DJ’s Mix Mixes Up the Playlist : Radio: Richard Vission’s edited version of C+C Music Factory’s ‘Boriqua Anthem’ connected with KPWR listeners--so the station is adding a similar song to its rap lineup.

Listeners of KPWR-FM (105.9) are accustomed to hearing a steady diet of hip-hop, from the gangsta rap of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre to the more mainstream sounds of TLC. It’s a mix that has propelled the station to the top of the local ratings.

So the KPWR audience must have been surprised in recent months to hear C+C Music Factory’s “Robi-Rob’s Boriqua Anthem”--a Latin-flavored dance song with Spanish vocals--shoot to the top of the station’s playlist.

To some, the breakthrough of a Spanish song on an English-language station might seem a logical step in a city with a vast Latino population.

KPWR executives are wary of this notion, however, believing that the success of “Boriqua Anthem” might be a novelty. Still, they are intrigued enough to have recently started playing a similar song by an East Los Angeles record-store clerk, Artie the 1-Man Party’s “A Mover La Colita,” which was inspired by the success of the C+C hit.

“I think it’s kind of a matter of conditioning,” said Bruce St. James, KPWR’s music director. “Before ‘Boriqua,’ there were maybe one or two songs that even fit that mold. But now people hear the C+C song, and it kind of opens them up to that type of music, and we as a radio station kind of grow along with them. It’s a two-way street.”

Robert Clivilles, the New York-based songwriter-producer who founded C+C Music Factory with the late David Cole in 1990, was surprised by the radio success of “Boriqua Anthem,” but is now convinced that the commercial appeal of such Latin-flavored songs is limitless.

“There’s a huge market for them,” said Clivilles, who has produced “Boriqua Anthem” parts II and III for the next C+C album, which is due out this fall.

C+C Music Factory, best known for the runaway 1991 bestseller “Gonna Make You Sweat,” had not recorded a song with Spanish vocals before producing “Boriqua Anthem” for its 1994 album”Anything Goes!”

“When I first started C+C Music Factory, I did a lot of the R&B; stuff that I dug, but I’m Puerto Rican and a couple of my friends were bothering me about that [saying], ‘You’re Latin, and you’ve never done anything Latin-inspired,’ ” Clivilles said. “I’d always wanted to--I love Latin music--so I said, ‘On the next album, I’ll do it.’ ”

The result was the 12-minute version of “Boriqua” that appears on “Anything Goes!”

“I knew it was going to be a big club record, but I didn’t know the radio was going to play it,” Clivilles said. “I couldn’t imagine the English stations playing it.”

Actually, despite the song’s immense popularity in dance clubs, Columbia Records never released “Boriqua Anthem” as a single, and radio ignored the song for several months after its release. That began changing late last year when KPWR deejay Richard (Humpty) Vission put together an edited version that runs about four minutes.

“I knew it was going to click,” the KPWR deejay said. “You play it in the clubs and everybody screams and runs for the dance floor. You can’t deny a record like that.”

After several months of limited airplay on KPWR--test rotation, in radio parlance--the song finally connected with the audience this spring and has remained among the station’s most frequently played records all summer.

“It was kind of a project for us for four to five months, but once it hit, it really hit,” St. James said. “It had a good two-month run as our hottest record.”

The edited version of the song, which can still be heard about eight times a day on KPWR, is now being played on numerous English-language stations across the country and will be included on a C+C greatest-hits album due out this fall.

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Still, KPWR executives are reluctant to call it a sign of things to come, even though studies have shown that about two-thirds of the station’s listeners are Latino.

“We have found that, while our audience is predominantly Latino, a majority of them do not speak Spanish,” St. James said. “And we’ve found in the past that Spanish language can be polarizing in music, when some of the audience doesn’t get it.

“We’re certainly not looking to be a bilingual station. We’re trying to reflect the Latino market that’s English-speaking. We really think that’s our niche in the world. There are enough Spanish-language stations in L.A. that fill the need for Spanish-language music.”

So, why did “Boriqua” connect with an English-speaking audience on a hip-hop station?

“It’s just the groove,” Vission said. “I think it would be just as big a hit if it was in English.”

St. James agreed.

“I would guess that a lot of our audience doesn’t even know what the song is saying,” he said. “It’s more of the beat, more of the cadence of the rap that listeners find appealing. We’ve found out over and over again with the hip-hop music we play, a lot of people don’t know what the songs are saying.”

Whatever the reason for the success of “Boriqua Anthem,” whose lyrics offer a risque invitation to dance and party, Clivilles was not reluctant to follow up with two more similar versions of it. For parts II and III, he brought together the same trio of vocalists--El General, Wepaman and Angel DeLeon--that appears on the original.

“I’m still using the formula, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ ” he said.