Songfacts®:

• You can shake your booty, your groove thing, your rump, and thanks to Ricky Martin, your bon-bon on the dance floor. Bonbons are little chocolate treats, but here they're repurposed in a rather wholesome euphemism for your backside. The song itself is a musical bonbon, a fun little dance tune where Ricky Martin takes us on an adventure around the world, with stops in the Sahara and the Himalayas.
• Ricky Martin was an international superstar by the end of 1998, when he released his fourth album, Vuelve. But it was "Livin' La Vida Loca," from his next album (his first primarily in English), that broke him in America. That song is almost entirely in English but has a pulsating Latin rhythm and loads of energy. "Shake Your Bon-Bon" follows a similar formula, with an unrelenting groove and a few recognizable Spanish words thrown in for spice ("hola amiga!").
• The lyrics are very singable, even if they don't make sense. "Bon-bon" sounds like a drumbeat and allows for a chorus of just one repeated line: "Shake your bon-bon." Elsewhere, we get "silhouette" rhyming with "Juliet" and "Himalaya" rhyming with "lay ya." It's all good fun, with the words there to support the beat.
• This song was written by Desmond Child, Robi Rosa and George Noriega, three writers of Latin heritage who were a big part of Ricky Martin's rise to stardom. Child and Rosa also co-wrote "Livin' La Vida Loca"; Noriega, who also produced "Shake Your Bon-Bon," also worked on Martin's songs "She's All I Ever Had" and "Loaded."
• The music video, directed by Wayne Isham, shows Martin performing in front of a bank of monitors that flash different scenes we sometimes enter, following the "around the world" theme. It picked up MTV Video Music Award nominations for Best Dance Video and Best Male Video.