Willie Colón & Rubén Blades—Siembra (1978)
I have such mixed feelings about this album. It's considered to be one of the greatest salsa albums ever made and was, when it came out, the best selling salsa album of all time. So you can see it has quite a pedigree. It's also considered to be "the thinking man's salsa" because of Rubén Blades lyrics, but unfortunately my spanish is only good enough to vaguely understand the content of the lyrics and I really can't tell if they're well written or not. As a result I can only judge by the music, which is good, but doesn't exactly blow my socks off. The funny part is the first track starts off sounding like it's going to be seriously the greatest disco song of all time before being interrupted by a salsa beat that, while enjoyable, is honestly a little disappointing in the face of the badass disco that immediately preceded it. Unfortunately, I feel like the rest of the alum never reaches the heights of that first 45 seconds.
I say all of this, I guess, because I'm curious if other people feel the same way about the intro to this album that I do. What do you think? Does the disco intro kick the salsa's ass or no? Here's the song: