El Mundo
Entero:
J Balvin
Prepares

A global superstar of the highest magnitude, Balvin dominates the charts, sells out arenas, and graces the covers of magazines around the world. His music inspires his exuberant style, as manifested in his line for Gef France in 2018, his multiple collections with Guess, and his sneaker collabs, including a rainbow-hued take on the Air Jordan 1 and a forthcoming glow-in-the-dark Jordan 2. Balvin is a relentless optimist whose ambition matches his reach—he doesn’t want mere success, he wants to break records, rack up firsts, and leave his mark on the entire world. It’s a mission that isn’t without complications.

When Balvin first arrives at The Box, an exclusive New York nightlife destination known for risqué burlesque performances and an A-list clientele, his entourage is as laid-back as his ensemble. Dressed in all black, shielded from the foul February elements by a leather bomber jacket, he’s accompanied by his assistant Mike and his makeup artist and groomer Tati. As he waits for the results of a COVID antigen test, he cuts the awkward tension with jokes about shrugging off his latest bout with the coronavirus, which he’d kicked just 20 days prior.

It was a far cry from the summer of 2020, when his first, pre-vaccine bout with COVID nearly sent him to the hospital. This time, Balvin was back to work within days, jetting off to Paris to record with Sheeran and Pharrell, then back to New York, where he played rough mixes of those sessions from his phone for members of his team. He’s preparing for his first international tour in years, a triumphant return to the biggest stages that he had only begun to explore before the live music industry temporarily dropped the curtain.

When the pandemic struck the Americas, Balvin found himself stuck at home with nowhere to go. He was days away from the scheduled release of his fourth studio album, Colores, with an entire suite of promotional events, interviews, and shows lined up. His label, Universal Music Latino, implored him to shelve the record, correctly assuming the challenges of promoting it from home on lockdown would affect its commercial success. But he insisted on releasing it on schedule. Times are dark, his thinking went, and the people could use some light. They were both right, of course. Streaming numbers for all new music were down at the start of the pandemic; but with other artists postponing releases and touring halted, Balvin’s fans were gifted with new music and online access to performances they might not otherwise have been able to attend. Colores moved 24,000 units in its first week; Oasis, his 2019 collaborative album with Bad Bunny, sold 36,000 units its first week.

As the pandemic continued with no end in sight, Balvin became unmoored. Unable to perform in front of fans, he tried to get back into the studio, but the vibes were off. “It took a while to have inspiration in the beginning,” he recalls. “’Cause we were just so sad.” He grew tired of holing up at home and decided to abscond to Miami to blow off steam. The trip proved to be disastrous. He suffers from anxiety and depression, but convinced that he was feeling better, he stopped taking his medication. His anxiety came roaring back, and then he caught COVID; his body struggled to fight it off and his oxygen levels crashed, hovering just above the threshold that would necessitate a ventilator. “It almost killed me,” he admitted in an interview with Billboard. As scary as the experience was, his withdrawal from the meds was even scarier. “It took me almost two years to come back,” he says. “Even though we won the Latin Grammy for Best Urban Album that year, I wasn’t even happy; I wasn’t even on this planet.”

Balvin speaks about his mental health with candor, convinced he has a responsibility to share his experiences so that they might help someone going through similar struggles. He knows it opens himself up to a world of criticism on social media from people who misconstrue his illness as ungracious dissatisfaction with success, as if fame should somehow balance brain chemistry. But he truly believes he could help save lives just by reminding people that, as he puts it, “it’s OK to not be OK.” “There’s a lot of misconceptions, a lot of stigma,” he says. “People are like, ‘I don’t wanna talk about this’—I take a lot of shots, you know,” he says, referring to the armies of anonymous online critics. “They’re just like snipers every time they say, ‘Oh, the depressive guy, the anxiety guy, the ungrateful guy, the guy that has everything.’ They don't understand.’”

