Karol G Is Blowing Up Reggaeton’s Boys’ Club

Karol G is part of an emerging nucleus of reggaeton artists, producers, and engineers centered in Medellín*—*a city that’s exploded in recent years as both tourist destination and nightlife mecca. Reggaeton originated in 1980s-era Panama, when Black musicians created renditions of Jamaican dancehall and reggae tracks in Spanish. The nascent genre then reached Puerto Rico, where MCs melded hip-hop with lyrics often decrying police brutality, racism, and social inequity. Then called underground, the movement picked up steam in the ’90s, despite the Puerto Rican government’s attempts to criminalize it. But in the early 2000s, when stations started playing Tego Calderón’s “Cosa Buena” nonstop and a song called “Gasolina” hit the radio, reggaeton was suddenly everywhere, and it was worldwide.

The Medellín scene began coalescing around studios like La Palma, launched by teenagers out of their garage in 2002. Karol says that producers making those early reggaeton beats tried to emulate sounds coming out of Puerto Rico, but they didn’t have the same drums or beats in their music libraries. Their attempts to interpret those ideas meant that a “different kind of dembow” would emerge.

For all the momentum behind her, she’s become part of the debate about why non-Black Latino reggaetoneros, such as Maluma and Bad Bunny, are bestowed heightened visibility in a genre with undeniably Black origins. And like a lot of successful artists, she’s had her share of stumbles. Karol caught heat during the 2020 racial reckonings after she posted an image of her black-and-white bulldog, with a caption in Spanish that translates to “the perfect example that Black and white together look beautiful.” Karol says she never intended for the photo to come off how it did, and admits that she didn’t fully realize the scale of racism’s pervasiveness at the time. “I feel that I learned a lot of things,” she says of the moment. The post was “ignorant,” as she puts it now, adding that “sometimes, you make a mistake and there is nothing you can do to explain it.”

For all her gifts, she’s still learning how to best express herself. Karol’s longtime producer, Ovy on the Drums, notes that the thing that distinguishes Colombian reggaeton is the simplicity of the instrumentation. “TQG,” for instance, is pretty minimal*—a bass, some drums, a distant bell sound—*that somehow manages to elicit tension nevertheless. Ovy says the success of a song like that comes from Karol’s ability to connect with her audience and tap into their feelings. “She’s always been very clear about what she wants to express, what she wants to tell people,” he adds. “Another artist can sing a Karol G song and it might sound good. But when she sings it, she transmits something through her music.”

For Karol, growing up in Medellín in the 1990s meant living in the shadow of the drug trade and Pablo Escobar, who manipulated and was responsible for the deaths of countless people but was also seen as a benevolent figure within the community. It was “a very strange era,” she says. It meant living on high alert. Before Karol was born, her mother worked as a waitress. One night when Escobar dined at her restaurant, he left her a life-changing tip that helped get the family back on its feet, she says. Then sometime later, Karol says her uncle was killed when he was out past curfew.