sign up for when you're bringing together players from across the globe
doing some digging, there are a bunch of published canons of Spanish-language music, but they're mostly siloed by country or genre, which is probably truer to how people actually experience the music than the unnatural miscellaneity of anglophone canon-making
if something like that exists and i just didn't notice because it was only produced for Spanish-language markets i would love to see it
something i've been percolating in the back of my head is the idea of one of those coffee table books about all the songs or albums you're supposed to hear before you die but covering exclusively Latin music since it always gets left out of the standard narratives
There was simply too much Dominican music to be limited to one day's worth, so here, have a second helping:
www.jonathanbogart.net/blog/2026/3/...
considering that she was working in a thirty-year lineage of reggae en español not to mention the original jamaican recipe (always very popular in panama), i don't know that ancient limp british pastiche would have meant much
remembering that one year for sdcc i stayed with a guy who had posted countdowns to the olsen twins turning eighteen and met his teenage daughter and didn't feel gross about any of it until much later
i'm kind of glad that my embarrassing youth posting was all done on comic book forums which were all nuked from orbit ten to fifteen years later for having crusted over into hotbeds of hate speech
RaiNao, Capicú (2024)
26/3/10: RaiNao, Capicú (2024)
forgot to log yesterday's: alt-urbano from a puerto rican auteurist woman now best known for a bad bunny collab, but listening to this two-year-old album i think he got as much from her as she ever did from him. overlong and drags in spots, but the highs soar.
oh i hadn't seen that about worldcat, that's going to make my life a little harder once i pick up one of my stalled projects again
#TheTenX5 15. Elisama, “No Me Gusta el Reggaeton” (2019)
Young Panamanian with a throwback tune read as embarrassingly simplistic by a lot of reggaeton heads (even the twist she gives the title, "I don't like reggaeton... I love it," is corny). But I dig a back-to-basics take.
youtu.be/kPMUDzf6uVw
oh no i just remembered something from my adolescence that… explains a lot. moving “find a therapist” up from Would Be Nice to Urgent
Yes, I’m religious. I believe in the Holy Trinity.
billy preston may be cheating though
first thought best thought: get back
It's Dominican dembow day at my travelogue through some of my favorite music from 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.
www.jonathanbogart.net/blog/2026/3/...
To a degree I was vindicated when she went boogie-rock post-Dr. Luke (her Dap-Horns collaboration could have made another version of this list), but by then I was far afield in post-dancehall internationalism and not caring much about pop classicism at all.
An image of Kesha Sebert with gliter makeup and feathers in her hair, with the words "KEEP TICKIN AND TOCKIN WORK IT ALL AROUND THE CLOCK" superimposed in hot pink on a black background.
This is still probably the essay I'm best known for in music critic circles (to the degree I'm known at all), and it's mostly about me trying to square my then-classicist tastes with liking Ke$ha.
jonathan-bogart.tumblr.com/post/4392834...
i checked and the movie you're looking for isn't there anyway, it's more about new releases. good luck!
#TheTenX5 16. Ke$ha, “Take It Off” (2010)
I spent the 2000s in love with Sixties pop and Seventies rock and Eighties synth and Twenties jazz and when I woke up and looked around at an unrecognizable musical landscape I made the choice to like rather than be repelled by Ke$ha.
youtu.be/edP0L6LQzZE
i've had good results with yts dot bz
Faves from a non-rigorous trawl through JB's Anglophone+ Week+ :
Starr: "Pineapple" 🇯🇲
Ariella Alexa: "Bend My Back" 🇹🇹
Chanou: "Halen/Trekken" 🇳🇱🇨🇼
Salle: "Psycho" 🇳🇬
Zara Qora: "Nawty" 🇬🇭
Ziza Bafana: "Biribi Bang" 🇺🇬
Nkosazana Daughter & MaWhoo: "Khetha" 🇿🇦
Deela: "Slide" 🇬🇧🇳🇬
