To quote the song itself, when you first hear Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca, it really does hit you “like a bullet to your brain”. Released in 1999, it blended Latin pop, salsa, surf guitar and even a whiff of ska, and sounded quite unlike anything else on the radio. And, for the time, it was recorded in a very different kind of way, too.
“That was the first song to be all done digitally to make it all the way to number one,” confirms Desmond Child, who co-wrote and produced the record, in an interview with Elmo Lovano. “It was recognised by the Library of Congress, the National Registry of Recorded Works. It was like, you know, Thomas Edison or something. We made it all the way to number one in a completely digitised format.”
