Colombia’s finest — it’s Maluma, baby
Maluma is marooned on an island of rocks in the middle of the ocean. It’s an incandescent and sweltering summer day at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, a sprawling century-old estate that’s been turned into a tourist attraction. Here for today’s photo shoot, the Colombian artist has found privacy on the beat up remnants of a big stone dock, smashed to rubble by Hurricane Irma in 2017 but still accessible by a small bridge. He hobbles along the jagged terrain in oversized white fashion sneakers, a peacock in blue and pink silk Versace, his sleeves too long on his buff arms, his shorts too short on his thick thighs, his fingers and wrists and pecs covered in too many gold rings and bracelets and necklaces. The quiet doesn’t last long: word gets out that Maluma is around, a flock of fans gather at the dock’s entrance, and within minutes, there’s no way off this pile of crag without doling out selfies and smiles. That’s what happens when you’re the most beautiful man in pop music: even out to sea, you’re never far from pandemonium on the shore.
To be fair, this is Miami, the capital of Latin culture in the United States, and at 25 years old, Maluma, is the biggest heartthrob in town, a charismatic star with 45 million Instagram followers and billions of views on YouTube. He was born Juan Luis Londoño Arias (friends call him JL) and raised in Medellín, Colombia, but Miami is a hub for Latin stars like him, one of the key markets for the new wave of Latin music, called urbano. “You really feel Latin culture in America,” he’ll tell me later, taking respite from the Miami sun at a shaded table by the museum’s parking lot (even a museum security guard, there to keep the peace, interrupts to ask for a photo).
Ever since Puerto Rican artists Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee released “Despacito” in 2017, remixed by Justin Bieber and the most watched video in the history of YouTube, urbano has inspired a gold rush. It’s a loose terminology, comprising a nuanced gradient of genres that runs the gamut from the grittier Latin trap of Bad Bunny to the flamenco of Spanish artist Rosalia to the glossy musical blend of Maluma. But that year, the number of Spanish-language songs on the Billboard Hot 100 went from four to 19, and Latin music revenues in the US grew by almost 40 percent. Even legacy acts like Madonna (who grabbed Maluma for her newest album) and Beyoncé (who remixed J Balvin and Willy William’s “Mi Gente” in 2017) wanted in. Then there’s Cardi B, born to a Dominican father and Spanish and Trinidian mother in New York, who has flourished by straddling the worlds of English and Spanish. She’s had hits in both languages, and often flips between them on one track, like on the gorgeous “La Modelo” with Puerto Rican singer Ozuna.
The audience has been there — there are over 500 million people in the 20 countries that make up Latin America — but, thanks to streaming, urbano’s reach is less fettered and more global. “The power that artists have is big. The label can do a bunch of things with numbers, but let me distribute my music on social media,” Maluma says. There are still gatekeepers, and services like Spotify have their own agendas and artists to prioritize, but things have opened up enough that an artist from any country is available to anyone almost anywhere. And even though much of the English-language media establishment has been shamefully slow in picking up on urbano, Instagram allows figures like Maluma to tell their own stories. There are plenty of shirtless thirst traps on his account, sure, but he also lets fans into his jet-setting life in Latin America as a way to push his music; a recent clip finds him jumping off a boat into pristine ocean waters while singing along to his latest single, “11 PM.” “Everybody is paying attention to Latin culture,” he says. He notes that while Colombia has often been exoticized in American pop culture as a drug haven, he is now able to show, through his own perspective, a more aspirational and diverse side to Latin life. “They’re not talking about Pablo Escobar — they’re talking about Colombia as a country with amazing artists. That’s my role, to show the world how good Latin culture really is.”
The previous generation of Latin superstars like Ricky Martin and Shakira and Enrique Iglesias all, around the turn of the millenium, sung in English to conquer the crossover from the international to the American audience, mythologized for decades as the pinnacle of “making it.” But this new wave has felt no such obligation, proving that English is not the only language of globalized pop nor the barometer of success. Maluma sells out shows from here to Poland just fine, and in the States, the idea of the “crossover” is outdated. Demographics mean that in the US, he has nowhere he has to crossover to — his audience is right here. There are now close to 60 million Hispanic people here, a number higher than Spain’s. It’s been calculated that Latin music accounted for up to 10 percent of all album-listening on streaming in the US in 2018, more than country music.
