Karol G Is Blowing Up Reggaeton's Boys' Club

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Karol G descends a grand staircase, her black Nike track pants swishing with every step. Her hair is a faded red. Her sneakers are mall-chic DCs. And tonight’s take-out feast set out before us, the bandeja paisa—a beloved local specialty of Colombia’s Antioquia region, a carnivorous spread typically featuring chicharrón, rice, beans, ground beef, sausages, plantain, a fried egg, avocado, arepas—is not quite up to her standards.

“The presentation is beautiful and it looks incredible, but it doesn’t taste the same,” she says with a sigh.

Seconds later, Karol*—real name Carolina Giraldo Navarro—*has moved on, swanning through the kitchen of her palatial Hollywood Hills rental with the air of a consummate host. At 32, the Colombian reggaeton star is one of a handful of women to go mainstream and flourish in a genre that has long been a boys’ club. She’s succeeding on her own terms, making hits that are both tenacious and tender, dancy and emo. For her fans, few contemporary artists can soothe a broken heart under the restorative shimmer of a disco ball quite like her.

Karol flounces around the marble countertop, where she’s joined by her publicist, assistant, personal trainer, makeup artist, and two close friends from home. Other pals periodically flit in through the high-ceilinged manse. “Buen provecho,” she tells me. “What do you want to drink? I’ll get you something.” She flings open the steel refrigerator, revealing soft drinks, various types of water, and energy drinks lined up in neat rows. “I’m not sure if you want a little wine, water, Red Bull—”

Suddenly she lets out a sharp, audible gasp. “Do you like cheese arepas?!”

“Of course,” I say.

“I can make you a cheese arepa that’s part of my secret recipe!” Karol beams, taking matters into her own hands. She unloads a tub of Kerrygold butter and sliced mozzarella. “Get ready to taste the best arepa de queso in your motherfucking life!”

Karol unwraps a foil package of thick, white-corn arepas she bought from La Fonda Antioqueña, a local Colombian restaurant. She arranges three arepas in a large skillet, stabs a series of holes into each one, then slathers the surface of each with roughly an inch of butter and tops them generously with cheese. “I open holes into the arepas,” she explains, “so the corn fills up with butter.”

When the arepas begin sizzling, she flips them with a spatula. More butter, more cheese. “Is it muy fit? No,” she says. “But for it to taste good, you have to do this.” Then she starts whacking everything in the pan into a mash, like grainy scrambled eggs. “When I serve them, it’s not an arepa so much as it is a hill of cheese,” she says.

Satisfied, she turns off the stove, flecks the arepas with salt, and hands me a plate, hoisting herself up to the counter to watch me take a bite. It’s unlike any arepa I’ve had in Colombia, where my family is also from. But it still reminds me of Saturday mornings at my parents’ house.

At the moment, Karol is between places. She moved away from Miami and has been traveling a lot between Los Angeles and Medellín. She doesn’t mind: LA has been her muse lately, partly because it “looks like it has an Instagram filter on all the time.” She likes it here in the Hills. The proximity to music history doesn’t hurt. At one point, she rolls up the sleeve of her Balenciaga sweatshirt to show me her Mount Rushmore–esque tattoo: Rihanna, Selena, and herself.

“I went to the tattoo artist, and I told him I wanted a tattoo of the women I most admire in the world,” she says, laughing. “People should get more tattoos of themselves! Because only you know how hard things have been for yourself. No one can feel that except you.”

Since releasing her breakout track, “Amor de Dos” with Nicky Jam, in 2013, Karol has ascended to global stardom: She’s steadily churned out hit after hit, both solo and on collaborations with fellow contemporary reggaetoneros including J Balvin and Ozuna. After she DM’d rapper Nicki Minaj on Instagram, the pair released the buoyant “Tusa” in 2019; it’s nabbed a billion-plus streams. In 2022 Karol G became the highest-grossing Latin female artist in North America*—*eclipsing both Jennifer Lopez and fellow Colombian pop megastar Shakira, also featured on Karol’s chart-topping new album, *Mañana Será Bonito—*for her $trip Love Tour.

“Bichota” is a riff on the Puerto Rican term for a big boss and/or drug dealer, and it has become a rallying cry for Karol’s massive fan base. She defines it as una dura, slang for a badass woman. Her fans embrace their idol’s take-no-shit alter ego with panache, showing up to her stadium gigs clad in fire engine red wigs and chucking Little Mermaid dolls at her feet. “In truth, I didn’t think it would become what it became,” Karol says. “I did it more for myself.”

A typical Karol G song can feel like dancing underneath a strobe light at 3 a.m. when you suddenly remember how your ex used to sweetly rest their chin on your shoulder while spooning you. Booty shaking and sobbing are not mutually exclusive emotions in Karol’s songwriting, which circles the more confounding facets of romances, situationships, and friendships. That includes holding on to a former lover’s toothbrush and hoping they come back (“Contigo Voy a Muerte”) and hyping yourself up to tell a dear friend that they’re dating a loser who’s bringing them down (“200 Copas”). Others are more overtly randy, like “Mi Cama,” with a beat that emulates a bed squeaking.

