Backed by the enormous success of ‘If I had met you before’, one more in his long list of macrohits, Karol G has published an album that looks in the classics. On the cover of ‘tropicoqueta’, Carolina Giraldo poses stretched in three congas, evoking the roofs of the sauce. And the starting track is inspired by that genre and closes an extensive work of musical historiography, in which Karol G reviews all or almost all the styles of Latin music that has grown up listening.
Karol explained that he was clear about the concept of the album before starting to write it back in August 2023. “It was not about looking further, but about looking more inside … more inside me, who I am really, of the things I like and of everything that represents me.” In ‘Tropicqueta’, Karol returns “to the songs with which I grew up listening to the sounds that made me fall in love with music.” He says it is the album that “he has always dreamed of doing.”
‘Tropicoqueta’ takes place as a compilation of successes or as a catalog of genres of Latin music. There is reggaeton in ‘Latin Foreva’, but also bolero in ‘Ivonny Bonita’, merengue in ‘Papasito’ or of course ‘if I had met you before’, Funk Braziliro in ‘Training Bandid
But the great curiosity of ‘tropicoqueta’ is not his collaboration with Manu Chao, which sounds exactly Manu Chao, nor that ‘song 13’ that Karol has decided not starting despite the fact that it is known that it is an old song called ‘Rosa summer’ that has the collaboration of Feid, his partner. The surprise of ‘Tropicqueta’ is ‘when I die forgot’, which adapts to the cumbia the melody of ‘Careless Whisper’, the success of George Michael of 1984.
It is not a sample that uses ‘When I die I forget you’, but an interpolation that moves the ‘Careless Whisper’ hook to a Colombian bagpipe melody that seems like a theme of Selena Quintanilla. In this way, Karol G Deletes the boundaries between Latin and Anglo -Saxon music.
How do you compare ‘tropicoqueta’ with which it is being the album of the year, Latin or not, ‘should I throw more photos’ of Bad Bunny? ‘Tropicqueta’ seems more like a musical nostalgia exercise than innovative curiosity. However, each song “tells a story” – as Karol has declared – and has its own personality. Here there are potential hits to Machete. What will be the next?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yu_0pfnhci
