'Being a billionaire is so tacky!' Musical firebrand Lido Pimienta on exploitation, class struggle – and going 'Enya mode'

THE GUARDIAN ·

After beating Leonard Cohen to Canada’s biggest music prize and splicing dembow with classical, the cross-cultural artist is now confronting Colombia’s new president W hen I speak to the Colombian Canadian musician Lido Pimienta , it’s in the run-up to Colombia’s presidential election, and she is worried. One of the two remaining candidates, Abelardo de la Espriella , “is so rightwing he wants to open up our beautiful country to fracking and the influence of the US,” she says – and at one point in his campaign, De la Espriella said he wanted to “disembowel” the left . He later waved that away as a mere figure of speech, but Pimienta fears that leftwing artists like her “would be target number one” for a De la Espriella presidency. He ended up winning in a narrow victory that brought praise from Donald Trump and a promise of “a new era, a change of order”. Despite the potential risks, the singer-songwriter has never shied away from speaking her mind. Since the release of her breakthrough second album, 2016’s La Papessa – which beat Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, the last album released during his lifetime, to win Canada’s prestigious Polaris prize – 39-year-old Pimienta has made ebullient, genre-defying records that hiss with indignation at racism, colonialism, misogyny and music industry expectations. “People tell me I have the best voice but that I’m ruining my career by always singing about politics,” Pimienta says, rocking in a multicoloured hammock over a video call from her family home in northern Colombia . “What is the point of having a voice, though, if I can’t speak freely and resist how my country and our people are being exploited?” On 2025’s La Belleza , Pimienta took classical music to task with a suite of luscious orchestrations, dembow rhythm and requiem mass music that challenged record stores and the media to stop pigeonholing her in the “ world music ” section, while her new album, Caribenya, turns to the dancefloor. When she was growing up in the 1990s, Colombia was ruled by presidents including Ernesto Samper, who was investigated when his campaign was alleged to have taken donations from drug cartels (he was cleared of any wrongdoing), and César Gaviria, under whose administration the narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar was imprisoned in a jail built to his own specifications. “Rulers who didn’t care about human rights,” she says. “But in the face of that, we Colombians created beauty. We blast our music in our homes made out of cardboard and we find joy as our resistance. On every corner there is dancing and singing, and when I came to write Caribenya, I wanted to capture that same mood.” There was also another, altogether unexpected touchstone. “I’ve always admired the I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-none-of-you-ness of Enya ,” she says. The multimillion-selling Irish ambient-pop singer “lives in her castle, she got no kids, she pops out every decade with a soundtrack that makes her even more rich, and she doesn’t sell perfume or shoes. I think it’s really beautiful and aspirational: she’s just a nice Catholic lady who does no interviews or touring. And the whole point of Caribenya is like: what if Enya went to the Caribbean and partied with my Black and brown friends, what would happen? How can I create a record that goes Enya-mode and doesn’t care about trends or fashion, or that doesn’t care about how I look?” Growing up in the shadow of an ongoing civil war in the coastal northern Colombian city of Barranquilla with her mother, who has Indigenous Wayuu roots, Pimienta says her traumatic experiences as a minority are one reason why she began making music. “White Colombians are the majority and I was the exception at school, being a Black girl. Everyone would go on holiday to Miami and I would spend my holiday learning how to butcher a goat and dispose of the blood. I felt foreign in my own country,” she says. “I was bullied relentlessly – people cut my hair and wanted to study it under a microscope to understand why it was nappy [tightly curled]. The place I ended up feeling most free was in the DIY music scene, playing in punk and hardcore bands where we could be activists and resist racism and power.” But just as she was finding her voice in this alternative scene, Pimienta was forced to restart when she relocated to Canada in her late teens with her family, who moved to escape escalating gang-related violence in Colombia. In her new home of London, Ontario, she experienced yet more racism but also began to learn about the consequences of colonialism and capitalism for everyone. “People would tell me to go back to my country, but I also began to be empathetic towards the white community that had become so disenfranchised,” she says. “I started to see things from both sides, like how in the western world you think you have freedom but really you’re just free to buy things. In Canada, progress is big parking lots and AI facilities – but that’s destruction. Everyone wants to be a billionaire but I think being a billionaire is so tacky. I miss the days when wealthy people would build theatres!” That anti-establishment energy gets its fullest expression on Toxica, a highlight of Caribenya. Over a susurrating shaker beat, Pimienta laments the toxicity of a friendship informed by warped priorities rather than mutual care. “You are toxic / You always want more / No one else matters / Only you and your insecurities,” she sings in a plaintive falsetto. “It’s about my best friend in the industry telling me to stop talking politics and saying I won’t go far because I’m fat,” Pimienta says flatly. “But I don’t make music to be seen, I make music to feel, and I feel sorry that she’s been fed this information. I’m an artist, not an entertainer – I don’t want to rely on looks or appealing to the male gaze.” As an artist, Pimienta certainly follows her own rhythm: there was a five-year gap between La Belleza and her previous record, Miss Colombia, and now she is releasing two albums in as many years. Caribenya was written during the same period as the La Belleza sessions, and she sees it as the second side of a double album – the first half leaning into the cerebral and the second taking charge of the body. Instead of La Belleza’s 60-person orchestra, the new album was created on her laptop using Ableton software – “I made it in my kitchen, while taking my kids to school, or while baking something”, she says – and it is more earthy and rough-hewn than its predecessor, attuned to the tempos and rhythms most likely to inspire motion. She isn’t keen to follow a commercial schedule, much like her idol, Enya. “I’m a mum of three, and I want to sew tapestries and bake, and singing makes me happy, but that is not the making of a star,” she says. “My mission is to give beauty to the world but I’m always asking if it’s worth it. I don’t know if it’s possible to have a career in music now, unless you’re Beyoncé or Bad Bunny or you’re selling things. I’m contractually obligated to release music, but soon enough I won’t be, and then I can decide how I want to carry on.” Pimienta’s contract with her label, Anti-, expires after Caribenya. While she has no plans for future releases yet, audiences can catch her on tour, spreading the booty-shaking sound of Caribenya and its joyous resistance across the US and Europe. “We need to keep our culture and our languages alive, and this record is a small part of that,” she says. “I want people to play the songs so loud in their car; I want them to dance so hard, cry and laugh and get angry. Because we’re not mad enough.” Caribenya is released on 17 July via Anti-. Lido Pimienta’s tour runs from September to November

DYAX Investor Sentiment

Bullish (Long) 41% · Bearish (Short) 59%

348 participants

Related News

원문 보기 — THE GUARDIAN