One rainy September afternoon I ran through the streets of Medellín with Karol G. We were late for the rehearsal of their most important concert to date. It was just five years ago, many years in the career of an artist of these times. We were recording her return to her hometown after the international success of My Bed Remix (2018) for a documentary from the American network Univision about its history. The collaboration with her countryman J Balvin and the Puerto Rican Nicky Jam had given Carolina Giraldo her most important success in the United States and a point of no return in her career, although we did not know that when we dodged the traffic and the rain of rain with laughter. Medellin.
Since then, the Colombian has broken down barrier after barrier and record after record. But it was not until this year, and despite the fact that Taylor Swift broke box office, Ticketmaster and the internet, that Karol G found her own space in the global pop scene and achieved what no other Latin woman (not JLo, not Shakira, not Selena ): a stadium tour in the US and the first album completely in Spanish to reach the global number one spot (Bad Bunny did it for men in 2022 and 2023). To two milestones he added the conquest of the world of fashion and its contribution to the effervescence of a new Latin genre with global reach: the Mexican regional.
2023 started with a declaration of intent: Tomorrow will be nice, their fourth studio album. In the first trackasked us “Don't worry be happy” with a risky sampling from the eighties classic. She thus predicted the beauty and obtained something spectacular in return: establishing herself as a Latin pop star and consolidating herself as the boss (or the bug) of reggaeton twenty years after the first queen of the genre, the Puerto Rican Ivy Queen, said I want to dance.
They call her the queen, the little baby, the Bichota, and she can't resist a pá-tupá-pumpá to release the brake on his hips (not in vain the video TQG, along with Shakira, was the most viewed of the year on YouTube). But beyond the suggestive dances, her chameleonic mane or her shameless lyrics, Karol G is above all a singer-songwriter of love and heartbreak (tusa, in Colombian) in reggaeton times who was destined to be a pop star. Getting to the top, however, took years.
When I first saw her and sensed her destiny in 2017, she had been working on her sound for a decade with producer Ovy On The Drums. She was at the Premios Juventud gala, the springboard for new Latin American stars to the Spanish-speaking American market (before the absolute reign of the platforms). Puerto Ricans Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee took over the world with Slowly when this girl from Medellín in her 20s appeared on the screen singing To herthe promotional single from their first album Unstoppable. The theme, a dembow made a pop ballad, it was precisely about a breakup. The self-confidence of a woman of her time publicly discovering herself to the rhythm of pure and simple reggaeton would not take long to arrive.
In November 2018, the Colombian sang My bed in Las Vegas and won her first Latin Grammy for Best New Artist. That was the end of Karol G: the warrior of the genre, the documentary that premiered the following year in Miami. It was also the beginning of a Latina's great rise to the top of the world.
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On his second album, Ocean (2019), revealed the tides of romantic love unleashed by the Puerto Rican reggaeton player and Spanish trap pioneer Anuel AA. An association that helped him gain legitimacy in the hardest wing of the genre and gave him free rein to his sex appealwhile incorporating markedly Puerto Rican elements to his lyrics, gaining acceptance among the audience of the natural heirs of reggaeton.
Cobalong with Nicki Minaj, and MAMIII, Together with Becky G, they were a winning combo to begin the journey to world domination while preparing the material left by her breakup with Anuel in 2021. The end of the romance was not told in real time. It was distilled in Tomorrow will be nice (2023), Karol G's most personal album. A repertoire of songs that includes the song to which Shakira, in the midst of her own breakup with the soccer player Piqué, finally said yes. Six years after her debut album, the LP that chronicles the journey of a broken heart to fruition placed 11 of her 17 songs in Billboard's top 100, making history and bringing her achievements to the big screen. crusade of the non-English.
Karol G has integrated expressions such as ¡qué chimba!, tusa and bichota into the vocabulary of an Ibero-American generation and has taken them to the backstage of the Super Bowl to make them viral in the mouths of their own idols like Rihanna. But she hasn't stopped there. This crop of Latin artists knows that the next step for a global star is to conquer the fashion industry. First, J Balvin did it with Nike, GUESS and Amiri, Maluma with Balmain, and more recently Rosalía with Acne Studios, and Bad Bunny (along with Kendall Jenner) with Louis Vuitton.
It was in March, a few days after the launch of Tomorrow will be nicewhen we saw Karol G in Paris. The images of the Colombian with her hair dyed bright red and her body covered in a mesh that revealed her pierced nipples came from the fashion capital. She looked like a true urban Cinderella teetering on Loewe tulip heels on the cobblestone path to the Chateau de Vincennes, a medieval fortress. Metaphor for the space she intended to conquer. And she achieved it. A few weeks later, she appeared in the Paula's Ibiza campaign from Loewe and the covers arrived… all of them. Those who “elevated” her image as ELLE, Business of Fashion or El País Semanal; those who crowned her as a pop star like Rolling Stone either Billboard; and those who were wrong like GQ, the publication that altered and distorted his face. All while the Colombian was collecting sold-outs in stadiums around the world.
But it was in Los Angeles on the red carpet of the premiere world of Barbie, the Greta Gerwig film, where the wide smile that accompanied her all-pink look finally showed the portrait of a global pop star. Karol G went down in history as the only Latina on the soundtrack of the 2023 cultural phenomenon, which became the highest-grossing film by a female director in history.
In November, Tomorrow will be nice was awarded the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year in Seville and in December it closed at home with the Tomorrow will be a nice festival, two electrifying nights in front of more than 95,000 people in which he summoned Peso Pluma, Romeo Santos and his current partner, the Colombian reggaeton player Feid. Both are in the top 10 on Spotify and have a less visible, but apparently healthier, relationship.
Thus, at 32 years old, Karol G showed himself like never before in his songs and the world surrendered at his feet. There she seems to hide the secret behind the impact and permanence of modern female pop stars like Taylor Swift, Karol G or Beyoncé. In her clever, authentic, brave vulnerability. That access that allows us to live her loves, her frustrations and her successes as our own.
“How cool life is. I have the f*cking life “What I wanted,” says the greatest Latin artist we have ever seen in her last song of 2023.
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