Word: menudo
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Ricky Martin is a fresh face, but he is not an entirely new one. For 15 years now the 27-year-old singer has enjoyed a kind of second-tier, ESPN2 level of fame: he was a member of the teen group Menudo, he once co-starred in Les Miserables on Broadway, has appeared on the ABC soap General Hospital. The cultural wave Martin is riding--Latin pop--we must admit, is also not an entirely new phenomenon. Salsa, rumba, mambo and other Latin musical forms have made inroads on American pop music--Celia Cruz, Ruben Blades, Gloria Estefan, Ritchie...
Look at Martin today, and you can tell he was a child star--he wears the spotlight like ordinary folks wear house slippers. Indeed, Martin got started early: at 12 he auditioned to join Menudo, a Latin singing group comprised of boys ages 12 to 16 whose roster rotated when members grew too old. Martin was rejected on his first try because he was too small and too young-looking. Martin tried out again. Rejected again. On the third try, he made it. It was an early sign: what Martin lacked in talent he made up for in pure doggedness...
Martin was immediately caught up in Menudo's vida loca. He visited Italy, Japan, Guam and Spain before he was old enough to shave. During one stretch, he and his young bandmates played for a month in Brazil (singing in Portuguese), then flew to the Philippines (singing in English) before returning to Latin America for a series of shows in Spanish. Life became a blur...
...former Mouseketeer, Britney Spears, can land a No. 1 CD, the time is probably just about right for Martin, a former member of the Latin teen group Menudo, to burst onto the national stage. At 27, he is already a major star in Latin America. He first caught the eye of English-speaking U.S. audiences with his joyous, hip-swiveling, eye-catchingly over-the-top performance at the Grammy Awards last February. Now, on May 11, the Latin pop star is set to release his first English-language album, Ricky Martin (C2Records/Columbia). And he is raring to hit mainstream stardom...
Enrique Martin Morales was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1971. In 1984, at 12, he joined the ever changing ranks of the boy group Menudo. "Two things can happen when you join a group like Menudo," says Robi Rosa, a fellow Menudo alum, who co-wrote Martin's current hit single, Livin' la Vida Loca. "You can get all messed up, or you can pay attention and learn from it. We learned a lot. For Ricky and me, the studio is like home...