Track 4 Selena, "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" (1994)

Context

Selena before the song: Lake Jackson, Corpus Christi, Selena y Los Dinos

Selena Quintanilla Pérez was born in Lake Jackson, Texas on April 16, 1971, the youngest of three children of Abraham Quintanilla Jr., a former Tejano singer who had played in a 1960s band also called Los Dinos, and Marcella Ofelia Samora. The family spoke English at home; Selena learned to sing in Spanish phonetically, before she could speak the language fluently, because her father wanted her to be able to perform for the Spanish-speaking audiences he knew were the future of the music. By 1980 the Quintanillas were running a Tex-Mex restaurant in Lake Jackson called Papa Gayo's and the children were performing there as a family band. The 1980s oil glut pushed the restaurant into bankruptcy. The family moved to Corpus Christi in 1981 and reorganized as a working touring band: nine-year-old Selena on lead vocals, her brother A.B. (then sixteen) on bass, her sister Suzette (then thirteen) on drums. They named the group Selena y Los Dinos, after the father's old band.

For most of the 1980s the band played weddings, quinceañeras, county fairs, and the dance halls of South Texas. They recorded for small regional labels (Freddie, Cara, GP) before signing with the new EMI Latin in 1989. Selena was eighteen. By then she had already won the Tejano Music Awards' Female Vocalist of the Year as a fifteen-year-old in 1986 and was on her way to ten consecutive Female Entertainer of the Year wins. Her brother A.B. Quintanilla III began producing the band's records and writing most of the songs. Her father Abraham Quintanilla Jr. ran the family's recording, management, and merchandising operation, eventually formalized as Q-Productions. Her husband Chris Pérez, the band's lead guitarist, joined Selena y Los Dinos in 1990 and married Selena in 1992. The backup vocalist and dancer Pete Astudillo joined in 1988 and would co-write many of her biggest songs. The band was, throughout her career, almost entirely a family business with a small number of close collaborators.

What Tejano cumbia was: conjunto and polka, the Colombian rhythm, the synthesis of the 1990s

Tejano music is the Mexican American popular music of South Texas and the Texas-Mexico borderland, with roots reaching back to the meeting of Mexican folk song with the German, Czech, and Polish polka traditions that European immigrants brought to central Texas and northern Mexico in the late nineteenth century. The earliest recorded Tejano forms are conjunto (small ensemble built on accordion and bajo sexto, working class, dance hall), orquesta tejana (the bigger horn-and-dance band of the 1940s and 1950s, often middle class and aspirational), and ranchera and corrido (the Mexican song traditions absorbed wholesale). What pulled all these threads together into the genre that the 1990s would call "Tejano" was, in part, the arrival of cumbia.

Cumbia was Colombian. The framing reading covered its Caribbean-coast Afro-Indigenous roots. By the mid-1940s, Colombian musicians like Luis Carlos Meyer Castandet had taken cumbia to Mexico, where it merged with local big-band practice and over the following decades became the most widely played dance rhythm in Mexican popular music. The Texas-Mexico border absorbed the same wave. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tejano cumbia was the most commercially viable strain of Tejano music, and the bands that defined its sound (La Mafia, Mazz, Selena y Los Dinos) were producing cumbia records that fused the Colombian rhythm with Tejano accordion and bajo sexto, mainstream pop production, synthesizers, electric guitars, and contemporary R&B and dancehall reggae. Amor Prohibido, the album this listening guide's track is from, sits squarely in that 1990s synthesis: a Tejano cumbia album produced like contemporary pop, sung in Spanish, aimed at a young audience that had grown up bicultural and bilingual.

The recording: a soundcheck in 1992, AMEN Studios in 1993, a four-chord cumbia loop

"Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" started as a soundcheck improvisation. Selena y Los Dinos were touring in 1992 to support Entre a Mi Mundo, the album that had broken Selena commercially. At a soundcheck in Seguin, Texas, with A.B. running a cumbia bass figure and Chris Pérez sketching a guitar part, Selena began improvising in English: "If I was a fish, under the sea, I would swim, swim, swim to you," and "itty bitty bubbles." The "itty bitty bubbles" mutated, over subsequent soundchecks, into "bidi bidi bom bom." Pete Astudillo and Selena rewrote the lyric in Spanish, A.B. arranged it, and the song was tracked at the San Antonio studio of producer Manny Guerra (sometimes called AMEN Studios) over the late summer and fall of 1993, alongside the rest of the album. The producer was A.B.; the engineer was Brian Moore.

Amor Prohibido was released by EMI Latin on March 13, 1994. "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" was released as the second single on July 31, 1994.

Reception, the Astrodome, and what came after

"Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" reached number one on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart on October 22, 1994 and held there for four consecutive weeks, Selena's second consecutive number-one single after the album's title track. The album Amor Prohibido became the first Tejano record to reach number one on the Billboard Top Latin Albums chart and stayed in the top five for ninety-eight consecutive weeks. The song crossed beyond the Tejano core audience: it was the second-most-played song on Latin radio in Los Angeles in October 1994, fifth in New York, sixth in San Francisco, ninth in Washington, D.C. By the end of the year Selena had won four Billboard Latin Music Awards. In March 1995, Selena Live! won the Grammy for Best Mexican-American Album, the first Tejano album by a woman ever to win in the category.