Now that he’s a father—his son, Rio, was born in June 2021—he’s become hyperaware of what he exposes his child to. “In the society we’re in, your parents, my parents, everybody’s parents, are like, ‘I want you to be a doctor. I want you to be a lawyer. I want you to do this,’” he says. “But what they didn’t say? ‘I want you to be happy.’” Balvin believes his biggest fears were inherited from his parents; as a child, his mother’s illness—acute intermittent porphyria—led her to frequently ponder her own mortality, instilling a strong fear of death in her son; his father, who watched his family’s fortune evaporate after losing his job, made sure he knew just how awful and scary it was to be old and poor. “Focusing on my career and my music, I’m thinking I don’t want to get old and not have money,” he says. But Balvin doesn’t want to shield Rio from his mental health struggles, either. Rather, he hopes that watching Dad manage anxiety and depression will help the child understand that humans are fragile and vulnerable—that life will humble you time and time again, and that’s OK.

If you want to prevent your child from inheriting your fears, it’s perhaps helpful to conquer them yourself. His father’s warnings about aging penniless motivated him to never let anyone outwork him. A month before his son was born, he decided to face his own fear of death. He put on a flight suit and a helmet, climbed into a plane, and began preparing himself to jump out of it.

“Professional skydivers, they say they always have those three seconds of fear [before they jump], like, ‘What am I doing here? I should be on the floor just talking with my boys,’” he says. “But once you jump, everything changes. You gotta face your fears and that makes you live. That makes you feel free.”

J Balvin’s road to becoming one of the world’s biggest pop stars was long and winding. It involved failures that might have broken someone with less resolve, and more than one stylistic reinvention. The path began, appropriately enough, in Miami, where Balvin moved after school to focus on his career. He’d paint houses and do other manual labor during the day, then dress up and cosplay as a flashy rapper in the clubs at night. It felt hollow because it was; he was pantomiming the way he imagined a more successful artist would live and act, but no one was buying it, not even himself. He returned to his native Colombia humbled and determined to find his voice.

Birthplace isn’t always destiny, but Colombia is integral to understanding Balvin’s journey. Reggaetón as we know it—the alchemical fusion of American hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall built atop the riddim from the classic Shabba Ranks track “Dem Bow”—is distinctly Puerto Rican, crafted in the clubs of San Juan in the ’90s. Those Puerto Rican artists worked with a prototype of the sound created in Jamaican communities in Panama, who made what they originally called “reggae en español.” In the late 2000s, while reggaetón was being maligned in Puerto Rico to the point of criminalization, Colombia adopted the genre, welcoming its stars and building its own communities. The country—and Balvin’s hometown of Medellín, in particular—managed to rebrand itself from Pablo Escobar’s cocaine capital of the ’80s into a portal to South America for reggaetón artists, a place that has embraced the music so fervently that it can launch or revitalize an artist’s career.

Just ask Nicky Jam, the reggaetón OG who was instrumental to its rise from San Juan clubs like The Noise. But drug use and criminal associations led to a falling out with his mentor, the legendary Daddy Yankee—who put out “Gasolina,” reggaetón’s watershed moment in the mainstream—-and Jam became persona non grata in Puerto Rico. When Jam first came to Colombia to perform, in 2007, his career was on life support; Colombia embraced him as a legend and breathed new life into his career. “If the Medellín people vibe with your music, it’s like a sensor of what’s hot and what’s not, and what’s gonna be big,” Balvin explains. “That story happens to all the artists in Puerto Rico. They went from Medellín to the rest of Colombia, from Colombia to Ecuador, to Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina.”

Sech, an Afro-Panamanian reggaetonero who calls Balvin his friend, agrees. Colombia was the first place that booked him outside of Panama, and he was blown away by the city’s passion for the music. Balvin may have failed to get his career off the ground in Miami, but if he could connect with his people back home, he still had a chance.

