#479: Amor Prohibido [Selena, 1994]

Mexico has long impacted American popular music. It was a Mexican folk song which the American-born Ritchie Valens turned into the rock classic La Bamba; Mexican regional acts like Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado and Grupo Frontera can be found near the top of the Billboard Hot 100! Between these two musical trends, we find the Tex-Mex explosion of the 90s, led by the Queen of Tejano Music Selena. On her 4th album, the last released before her death, Selena expanded with different musical influences, including rock on the fun closer Ya No and hip hop on Techno Cumbia, a delightful so-bad-it's-good car crash of a song. The juxtaposition between that song and the positively Alpine Tus Desprecios is comical. I don't know any Spanish, but unlike with Shakira (#496), I cannot divine any meaning from Selena's singing, and melodrama without meaning is just a whole lotta noise. To top it all off, the mariachi horns, accordions and other instrumental trappings sound cheap and sterile to my ears. Overall, Amor Prohibido can be praised for its ambition, but not all of its experiments worked for me. 2/5.