The new album finds Karol in the aftermath of a very public breakup, and it’s the first Spanish-language album by a female artist to go No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Over Mañana Será Bonito’s 17 songs, she moves between ice-cold reggaeton jams calling out the ex that still watches her IG stories (“TQG,” featuring Shakira); a dembow ode to party rocking that’ll likely tumble out of car stereos come early summer (“Ojos Ferrari,” with Angel Dior and Justin Quiles); and a celestial pop punk bop about longing (“Tus Gafitas”).

The vibe of Karol’s new music is reluctantly optimistic. Take the opener, “Mientras Me Curo del Cora.” For the song’s backbone, Karol drew from the beat of jazz virtuoso Bobby McFerrin’s Grammy-winning track “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” It isn’t exactly a popular song to sample in reggaeton, but it makes sense as the spiritual progenitor of Mañana Será Bonito. The song would be cheeky if it wasn’t so earnest; Karol says she personally adopted it as a mantra following a tough period, both personally and professionally. In 2021 she ended her relationship with Anuel AA, the Puerto Rican rapper. The pair hard-launched their romance in 2018, after their song together, “Secreto,” was leaked, and broke up two years later.

It was a trying moment in her life. “I wanted to die, I was crying horribly,” she says. What helped her find a way through was realizing that she could pick things up again the next day. “I wanted to tell people: ‘It doesn’t matter. Everything is going to be fine.’ ”

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.

Underneath the ambient danger were moments of real joy too. If you go back a ways through Karol’s Instagram, you’ll find a video of her at an outdoor family gathering. It’s 1996, and a four-year-old Karol is wiggling and singing along with her dad, who’s playing the bongo. “My dad would get me to sing everywhere,” she remembers. He worked in the music business by day and, on weekends, played in his own band.

Karol learned how to play the guitar, violin, and drums but never connected with any instrument besides her voice. Even though she had tried out for Factor XS (an X-Factor spin-off) and had nabbed a record deal, she was having a hard time breaking through. Still, her parents believed in her talent. Her father quit his job to manage her career, and her parents drained their savings and sold their car to support her.

Those early days were scrappy: Her mother would call around to different municipalities to see if there was a birthday party, a school function*—any event, really—*that Karol could perform at. They stopped in every town they could to hand out CDs on city buses and to people walking down the street. She performed covers of early reggaeton anthems by Ivy Queen and La Factoría, interspersed with original songs she’d written. But after a while, that grind started to wear on her. As did the feedback she got over and over again in meetings: That there’s no more room for women in reggaeton.

“I would be there with my dad, and they would talk to him like I wasn’t there,” she recalls.

Once, she says, at a meeting in Miami with the label Universal Music Latin Entertainment, an executive told her that they weren’t interested in her, but they wanted to sign her on as a songwriter for other artists. “My dad got super mad,” Karol says. “He said, ‘I didn’t come here to offer you a songwriter. I came to tell you that my daughter is a singer and she’s going to be huge!’ ”

Something in Karol began to shift. Over time she eventually became more defiant, more unswerving—in her parlance, bichota. Her big break came in 2013, when she heard that Nicky Jam was performing at Medellín’s old B Lounge. She persuaded him to let her do a song with him onstage. As chance would have it, a hungry producer named Ovy on the Drums saw her perform. Ovy made a pitch to work with her, she soon started singing over his beats, and things just exploded from there. “I saw in her that we could do something huge,” Ovy says. “I felt that from day zero.”

Karol is sitting cross-legged around a wide coffee table. It’s two weeks before her album drops, and she’s doodling a giant gerbera daisy onto a sheet of drawing paper. Karol is anxious. “I need for this album to come out, because I’m going to be sick. I never break out like this,” she says, pulling on her cheeks to show me a few zits. Underneath the pop-star sheen, she’s still a nervous songwriter hoping that her words will resonate.

The source of her stress, she says, stems from the raw, revealing nature of the new album. “[I’m] exposing a very personal part of myself to the public,” she says. Especially since the new album is an autobiographical reflection of a challenging time in her life. “I express a lot of pain in my songs,” she adds. “People have told me that they’ve been able to get through heartbreaks with my songs.”

Lately, Karol has been trying to find different ways to convey what she’s feeling. She has a small part in Netflix’s forthcoming Griselda Blanco biopic, which inspired her to take a “corporeal expression” class. There was one time her teacher insisted that she “act like a spider,” and she had to suppress every urge to laugh.

But the course taught her something important. It showed her how to transmute emotions into something more deeply felt, particularly when she performs onstage for her fans.

“It’s taught me how to liberate my emotions,” she says. “I feel that when listeners sing my songs with me, it’s my way of connecting with them. And if I see someone crying, I’ll start to cry with them.”

Paula Mejía is the arts editor at the Los Angeles Times. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Texas Monthly, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

A version of this story originally appeaered in the April/May 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Karol G Is Blowing Up Reggaeton’s Boys’ Club”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Donna Trope
Styled by Michelle Cameron
Hair by Dennis Gots at Forward Artists
Makeup by Christopher Ardoff using Chanel Beauty/Welovecoco
Manicure by Riley Miranda using Chanel Beauty
Tailoring by Keke Cheng
Produced by Alicia Zumback and Patrick Mapel at Camp Productions