In Colombia he found the voice he had been seeking. Those early records, 2012’s J Balvin Mixtape, and 2013’s La Familia in particular, carry reggaetón’s signature dembow rhythm—that iconic boom-ch-boom-chick beat that moves hips involuntarily—but shared as much melodically with dancefloors in Europe as they did in Puerto Rico. This sound caught fire with a Colombian audience ravenous for reggaetón.

Balvin’s early work bore little resemblance to the globe-spanning, pristinely curated pop for which he would become internationally known. But each release represented a massive leap in sophistication; as he took his music on the road and traveled the Americas and later the world, he crept closer and closer to a sound that more accurately reflected his tastes and vision. His 2018 album, Vibras, represented his real breakthrough; with its spot-on selection of dancehall, trap, salsa, bachata, and Afropop, his sound was now truly global, masterfully sequenced to connect the dots between those distinct influences in such a way as to appear effortless. The album’s biggest hit, an ode to Latinidad made with French-Mauritanian producer Willy William, got launched into the stratosphere after Blue Ivy Carter’s love for the track convinced her mom, Beyoncé, to jump on the remix. “Mi Gente” remains Balvin’s defining work, a reminder of just how high his ceiling can be, with or without an assist from one of the U.S.’s biggest stars.

The genres that Balvin so expertly synthesized into one of the best pop records of 2018 are distinctly Black. And Balvin, like the majority of mainstream urbano stars, is not. The first time Balvin heard Daddy Yankee, he assumed the reggaetón legend was Black; after he saw his picture he thought, “¡Ah, yo puedo ser como él!” (“Ah, I can be like him!”), as he told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo last year. Discussions of appropriation are finally reaching the mainstream, and as a massively successful white artist making Black music, Balvin often finds himself at the center of them—like in late 2021, when he graciously accepted the Afro-Latino of the Year award from the African Entertainment Awards USA, a New Jersey nonprofit. He would later acknowledge that he’s not Afro Latino; but for many, it was baffling that he didn’t immediately recognize why accepting the award might be problematic in the first place.

When I ask him about what an artist of his stature can do to ensure all Latinos—including the Black ones, who are often erased—get their due, he tells me: “I don’t have that mindset. When I think about Latinos I think about Latinos in general, right? Black, brown, yellow Latinos, red latinos—we’re the same.”

But we don’t all get treated the same.

He takes this in, putting his hand to his chin. “I’m thinking about it right now, and a lot of reggaetón artists are pretty much white. But it’s weird to even talk about, if it’s Black or is it white—because we’re just Latinos!” He tells me his grandfather was Black. Six of his nine dancers? Black. “One of my closest friends is Black Latino,” he says, “which is weird to say, ‘Black Latino.’ To me, it’s just my boy, you know?”

Clearly, Balvin would prefer to avoid engaging with the racial dynamics of Latin music at all. But as long as the structural inequities exist, the music he makes and the culture he traffics in make that nearly impossible. Take his collaboration with Tokischa, a rising Black Dominican dembow artist known for her elastic, singsong flow and taboo-flaunting lyrics; when I mention their collaboration—a raunchy track called “Perra”—Balvin becomes despondent.

In October 2021, Balvin released the video for the single, which took the song’s concept literally, depicting women—including two Black women—as dogs walked on leashes by Balvin himself. Amidst the public outcry—which included Balvin’s own mother—Balvin pulled the video and apologized over Instagram, saying “I want to say sorry to whomever felt offended, especially women and the Black community. That’s not who I am. I’m about tolerance, love, and inclusivity.” He addressed his mother, searching for a note of optimism: “Mom, I’m sorry, too. Life gets better each day. Thank you for listening to me.”

Tokischa said she played no part in the video’s removal. “He came here to record with me and to share his platform with me,” she told Rolling Stone in an interview following the video’s removal. “Now I’m like, ‘What did I get José in?’” The collaboration could have been a triumphant mainstream moment for her, had Balvin been a more careful custodian.

