He's in the list because... Rolling Stone magazine put his album "Bandido" at #20, which in my opinion is overrating it a bit.
The most salient characteristic of Miguel Bosé is that while his records might not be revolutionary, his persona is downright fascinating. Here we have the son of a bullfighter who had affairs with Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth and an Italian actress and former Miss Italy, who had Luchino Visconti as godfather, who grew up around Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso (who were friends of his father) and who had Andy Warhol do one of his album covers.
Musically Bosé started doing typical late-70s teen pop, later drifting to a more adult pop with Italianizing tendencies, to later become some sort of mainstreamized mixture of David Bowie and Peter Gabriel (in his good days).
Here we can see Miguel in his earliest days, when his output was more or less divided between incredibly sappy ballads and poppy uptempo numbers. The first one, sung in English is pure Europop - somebody was listening to Abba, I think. The second one was a massive hit, or at least so it seemed to me in my elementary school days.
Then, after several albums in this vein, and having reasonable success in Latin America and, especially, Italy, Miguel reinvents himself as a modern pop artist. He learns to sing in a deeper voice, grows a stubble, commisions Andy Warhol to paint him for a cover obviously inspired by Alladin Sane (thus jump-starting the Bowie comparisons, which probably was the intended outcome), and gets a former Premiata Forneria Marconi keyboardist to handle the production duties. With all these ingredients, he releases Bandido which gives the impression of Miguel Bosé getting serious on us:
So, if previously, the vapid teen idol had been a frequent presence in the media, the now young man who uses his adult and more controlled voice to sing carefully labored, sometimes cryptic, lyrics while surrounded by an aura of ambiguous sexuality is now everywhere. While the Italians are underwhelmed (even if the album was released there in their language), the Spaniards embrace this new version of Bosé, who follows with a couple of albums in the same vein. Salamandra and XXX are new exercises in sophisticated glossy modern adult pop, and this time, instead of focusing in the Italian market, the international version is recorded in English, with XXX even being a (failed) attempt to assault the American market. Meanwhile he maintains a parallel career as a movie actor (which had already started in his teen years).
A song each from the mentioned two albums. For Salamandra I could have chosen any song, since I have memories of most of them, which means that either the album was played everywhere or that it was spewing singles all around (probably both). "Duende", the XXX selection, is probably the Bosé song I prefer over the rest of his output.
Since this trio of albums, his career has been steady but without many surprises, although as pertains to these kind of restless souls, he has had a couple of curious experiments worth mentioning; his 2004 and 2005 albums, Por vos muero and Velvetina are, respectively, an orchestrated album of imaginary movie songs and an electronica and trip-hop influenced affair. The weird thing here is that apparently the initial concept was to release both as a double album. After this his more successful venture has been the obligatory duets album, Papito, which of course became his best selling album ever. So it would be wise to stop the exploration with the aforementioned two albums. Warning: the video for "Down with love" from Velvetina is very probably not suitable for work.
My verdict: Miguel Bosé is not quite my cup of tea, although I don't mind him when he comes on the radio. To begin with, I think he is one of those artists more interesting in theory than in practice. Still, a nice enough beginning for this series. We'll have time both for raving and for disparaging later...
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