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El Swing

Christian Alicea · 2023 · written by Christian Bosque Alicea, Urales Vargas, Carlos Palacios, Joshua Ramírez, Eliot Feliciano & Jay Dary Castillo, from the album Yo

People say salsa is dead. A kid from a Puerto Rican housing project answers: the swing you're looking for, I've got it. A new-generation salsa hit.

The story

  1. 1.The rumor

    People are going around saying it's all over, that salsa's time has passed. What they don't know is that the swing they're looking for, he's got it.

  2. 2.Don't be sad

    So nobody needs a long face: if salsa is what you want, here it is. He's bringing it himself, seasoned his own way, with a little salsa, drums and reggaeton.

  3. 3.Who he is

    He's a kid from Puerto Rico with plenty of drive, raised in a housing project, tough but not looking for trouble. He learned the swing the way his father taught him, and he repeats it in case you missed it: this isn't over.

Key phrases

  • “El swing lo traigo yo”I'm the one who brings the swingSwing, borrowed from English, is the groove, the flavor that makes you want to dance. Lo traigo yo, “I bring it”: he's got it, and he's bringing it to you.
  • “que tó esto se acabó”That all this is overTó is todo with the middle dropped, the way it's said on the street. The rumor the song answers: that salsa is finished.
  • “Salsa, batería y reguetón”Salsa, drums and reggaetonHis recipe, and a fair description of the song.
  • “criado en un caserío”Raised in a housing projectA caserío is a public housing project in Puerto Rico, the kind of neighborhood salsa's old stars came from too.
  • “Así como papá me enseñó”The way my father taught meThe swing is an inheritance: the new generation learned it at home.

Context

Christian Alicea is a young Puerto Rican salsa singer, and Yo (2023), “me”, was his first album. El Swing opens it. The album was produced by Eliot “El Mago D Oz” and DJ Buddha, and the Puerto Rican paper Primera Hora called its sound salsa urbana: salsa with touches of reggaeton and the city.

It came out as a single in September 2023, then as “El Swing 2.0”, a remix with Luis Figueroa, Moa Rivera and Luis Vázquez, three more salsa singers.

There's no story here, and it doesn't pretend to have one. It's a manifesto: people keep saying salsa is over, and a new generation answers that they've got the swing.

On the dance floor

Short, fast and punchy, around three and a half minutes, with a crisp modern sound: modern salsa made for today's socials.

The chorus is a call and answer, “lo traigo yo”, “I've got it”, easy to catch and easy to shout. In between you'll hear shout-outs to the producer and the band, the way reggaeton does it.

This is our own retelling of the song, not its lyrics or a translation of them: the few short phrases quoted are there to explain what they mean. The song belongs to its writer, Christian Bosque Alicea, Urales Vargas, Carlos Palacios, Joshua Ramírez, Eliot Feliciano & Jay Dary Castillo.