Despite the controversies, Balvin’s collaborators—including Tokischa—still speak well of him. He perks up at the mention of his close friend Sech—“That’s my man!”—one of the only Black Panamanian reggaetoneros to break into the mainstream. Sech later tells me that he owes his success to all the people in his country who came before him, using a metaphor of being passed a bottle that was easy for him to open, but only because seven people had tried just before him, loosening the cork. He’s also convinced that the world is finally ready to hear from his fellow Panamanaians. “After me, bro, there’s gonna come a bunch of people,” he says on a call from his home in Panama. “They have too much talent. If people can understand me, they can understand them. It’s a blessing. My Black people can see that we can do it, bro—we can make it.”

Balvin tries to keep doors open for emerging artists to step through, as he attempted to do for Tokischa. When he first met Bad Bunny—arguably the world’s biggest urbano star not named J Balvin—the singer had barely spent time in a recording studio, and was so overwhelmed Balvin said he was moved to tears. A few years later they’d drop their collaborative album, Oasis, and headline festivals together. Sech tells a similar story of being awed by his star power, yet surprised to find a humble dude named José who was just as interested in him; a mentor and collaborator more interested in his friendship than exploiting him for clout. Sech tells me that after they dropped “Una Nota,” their recent hit with nearly 30 million plays on YouTube, they barely even talked about it.

“He is a special person,” Sech says. “He’s helped me in everything, bro. He’s always telling me, ‘Why didn’t you ask me for this?’ I’m like bro, you’re my friend, you’re not my manager,” he laughs. “But he always wants to help. And I appreciate that. We talk about everything; we don’t just talk about music. We have vibes. And if the vibes are there, it’s everything.”

Like an old-school A&R rep, Balvin has a knack for not only hearing talent but also clocking the star quality required to propel that talent into something popular. He manages to do this mostly by paying intense attention: to when people close to him hip him to new music, when fresh voices break through the noise on social media, and when curated Instagram accounts that share trap and reggaetón highlight rising talent.

“I love my genre,” he says. “I love what I do. You have to know who’s gonna be the next one. I’ve been really blessed to see the future with a lot of artists.” Asked for a list of who’s up next, he rattles off a handful of South American artists, some from Medellín (Ryan Castro and Blessd), and some from Argentina (Trueno, Maria Becerra, and L-Gante). Like Medellín before it, Argentina is home to a bevy of nascent stars drawing attention to a community long defined by its love of freestyling and battle raps. We talk about Bizarrap, the young Argentine producer whose “Freestyle” and “Music” sessions with local rappers—and, recently, big-name reggaetoneros—have made the jump from YouTube to the pop charts. “He basically is the culture (in Argentina),” he declares.

The next steps for Balvin are clear: He’ll continue to expand his brand in service of touching as many people as possible. The fruits of his collaboration with Sheeran are sure to surprise many, but it’s also easy to see how he might be inspired by the English musician’s ubiquity. Balvin has already dipped his toe in Hollywood, voicing a reggaetón troll in 2020’s Trolls World Tour and making a cameo in Lil Dicky’s send-up of the music industry, Dave. His fashion collaborations seem like pilot programs for a career as a designer himself, modest previews of what he might be able to achieve with the right partner and resources. It’s no exaggeration to say his influence rivals that of Kanye West, who managed to successfully leverage a rabid musical fan base into a global fashion brand—that’s the scale Balvin typically aims for.

Of course, even if—or when—Balvin reaches the top, he’ll carry his struggles with him, too. He’ll have to manage his anxiety and balance his brain chemistry for the rest of his life. Though he seems to have found ways to cope, it’s not something that you fix and move on from. And as long as racial inequality exists, his engagement with Black music will continue to be examined. His responsibility is impossible to shake, as uncomfortable as it may be. “I forgot that I have this power,” he says. “But that gives me fuel to make a better world.”