J Balvin: ‘People See the Glory, but Not the Story’

C omb through any era of J Balvin’s decades-long career and you’ll find some impressive accolade or bit of Latin-music history sitting in plain sight: Start early on, when he’d just shot out of Medellín’s music scenes, there’s all the massive achievements he set for songs like 2015’s “Ginza”; he even scored a Guinness World Record for longest consecutive run at Number One on the U.S. Hot Latin Songs chart. 

His 2018 album, Vibras, which featured a young Rosalía when she was just breaking out of Spain, shattered streaming records in its first week, and included the global smash “Mi Gente,” the first fully Spanish-language song to reach Number One on Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart. He hit the Coachella main stage when he popped in for Beyoncé’s headlining set and followed that by teaming up with rising peer Bad Bunny, who joined him for the joint album Oasis.

Tons more has followed: His experimental album Colores, his personal turn Jose, his genre-bending Rayo. And yet Balvin, as he recounts all of those stories, is quick to point out that none of it was as easy or as straightforward as it looked. “It feels fast, but it wasn’t,” he admits. “It took me, I mean, 20 years.” And he’s weathered a lot: Mental health issues, controversies, feuds. But one of Balvin’s strengths has been his staying power — and his ability to build a career that’s been focused on longevity.

This year, Balvin released Omerta, his joint album with Colombian newcomer Ryan Castro. The two of them had a whirlwind couple of months, stopping by the Coachella stage to play with Karol G and hitting the World Cup opening ceremony for a headline-making performance. And he’s still going; In a wide-ranging conversation held as part of Rolling Stone’s Residency at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Balvin took us through all of the highs and lows of his career and explained just how he’s made it this far. He took us through his time grinding in the U.S., including working undocumented, his biggest breakthroughs, and his favorite collaborations. He’s not ready to stop any time soon — but he’s taking the time to enjoy the ride these days.

A little bird told us that you just got back from Europe, and that you were celebrating a birthday.Yeah, it’s my birthday.

Happy birthday!Thank you so much. Thank you.

Tell us what you did and how you celebrated.I celebrated with my family, you know — I love to gather with all my friends and celebrate all the blessings, that I’m healthy, that I am 41 and I look 20 [laughs]. But, yeah, it was beautiful to be with all my friends and my family in Ibiza. I was doing a show with DJ Snake also, like two nights in Ibiza. So, we were there already … we made the party there. But it was May 7, my birthday, actually.

So, this was a late celebration.I was touring, and I’m like, “I have to celebrate my birthday no matter what, so I waited a whole month.”

Since we’re talking about your birthday and a new year and a new beginning, I want to take this moment to look back at your career. And I want to start with you growing up in Medellín. Tell me a little bit about your childhood and what Baby Balvin was like.Ooh, a headache. My mom says that I used to cry a lot. But, no, it was beautiful. I grew up in Medellín. I grew up middle class. My parents are still together. My mom is always my best friend. She’s my guide. I still call her every time before a show for the blessings. To me, she’s the one who made me believe that I can, you know, that I can make it. And my dad is a super-hard worker, and [I have] an amazing sister that I love. So it’s basically like a regular family, quote marks, you know, from Medelliín, Colombia, a stable family, thank God. And I was always really curious, I was always asking myself. Why? Why, why, why? And I’m still doing that every day. Related Content Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker? Drake Appears on Karol G’s New Album. Let’s Look at His Past Latin Music Collaborations Jay-Z’s New Verse on a Beyoncé Outtake, Plus Karol G and More Songs You Need to Know This Week The Rise and Fall of the QAnon Queen of Canada

What was your entry point into music? Was your family musical?We had some people in the family that were poets. And my mom, she plays accordion. Super random, but we got vallenato in Colombia, so she knows how to play that. What other countries play that? Like in Switzerland or Sweden? The Dominican Republic has an accordion? That’s crazy. That’s so crazy.

Where do you think the bug came from?That’s a good question. I think just the fact that I grew up with my dad listening to salsa all the time, and listening to baladas, my mom listening to Ricardo Arjona, a lot of Juan Gabriel and Ana Gabriel. I was listening to these guys, and I was like, “This is really good.” I liked it, but then when I started listening to rock, I started listening to Nirvana. I started playing guitar to make their covers, and then I fell in love with Metallica, and then I started doing more covers where I was the guitarist of the group. And then I came to New York once, and I deeply fell in love with the hip-hop culture. And then, I left rock [laughs].

No, but no. I love rock. I’m still listening to rock music. But when I came to New York, this city opened my mind to be like, “Oh, wow, this culture is cool.” The different types of rap, breakdancing, graffiti, like, the whole culture in general caught my attention … also, the business side of rappers doing brands and stuff like that. So I was like, “Oh, I love this.”

I want to get to New York because I know that you have a long love of the city, but actually, as your first entry point into the U.S., you went to Oklahoma for a while as an exchange student.Super random.

I want to know what your first impressions of the U.S. were, based on getting there first.You see my face? Wow. I was doing this thing of being an exchange student. It was like a lottery: You put your hand there, you get the paper, and it says Atoka, Oklahoma. And I’m like, “What in the world is this?” I just want to be a little polite. At that time, the internet was just kind of blowing up, so we didn’t have google to search “How’s Oklahoma and Atoka?” And it was funny because when … I got there I was in the middle of a forest, in the middle of nowhere, with coyotes and big bears and all this crazy stuff. And I used to live in a house where the biggest train passed by at six in the morning every day. I didn’t know the first night that I slept there, and I thought it was a huge earthquake. I was like, “What is this?” And it was the train. And then they took me for the first time to the high school. And they had something really weird that I hadn’t even seen when I was in Colombia. They had a basketball donkey game.

What is it?They were on donkeys, throwing the ball. I’m like, “Wait, I don’t even see this in Colombia.” I was expecting to see kind of like New York, and then it was this town. I think this town has, I don’t know, 5,000 people max. You can google it. It’s called Atoca. I went, for the first time, to high school there. And I remember that I went to the lunchroom. I sat down, and immediately all the people left, and they left me alone. And that’s when you realize that the racism and all this stuff, it was true. And it was really weird to me to feel that, because I never felt that before. But it gave me a lot of strength too, and also to understand how different the world can be.

You did eventually make it to New York, and —My mom and my family always told me to be nice and to serve people and help them. As a good Latina mom, she’s like, “Jose, if the lady wants to clean something, just go ahead and help her.” So I started helping this lady a lot, and I think she liked that. I was helping her a lot, showing a lot of love. I think they were super cold there to express themselves. She started really having a lot of love for me. And one day I went to school — and I started using Messenger at that time — and she’s like, “No, you cannot use Messenger because you speak in Spanish with your friends, or you’re going to forget English.” I’m like, “I don’t even speak English anyways” [laughs].