****
Maluma is great at making music perfectly pitched for critical mass. While J Balvin and Bad Bunny are edgier, filtering the sound of contemporary American hip-hop through Latin rhythms, Maluma has taken a poppier route across his four albums since 2012, blending two styles he grew up loving: reggaetón, a brash Puerto Rican genre that emerged in the 1990s and incorporated Caribbean dancehall riddims, and soulful and jazzy salsa, the traditional, widespread style of 20th-century Latin music, popularized by 1960s icons like Celia Cruz and Héctor Lavoe. “I’m old fashioned. I love these old singers like Héctor Lavoe,” he says. “What I [always] want to make is a very pop romantic song.” Though everyone is a rapper-slash-singer or singer-slash-rapper in these genre-fluid times, Maluma leans on crooning, his voice rolling smoothly and lightly over his beats. His current single “11 PM,” from this May’s album 11:11, is truly polished pop.
His is a sound that’s easy to love, so much as to be embraced by Madonna, with whom he collaborated on her 2019 album Madame X. She put him front-and-center in its promotion, including in a video for the first single named for his — not her — hometown, “Medellín.” “I did the [2018] VMAs in New York, met her, and next week she called. I was like, Are you fucking kidding me?” He raps and sings in Spanish, and they performed the track together in a massive production at the Billboard Music Awards this year. He’s become a go-to for duets with pop juggernauts like Ricky Martin and the long-reigning Colombian queen of Latin music Shakira, with whom he has a number of popular duets. As Shakira told me, there’s something irresistible about him. “What’s so disarming is his excitement for everything — it’s contagious. I remember being in the studio, and even before we finished [2016 megahit] ‘Chantaje’, he couldn’t wait for the world to hear it,” Shakira says of their biggest song together. “He works hard, like me, but he never lets ambition get in the way of enjoying whatever he’s doing. And that makes you want to be around him.”
Madonna, ever the cultural empath, understood the other important part of his appeal — sex. In the “Medellín” video, they lounge in bed drinking champagne, she arches over his legs, sticks out her tongue, and licks his feet like a cat lapping milk. “She was like, Can I lick your toe?” he says with a laugh. “I was like, Fuck it, lick my toe! You’re Madonna. Do whatever you want.” It’s not surprising, as it’s something he’s stoked in his image and music. In many songs, he places himself as the object of a woman’s sexual fantasies, with lyrics about leaving mundane monogamy for a no-strings tryst with him. His first smash in 2017, “Felices Los 4,” with over a billion-and-a-half views on YouTube, is about a couple that openly cheats on each other, with Maluma promising that he doesn’t care if the girl comes or goes, as long as she’s having fun. Another song, “Amigos Con Derechos,” translates to “friends with benefits.” His massive track this summer “HP” — his 13th number one on the Billboard Latin Airplay chart — is about casual sex after a jerk dumps you. “I love writing about sensual things,” he says. “That’s enjoying life.”
The bold come-on in his music works in no small part because of how physically lovely he is. Right now in front of me, Maluma is wearing tight pants and a black military vest with no shirt, revealing his body beneath. His skin is bronzed from the summer and his hard work at the gym (which he documents shirtless on Instagram) has paid off: He’s broad; his tattooed arms beefier than they appear in photos. His bushy brown beard and pearly smile are offset by a head of hair dyed in creamy pink, which, in the back, blends into his roots to make a muted sherbet orange. There’s something welcoming, not intimidating, about his face, a softness around the eyes. And he knows it, showing off whenever he can, with a mischievous winking glint in his eye. He used to refer to himself as “Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy,” and that’s what he delivers, especially while touring the world. “In the show, I go center stage — I’m super close to the fans — and they start throwing panties and bras,” he says with a laugh. “Always when I finish, I have a mountain of bras and panties.”