On February 26, 1995, Selena performed at the Houston Astrodome for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo before a televised audience of more than 60,000 people. She closed her set with a disco medley, performed in a sequined purple jumpsuit she had designed herself; "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" was sixteenth in the set. The concert is now known as her last televised performance. On March 31, 1995, five weeks later, Selena was shot and killed at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi by Yolanda Saldívar, the former president of her fan club, after a meeting in which the family had confronted Saldívar over financial discrepancies in the boutique she had been managing. Selena was twenty-three years old. The English-language crossover album she had been recording with EMI was completed posthumously and released as Dreaming of You in July 1995. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, the first predominantly Spanish-language album by a Latin artist ever to do so. "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" became, after her death, one of her two or three most-played songs and one of the most widely recognized recordings in late-twentieth-century Latin pop. The song has since been covered by artists across genres and languages, sampled in reggaeton and hip hop tracks, and performed in tribute concerts that draw the same kind of crowd that filled the Astrodome.

Things to listen for

The recording is in the key of B-flat major, in 4/4 meter, at a tempo of approximately 90 BPM, the moderate cumbia walking groove. The full runtime is 3 minutes 29 seconds. The harmonic vocabulary is unusually small (a four-chord ostinato repeats almost the entire song); the form prompt below works through it in detail.

First, the timbre of Selena's voice against the band. Selena's lead vocal is conversational and direct, sitting in a comfortable mezzo range, with the slight Spanish-language phrasing of a singer who learned to sing in Spanish phonetically before she spoke the language fluently and is therefore careful with each consonant. The voice is unornamented compared with the gospel-trained or operatically-trained voices of other singers across the course (compare with the voice of Celia Cruz on Quimbara, which fills the room with a different kind of declamatory force). Selena's vocal is closer to the speech-derived intimacy of contemporary pop. Behind her, the band's timbre is unmistakable as 1990s Tejano cumbia: synthesizer pads where an earlier Tejano record might have used accordion, an electric guitar (Chris Pérez's) playing a clean, treble-heavy, slightly surf-tinged figure that is part rock en español and part Tejano lead, drum machine and live percussion mixed close together, the cumbia güiro scrape running through the entire track. Listen for what feels traditional in the timbre and what feels like 1994.

Second, the texture, and specifically the role of the percussion section. The most important rhythmic element in a cumbia is not the drum kit but the güiro scrape, the dragged-and-tapped pattern of a notched stick that gives the cumbia its characteristic "chu-chu-cu-chu" forward motion. On this recording, the güiro is in the foreground throughout, sometimes layered with a cowbell-like accent, sometimes with a synthesizer-flavored hi-hat. The drum-kit pattern underneath is a moderate cumbia walking groove, not a Cuban clave-anchored salsa pattern, and not a polka downbeat-and-offbeat. Listen for the güiro on every count, listen for how the bass walks through the chord changes (B-flat to E-flat to F to E-flat), and listen for the moments where the percussion suddenly opens up to make space for the vocal hook. The texture is layered but transparent; you can hear each element doing distinct work.

Third, the form and the four-chord loop. The entire song sits on the same I-IV-V-IV ostinato, the same B-flat to E-flat to F to E-flat cycle, with no bridge, no key change, no second harmonic theme. What changes across the song is what is happening on top of that loop: an instrumental introduction, a verse where Selena describes the man passing by and her heart starting to race, a chorus where the band's chorus joins her on the title onomatopoeia "bidi bidi bom bom" (the heart's palpitation), a second verse, the chorus again, an instrumental break, a final chorus. This is a structural cousin to the single-vamp form of Puente's "Oye Como Va" and Santana's "Oye Como Va," recorded thirty-two and twenty-four years earlier respectively: a dance-floor song that holds an audience by the strength of its groove and its hook, not by its harmonic motion. The repeating progression is the same harmonic logic that runs through American rock and roll, and through the polka traditions that Tejano grew out of. Listen for what the song does to keep your attention across three and a half minutes of the same four chords.

Fourth, the gesture of the lyrical hook and what onomatopoeia is doing here. The phrase "bidi bidi bom bom" is not Spanish, English, or any other language. It is the sound the heart makes when the singer sees the man pass by. ("Cada vez que lo veo pasar, mi corazón se enloquece, y me empieza a palpitar / Bidi bidi bom bom.") The choice of a non-linguistic title for a Spanish-language pop song, on a Tejano cumbia record, is doing two things at once. It is reaching for the same universal-readability that English-language nonsense pop syllables ("doo-wop," "shoop shoop," "do re mi") have always done in American pop, and it is grounding the song in the embodied physical fact of a heartbeat, which is the same in any language. The song is sung in Spanish, but it travels, partly because the title is a sound rather than a sentence. Listen for how Selena delivers the title phrase and for what the band's chorus does when they answer her on it; the call-and-response on "bidi bidi bom bom" is where the song most clearly stops being a verse-with-chorus pop song and starts being a dance-floor singalong.