Ricky Martin: How One Hip Swivel Became the World’s Favorite Form of Soft Power

Ricky Martin: The Glittering Canary in the Global Coal Mine
By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still coughing up confetti from 1999

Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the planet agreed on exactly one thing: it was perfectly acceptable—nay, advisable—to scream “¡Un, dos, tres! Un pasito pa’lante, María!” while careening through traffic in Jakarta. Ricky Martin, the human metronome of late-capitalist joy, has spent three decades proving that geopolitical borders are no match for a well-timed hip swivel.

In 1998, when the U.S. was bombing Serbia and the euro was still a twinkle in Brussels’ eye, Martin sauntered onto the World Cup stage in Paris wearing white linen like a man who believed wars could be paused for a key change. The song was “La Copa de la Vida,” a carnival of horns and optimism so potent it briefly made FIFA look benevolent. Viewers from Reykjavík to Riyadh learned that Spanish could be belted phonetically with no loss of profit. The single went platinum in 47 markets; the Serbian dinar, notably, did not.

Then came 1999’s self-titled English crossover album—globalization’s glitter bomb. “Livin’ la Vida Loca” colonized airwaves faster than a hedge fund snaps up water rights. In Moscow, oligarchs’ mistresses used it as ring-back tones; in São Paulo, favela sound systems blasted it next to baile funk; in suburban Ohio, chaperones clutched pearls while teenagers practiced safe-ish grinding. The track sold eight million copies and taught the International Monetary Fund a valuable lesson: if you want emerging markets to open, send a Puerto Rican pop star with perfectly symmetrical cheekbones, not a structural-adjustment program.

Martin’s personal life, meanwhile, has mirrored the world’s slow, uneven crawl toward tolerance. After years of polite speculation and impolite tabloid headlines, he came out in 2010—the same year Greece discovered its debt was essentially a subprime mortgage wrapped in feta. The coincidence was poetic: one Mediterranean crisis exposing the fragility of constructed identities, the other involving Greece. Overnight, Martin became a one-man soft-power campaign for LGBTQ rights in Latin America, where reggaetoneros still couched homophobic slurs as “edgy.” Presidents from Chile to Colombia invited him to campaign rallies; polls showed a measurable uptick in support for same-sex civil unions whenever he performed shirtless. Call it the absolution of the abs.

Today, Ricky Martin is less pop star than transnational utility. Need to launder your nation’s reputation? Book him for a tourism ad. Spain’s right-wing Vox party fumes that he’s “corrupting Spanish youth,” while left-wing mayors in Madrid pay him to headline Pride. In the United Arab Emirates—where public homosexuality remains illegal—luxury hotels blast “She Bangs” at pool parties because irony, like oil, is a lucrative export. Even the U.S. State Department once dispatched him on a cultural diplomacy tour of Eastern Europe, presumably because nothing deters authoritarian nostalgia like a man who can samba in combat boots.

His latest act, a role as Gianni Versace’s lover in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” turned Latin America’s erstwhile boy-band heartthrob into Exhibit A for Hollywood’s obsession with tragic queer narratives. Critics called it brave; cynics noted it arrived just as streaming services realized that trauma sells better than joy south of the equator. Meanwhile, Martin’s philanthropic foundation keeps building orphanages in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, funded by royalties from songs now used to sell everything from Polish vodka to Filipino toothpaste. The circular economy has never looked so washboard-abbed.

So what does Ricky Martin ultimately tell us about the global condition? Simply that the modern world will tolerate, commodify, and finally canonize any identity—provided it can keep the beat at 128 BPM. He is both product and prophet of a planet that outsources its conscience to Spotify playlists, then wonders why the algorithm keeps recommending despair. Someday, when the last glacier melts into a mojito glass, archaeologists will find a flash drive labeled “María” buried under volcanic ash. They will play it, dance, and conclude that Homo sapiens went extinct precisely because it mistook rhythm for resolution.

Until then, we keep hitting repeat.