Day 318: Selena – Amor Prohibido
Today I started off thinking maybe I could listen to a bit of Soft Cell, I think I’ve only ever heard “Tainted Love”. I chose their album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and I got about five songs through until I abandoned it because I heard the song “Sex Dwarf”, I do not have the time and the energy to get into all that. So onto something completely different: let’s listen to a bit of Selena.
Album cover courtesy of EMI Latin
Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was born in Texas to a Mexican-American parents in 1971 to a musician father, who says he noticed when she was six years old that she has a talent for music. After his restaurant business closed, he became her manager and they started a family band called Selena y Los Dinos, who went professional when Selena was only 12 years old.
Amor Prohibido was released as Selena’s fourth studio album in 1994. At the time, she was already an established artist, but the album propelled her to a new level of fame, as it became one of the best-selling Latin albums in the United States. It was also the first Tejano album to reach number one in the Latin charts. It was her second to last album, as she was murdered by the manager of her store and beauty salon a year after its release.
The whole theme of the album is love and dysfunctional relationships, with the titular track being about a forbidden love affair between two people in different social classes, which was inspired by Selena’s great-grandparents. Maybe some aspects of that was inspired by her forbidden love affair with her guitarist Chris Perez, as both of her parents disapproved of the relationship so much that they threatened to break up the family band. They eventually relented after the couple eloped.
However, I’m running into a massive issue when listening to it, and that is my own incompetence. Unfortunately my discussions with my close personal friend el búho de Duolingo haven’t yet yielded enough results for me to be able to follow the lyrics, and as the songs are mostly musically quite uncomplicated, the crux of it is surely in the storytelling that she does. But that’s more of an issue with me rather than an issue with Selena or the album – I’m sure I’d enjoy it a thousand times more if I understood it. But a lot of it translates purely from the passion in Selenas voice, too.
I say this with a heart full of love and no disrespect to any cultures (including my own) but I have to say that occasionally this album reminds me a bit of schlager music from my neck of the woods, and I can’t exactly pinpoint why. Maybe it’s because of the accordion. It’s an enjoyable listening experience and if nothing else it spurs me to learn more Spanish, because this is pathetic. Maybe I’ll try to translate her lyrics to English or something. Anyway, Amor Prohibida is a 6.5/10.