Felices los 4

About the song

«Felices los 4» was released as a single by Sony Music Latin on 21 April 2017, and within a few months it had turned Maluma from a Colombian star into a name that radio programmers all over the Spanish-speaking world had to reckon with. The singer was born Juan Luis Londoño Arias in Medellín on 28 January 1994, and his stage name is built from the first syllables of three people in his family: his mother Marlli, his father Luis and his sister Manuela. He had been releasing music since his teens, but this was the record that widened his audience beyond the Latin charts.

The track runs three minutes and fifty seconds and sits squarely in reggaeton, with a pop sheen on top: a dembow pattern under a melody that is closer to a radio ballad than to the harder club records of the same season. It was produced by the Rude Boyz, the Medellín team Maluma worked with throughout that period, and the production credit is spoken out loud inside the recording itself, in the way reggaeton producers habitually sign their work. The writing credits are long, as is normal in the genre, and include Maluma himself alongside Servando Primera, Mario Cáceres, Eli Palacios, Kevin Jiménez, Bryan Lezcano, Stiven Rojas and Andrés Uribe. A year later the song was folded into «F.A.M.E.», Maluma’s third studio album, released on 18 May 2018, a title he has explained as standing for Faith, Alma, Music and Essence.

The subject is what gives the song its title and most of its notoriety. It is sung from the point of view of someone whose partner also sees another person, and who says that this does not trouble him, because he is certain she will return to him; he proposes that instead of a break-up everybody should simply be content with the arrangement, and he counts the people involved: the two of them, plus the other partner on each side. Four. The singer adds that what the couple has does not rest on any signed agreement and that he does not believe in contracts, and he waves away the gossip of the people around them. It is, in other words, a pop song about an open relationship, sold with a shrug rather than with an argument, and that is exactly why it was discussed as much as it was played. Commentators in Latin America and Spain debated whether the song normalised something or simply described it; Maluma, for his part, always presented it as a story rather than as advice.

For a learner of Spanish the interest of the track is not really its subject but its accent. This is Caribbean and Colombian urban Spanish as it is actually spoken on the coast and in the clubs, and it does something systematic that textbooks rarely show: it drops the final -s of first-person plural verbs. The forms that appear in the recording are written with an apostrophe to mark the missing consonant, and a student who has only ever met the full written forms will not recognise them by ear at all. The song is therefore an unusually clean demonstration of a feature that covers a huge part of the Spanish-speaking world, from Cuba and Puerto Rico to the Colombian and Venezuelan coasts and much of Andalusia. Once a learner has heard the pattern here, they can hear it everywhere.