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Cover story
The Worl At is Feet
A superstar in
Colombia, Fonseca
earned his pop icon
status the old-fashioned
way: with true talent.
A singer and songwriter,
he has steadily built
what is known as
The Fonseca
Phenomenon.
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
Fonseca is trying to spin a top, one
of those old-fashioned wooden
ones that kids have played with for
generations. But every time he throws
the gizmo, it lands on the wrong end. No
matter. He tries again. This is the backstage
life of a music star: endless moments of killing boredom.
The morning of this September day
in Miami had been spent not in boredom
but in leisure. Chilling. The Colombian
Grammy-winner and four-time nominee
played a free concert in New York sponsored by People en español a few days earlier, and is about to go on tour, so he was
taking advantage of this free morning at a Miami Beach hotel to rest on the beach. By
1 p.m. he is refreshed and ready to head out
for a private concert organized by Warner
Television and taped in the Telemundo
network’s Miami TV studio.
The concert is going to be very Colombian, very movidito,” Fonseca says on
the way to the studio, using a diminutive
typical of his native country’s Spanish. Very
uptempo. Movido is moved, but made intimate and sweet by the diminutive movidito.
Very sweetly uptempo.
The 29-year-old Juan Fernando Fonseca shares his compatriots’ taste for danceable music. “I started out doing rock, and I
played in my high school band, where we
did salsa and Cuban son,” he says.
But it was vallenato that captured his
heart. “I do it because I like it,” he says. “It’s what I grew up with.”
Unlike his role model, superstar Carlos
Vives, Fonseca does not hail from “the valley,” the region of Colombia’s Caribbean
coast zone where vallenato, a genre that
tells stories to the beat of accordion and
percussion, was born. The younger artist
is from Bogotá. The origins are important.
Colombians, whose country is as geographically and culturally diverse as any in Latin
America, divide themselves in two major
camps: The coastal people, whose speech
patterns, music and attitudes are more like
those of tropical island nations like Cuba,
the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico
than those of the plateaus and mountains of
the rest of South America; and the inland
folk, like the supposedly formal citizens of
the capital, elegant old Bogotá.
 Indeed, to some extent Fonseca fi ts the
formal Bogotá mold. Unlike the wild-haired
Carlos Vives, Fonseca keeps his own hair
closely cropped. And while Vives used
to appear in his video clips wearing cut-off jeans and no shoes, this Bogotá native
dresses in a mix of casual and elegant—often wearing a dark jacket over a T-shirt and
jeans. He is soft-spoken and delicate-featured. He is also friendly—no star attitude whatsoever. In a teen comedy movie, Fon
seca would play the weird hero’s sensible
best friend.
Musically, his delivery is gentle, but
his rhythms are hot. Like his compatriots
from all over the national territory, Fonseca has been drawn since childhood to
the Colombian coast’s infectious rhythms,
particularly the music of el valle—vallenato.
It was already the country’s hottest music,
in spite of its regional folk origins, when
Carlos Vives ramped it up in the ‘90s, giving it a modern backbeat yet keeping its
rootsy feeling. Fonseca has built on this,
and his music draws from pop as well as
the close-harmony groove of Dominican
star Juan Luis Guerra. But it feels Colombian. Very movidito.
One authentic vallenato element in Fonseca’s band is the accordion, played by the
virtuoso Hermides Tati Manzano, who does
hail from the valley. “I never knew what an
accordion was until I moved to Valledupar
[the capital of the valley region] at the age
of 10,” Tati says backstage. “Until then I
lived in the country and I only heard the
music on the radio and tried to play it on
a harmonica.”
By the time Tati arrives backstage, it’s
time for Fonseca’s top-spinning to stop
and the concert to start. The artist is wearing a dark striped suit jacket over a white
V-neck T-shirt and black jeans and trademark red-glitter sneakers—“I found them
in Los Angeles.”
The small audience is local, and judging from the familiar way they move to the
rhythms, largely Colombian. Among them,
a group of contest winners Warner Television has fl own sits in the front row and
eventually share the stage with Fonseca.
They hail from Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Argentina.
They say they like Fonseca’s music for its joy, its
danceable rhythms. But also, as one of them
puts it, “for the emotion that is expressed
in his songs.”
Indeed, Fonseca is known as a cantautor—a singer/songwriter—a Latin American
tradition that includes such popular fi gures
as Ruben Blades and Juan Luis Guerra, but
also artists who, like their American counterparts since the ‘60s, are best known for
the intensity of their lyrics. They are known
primarily as poets.
That explains much of the Fonseca phenomenon. At the concert, he is warm and
engaging, but he does not jump around like
a pop-rocker. Instead, he stands behind his
guitar, letting the songs and his incredibly
alluring voice take over the audience.
This is most marked when he does an
acoustic version of a song like Enredame
(Tangle me up) or Te mando fl ores (I send you fl owers). The beat is slowed down, allowing the lyrics to ripen and deliver their
power. And his clear, gentle voice is even
softer at this pace, yet still retains a hint of
the beat as it sounds with a full band.
Of course, when he sings and plays with
the band it’s awesome, precisely ecause
the band is awesome. It’s hard to say who
among them is the most talented. They
lay the groove that makes the concertgoers
stand up and dance in place, the seductive, laid-back group of olombian tropical
music. But the centerpiece is Fonseca—his
lyrics, his voice.
In the traditional style of Colombian
roots singers, Fonseca’s voice breaks in the
middle of a vowel, stressing the emotional
charge of the word. Asked how he does
that, the singer admits he does not know.
“It’s not thought out,” he says.
“La cantada uno se la goza,” Fonseca
says in a very Colombian turn of phrase
meaning “one just enjoys the singing.” “It’s
something mysterious and it depends on
the feeling of the thing.” Besides, he adds,
“stuff like that [the traditional voice break] just sticks to me.”
After the concert Fonseca greets his parents, who have come hear him perform. The
Fonsecas, who look and dress casual but
stylish like their son, are in South Florida
attending a business meeting. In their company, the singer looks even more clean-cut:
a nice young man from a nice family. The
star as kid next door.
Fonseca was going on a tour of his native
land, selling out the 10,000-seat Coliseo el
Campín in his hometown of Bogotá, where
he had not performed in three years, followed by performances in Cali, Barranquilla, Medellín and other Colombian cities. All the while, his single Arroyito (Little Creek),
from the album Gratitud, would top the
charts in neighboring Venezuela.
But before embarking on the tour of
his own country, the Colombian singer is
shooting a video clip of Arroyito—a catchy
love tune in the traditional style spiked with
a sweet pop chorus—at a downtown Miami
loft, a couple of weeks after the Warner
Television concert. The plan had been to
shoot on a rooftop but the weather turned
and everything was moved to the loft at
the last minute.
A lunch has been catered, with enough
salad and greens to please a vegan, and a healthy chicken with sun-dried tomato dish
as meat course. Even dessert is healthy:
carrot cake. Welcome to the postmodern
pop scene. Instead of sex, drugs and rock
and roll, it’s vegetables, carrot cake and
vallenato.
The interminable backstage waiting
begins. But this loft has better toys than
a wooden top, particularly an electronic
drum kit that can be programmed to sound
like any kind of percussion—including the
congas and cowbells of salsa. Fonseca sits
at the drums, headphones on, and bangs
out a professional-sounding beat, even if
only a tap-tap-tap can be heard by others.
Then he twirls the drumsticks on his fingers like the high school band drummer
he once was.
Friends of the artist drop by and they
reminisce about those high school days.
“I saw my yearbook the other day,” Fonseca says. “I looked like a baby!” And they
laugh, recalling a film comedy they’ve just
seen on DVD, Idiocracy, a fantasy in which
the future is peopled by only the incredibly
stupid. They recall scenes from the movie
and can’t stop laughing.
One participant in the shoot stands out,
literally: Penelope Sosa, a gorgeous Venezuelan model who towers above most of the
men, including Fonseca. A fashion show
pro, she tries on clothes without need of
a dressing room, knowing how to slip out
of her street wear right under the dresses
she’s putting on for the shoot. Earlier that
day, Penelope had been shot for the video,
walking in her long-legged stride down the
streets of downtown Miami. “I’m the love
object in the video,” Penelope says, “but
they told me I play a heartbreaker.”
The day has not cleared, but it has not
rained either, so everything is moved to the
roof, where a somewhat surrealist set that
includes a modern couch and coffee-table,
as well as a stylized Venus statue, is already
set up. The camera crew that has come to
shoot a Behind the Scenes piece for Colombian television is pleased with the weather;
the clouds have diffused Miami’s blinding
tropical light. “Look,” the cameraman says
enthusiastically, “there are no shadows.”
Take after take has Fonseca walking on
the rooftop, guitar in hand, then sitting at
the couch and starting to play and sing, as an iPod hook-up plays Arroyito. Every angle,
every distance. The singer keeps his good
humor through the long afternoon, following
directions. Hours go by. The day is ending
and darkness— true darkness, not the kind
rain-cloud shadows that are softening the
photography—is descending.
Lights are brought up to the roof, a Titanic task since there is no elevator for the
last two flights. Finally, Penelope is called in
and Fonseca trades his red-glitter sneakers
for a pair of huge platform shoes that will
match his height to the model’s. They begin
to dance, rehearsing the shoot. Were he to
trip, there’d be broken ankles.
But he dances the dance, and even takes
a twirl. His manager and others on his team
look on nervously. The city of Miami lies
at their feet, floors under the rooftop, providing a backdrop for the shoot, a backdrop that is beginning to fill with lights.
The video shoot’s own lights are finally
up, and Fonseca and Penelope, centered in
an island of artificial glow, move into each
other’s arms while Arroyito plays for the
hundredth time.
The rhythms carry on, swaying as the
dancers sway. Fonseca moves in his dangerously tall platforms, and Penelope, in flat sandals,
moves with him. Side to side in the music’s
sensuous swing. The couple separates, still
holding hands, still keeping the beat, and Fonseca twirls. This time he is the spinning top.
He does not fail. His aim is true.
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