How Karol G Chose Memory Over Hits and Won Hearts Worldwide

From Medellín stages to the Vatican, Karol G says her June album Tropicoqueta dug into Colombian memory and split opinions. In Rolling Stone, she explains why nostalgia, family dances, and women’s safety work now define her global rise this year.

A Superstar Still Surprised by Spotlight

At 34, Karol G speaks about fame the way many Latin Americans talk about a sudden visa approval—grateful, half-disbelieving, and careful not to jinx it. “I’ve done legendary stages that never in my life I imagined I’d perform in, like the Vatican or Crazy Horse,” she says, sounding less like a brand manager than a woman trying to name what just happened to her life.

This feature is adapted from the original report, quotes, and interviews published by Rolling Stone and written by Julyssa Lopez. In that telling, the milestones aren’t only trophies. They are the echoes of an older story: a singer who broke out in Medellín, started performing as a teenager, and measures success by what she can carry from home without losing it.

The Album That Picked Roots Over Routine

That question—what survives the leap—sits inside Tropicoqueta, the album she released in June. It was a gamble precisely because it refused to behave like the safe next move from a reggaeton star. Her earlier projects could swing between party joy and tough talk while delivering hit after hit. Tropicoqueta chose a deeper excavation: a return to Colombia, not as a backdrop but as a musical argument.

She reached for traditional sounds like folksy vallenato and for ballads that linger on heartbreak instead of racing past it. She also brought in Marco Antonio Solís, an ’80s legend, as if to underline that Latin pop memory has its own elders and its own grammar. “Songs like ‘Coleccionando Heridas’ and ‘Ese Hombre Es Malo’ remind me of the music that I used to listen to when I was in school,” she says. “I wanted this album to get to those feelings and that nostalgia.”

The risk, she learned, wasn’t theoretical. She remembers the early reactions arriving like a storm of voice notes and comment threads—“‘I love the album, it’s crazy.’ ‘I hate the album.’ ‘It’s so special.’ ‘The album is just garbage,’” she says. In the logic of streaming, where artists are pushed to repeat the last formula that worked, a detour toward tradition can look like a mistake. In Latin America, it can also look like courage: a refusal to flatten yourself for the market.

Once she stopped trying to translate the album’s purpose into something “acceptable,” she went back to what started it: the family parties, the novelty dances of La Hora Loca, the aunts who used to dance in the kitchen as if joy were a duty. The payoff wasn’t a cleaner narrative—it was a more human one. On TikTok, girls sang the songs with their grandmothers, and others learned choreography to “Latina Foreva,” not as a slogan but as a declaration.

“I went back to my memories of being on tour, people bringing their flags in every single concert, flags from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and me feeling that I was bringing a piece of home to every place I went,” she says. For fans raised between countries, that image hits hard: a stadium turned into a shared neighborhood, stitched together by cloth and chorus.

The Cost Of Visibility and The Next First

Behind the glow is work that doesn’t photograph as easily. Karol G has spoken about clawing her way through a male-dominated industry, and earlier this year she released a Netflix documentary in which she tearfully recounted being harassed at 16 by a former, much-older manager. “I can do 105 documentaries and a thousand interviews, and nobody is going to understand how hard it was to be a woman in a room with a lot of people with so much power that can make you feel really small,” she says.

That memory helps explain why her stardom now stretches beyond music. Through Con Cora, her foundation, she supports women and girls in Latin America from vulnerable or abusive backgrounds. In 2024, she rebuilt her childhood school in Medellín with the idea of creating a safer space—an investment that, in the region’s language, sounds like both protection and prophecy.

In 2026, she will become the first Latina to headline Coachella, another stage that can look like pure celebration from afar. She doesn’t describe it that way. “It’s heavy,” she admits. “But I feel like I’m ready.” In a hemisphere where visibility can invite both love and violence, readiness isn’t just confidence. It is the choice to stand in the light without letting the light erase the girl who first sang in Medellín.

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