At times, his magnetism can cause chaos. “I was at a concert and I got close to a fan and she pulled me so badly she ripped my shirt off. She hurt me,” he says. “But you understand that that’s love. They want you to be close.” Indeed, when fans have amassed around him at the Vizcaya, one grown woman says out loud, “I’m crushing hard.” I asked others in Miami why they love him. “Women and gay men are crazy about him,” says Patricia, 33, originally from Venezuela. “Who else occupies that place in music? Rap can be misogynist and alienating to women. Justin Bieber is too much of a baby. Ed Sheeran makes my body go numb.”
Her friend Vanessa, 34 and with two kids, agrees. “I already have a husband — I need a dirty boy,” she says. “He posts Instagrams in a towel or tanning by the pool; basically girl porn.” At a time when male sexuality is mostly in the news for terrible reasons — some lecherous titan who is horrible to women — Maluma is almost wholesome in his dirtiness. The dream of Maluma is like letting the libido ride a rollercoaster: it’s a brief jolt of electricity, but his sweet demeanor reminds you that you’ll get off the ride safe in the end, without real consequences. “It’s a fantasy for women to have this gorgeous man that you know you can’t trust but that you can’t resist,” Vanessa continues. “He has a sweet smile, and you can tell he would be fun. I want to perrear with him, an expression in reggaetón that means to dance dirty.”
Some of the hoopla has taken a toll: Maluma clearly enjoys being an object of desire, but has found that he has needed to seek sanity elsewhere. He doesn’t party like he used to, preferring wine with dinner to shots at the club, and the rigors of his career require tremendous discipline. “I wake up at 7am,” he says. “I eat clean.” He has been in a relationship for two years with model Natalia Barulich, who he met on the set of one of his videos, but his face really lights up when he discusses Colombia. There, he has a house with his own soccer field (as a teenager, he was so good that he could’ve gone professional if he hadn’t instead dedicated himself to music) and 14 horses, including the first one he purchased at 22, Hercules, who he spoils with good food. “I love nature. It keeps me grounded — horses are so powerful they can kill you. But they respect you. And they are loyal.”
He has remained close to his family. He got the name Maluma from combining the letters of his family’s names (his mom is Marlli, his father is Luis, and his sister is Manuela), and he wears a pendant with an old photo of his family embossed in candy pink around his neck on a chain of diamonds. Lately, he’s been seeing Maluma as a character separate from the man Juan Luis Londoño Arias, so as to find space for himself in a world that wants to eat up every part of him. “When I leave Colombia, I feel like, Okay, I’m going to play the role,” he says. “You play the role so you can have a beautiful life, but you know that this shit is not going to last. You can have all these material things but when you die, you’re not taking them with you. Nothing lasts forever.”
***
Fame has also clarified his mission: He surprises me when I ask him if he ever hopes to have hits in English. “A year ago, I went to LA and worked with the biggest producers in the industry. Scott Storch, Timbaland, Max Martin,” he says. “I felt pressure because they told me I had to record in English. I did all these songs and loved them but wasn’t feeling my essence. I decided that I was going to keep singing in Spanish.” It’s the wrong question, it turns out, because it contains the old fashioned bias that a direct appeal to English-language audiences is the holy grail. Although Maluma is fluent in English, he doesn’t see achievement that way. Whether Maluma lands the cover of American Rolling Stone or not (he hasn’t — yet), he is already one of the world’s biggest stars, an optimistic emblem of pop’s dissolving language barriers. Massive success in the Hispanic world isn’t niche success: It’s success. Period. “I want to break barriers with my language, to be known as a Latin artist,” he says. “I want to get as far as I can get.”
Even farther is possible. He’s signed on to an upcoming romantic comedy with his friend Jennifer Lopez called Marry Me. Though it’s his first film role, he says it’s been his goal since childhood to act, and he’s jumping in headfirst, not in a small part, but as the male lead — just as he likes it. “I had offers before to be on TV or not the main character, and I was like Yo, I’m going to wait for the right moment,” he says decisively. And then, if there’s any doubt left as to when that would be, he removes it before we have the chance to move on to the next topic. “This is the right moment.”