“The young woman started dancing and I told her: ‘ Dale a tu cuerpo alegría, Magdalena, que tu cuerpo es pa’ darle alegría y cosa buena’ – put some joy in your body Magdalena, as your body is made to be given joy and good things.’ That’s what inspired me to write it,” says Romero. The catchy lyrics came to Romero when he and Ruiz were invited to a party at the end of 1992 by the businessman Gustavo Cisneros in Caracas, Venezuela, where they rubbed shoulders with the Venezuelan president at the time, Carlos Andrés Pérez, and a local flamenco dancer named Diana Patricia Cubillán Herrera.
While it is the anniversary of the song’s remix, it is worth remembering that the original was released on the duo’s 1993 album A mí me gusta. What we have to do now is to live and enjoy ourselves.” We are always being asked when we are going to compose another Macarena, to which we reply that we have already done it.
Just as Spain has only won the World Cup once, we have fortunately been able to be the world champions in terms of music. As Romero points out, “becoming number one on five continents is tremendously difficult. Not that at the age of 73, this ruffles their feathers. The duo had other hits in Spain such as Sevilla tiene un color especial or Se te nota en la mirada, but outside of Spain they are considered one-hit wonders. That was the biggest sacrifice we could make.” It wasn’t until our fathers died that we said to ourselves: ‘We have no choice but to take this music thing seriously.’ Basically because it was the only thing that gave us money that could help our mothers. We started out when we were 14 and, being young, played at both singing and bullfighting. “We never panicked because at that point we’d already had a 30-year-long career and had dealt with many, many difficulties. Perhaps it all got out of hand? “Not at all,” says Romero. Among other surreal achievements, the duo performed it on January 26, 1997, at the Super Bowl before a live audience of more than 70,000 spectators and tens of millions of viewers at home. A quarter of a century ago, Macarena was played at the Democratic National Convention with Hillary Clinton clapping along it was also used by the US women’s gymnastics team at the Atlanta Olympics. Speaking just a few words of English and with the internet still in its infancy, Los Del Río revolutionized the world’s largest and most competitive music market with their danceable ditty. However, no one can argue that what these two friends from the Seville town of Dos Hermanas achieved was phenomenal. But the Bayside Boys’ dance remix, which incorporated female vocals in English, stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks that summer and remained on the charts for 66 weeks.Īs the most influential music barometer in the world, it was an amazing feat for the middle-aged crooners, trumped only in 2017 by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee who enlisted Justin Bieber to collaborate in a Spanglish version of Despacito, which topped the US charts for a record-breaking 16 weeks. The original flamenco hit composed by the Seville duo known as Los del Río – made up of Antonio Romero and Rafael Ruiz – had already rocketed up the charts in Spain in 1993. In 1996, the whole world got swept up in Macarena madness.
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