In a recent summer week, the most popular video on YouTube was not from Taylor Swift or Lil Nas X, but from a cadre of international musicians leading a global tidal wave of Spanish-language music. “Con Altura,” by the Catalonian singer Rosalía, with J Balvin (a native of Medellín, Colombia) and El Guincho (from the Canary Islands), is now approaching half a billion views for its music video — it has another 155 million plays on Spotify — and as it topped the YouTube chart in late June, it led a crop of eight Spanish songs in its Top 10. (Watch how “Con Altura” was made in the video above.) This is the new order of things in the increasingly diverse, genre-melding, multilingual world of pop: Language is no longer a barrier, world rhythms mix and cohere, cross-cultural collaboration is common and hip-hop influence seeps in from all sides. In the case of “Con Altura,” Rosalía and the producers Pablo Díaz-Reixa (El Guincho) and Frank Dukes, a Canadian, entered a studio in Miami with the express mission of making a homage to old-school reggaeton, the resurgent Caribbean and Latin American rap style pioneered by artists like DJ Playero and Daddy Yankee.

Source: International New York Times July 08, 2019 09:00 UTC