Manero

It all started with a press release announcing that Maná's latest album, Cama Incendiada, had gotten a four-star review. (Well, our distaste for Maná started years ago, but that's a different story.) The fact that a respectable music site like AllMusic would give the most notorious cheese rockers south of the Border such a high rating made us remember other similar cases of great reviews of mediocre Latin pop music by otherwise respectable American music writers. Even when AllMusic expressly states that they "rate albums only within the scope of an artist's own work," the review made us wonder if there was something else at work here: an embarassing double-standard when it comes to reviewing Latin pop music. In other words, can someone seriously claim that Cama Incendiada is "brilliant"?