Sure, in the digital age, there are ways to quantify the fame of Colombian pop singer Maluma: He has 47 million followers on Instagram, for instance. (Harry Styles has 24 million; John Legend has 11 million.) And on YouTube, his videos have been viewed a cool 13 billion times. But his stardom—the pure global reach of it—still has a way of beguiling him.
The 25-year-old is telling me this while perched in a makeup chair in Toronto, where he’s in town for yet another sold-out show. A few days ago he was in New York City to play Madison Square Garden, when he stepped out of his hotel and found a throng waiting for him on the sidewalk. That part didn’t shock him; he’s gotten used to the crowds. But this particular group told him they’d flown in from China—a place Maluma didn’t even realize his music had reached. They had come just to see him.
“They were like, ‘We’re huge fans!’ ” Maluma recalls, “and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, you have a huge fan base in China.’ They were telling me, ‘You have to come. It’s a big deal. We came to New York for your show because you never come,’ ” Maluma remembers, seeming genuinely thankful for the heads-up about his rock-star status in the world’s most populous country. “I said, ‘Oh, fuck—sorry! I’m coming soon.’ ”
The resolution joined a lengthy to-do list. That night, onstage in New York, Maluma hinted at another grand new ambition when he brought out a secret guest: Jennifer Lopez, with whom he’ll star in his film debut, Marry Me, next year. He talks about Lopez breathlessly and says that “at the musical level, there’s been a big connection” between the two of them. And he says he’s thankful to her, of course, for handpicking him for his first shot at movies. In plenty of ways, the Hollywood role is a fitting brand extension for a star who’s built his reputation on suave charisma—and who’s sent three albums skyrocketing to No. 1 on the Billboard Top Latin Albums chart.
There’s a throwback quality to Maluma, who may have more in common with the hit-making pop idols of the early 2000s than with his contemporaries like Bad Bunny and J Balvin, artists known for their edginess and freaky-deaky experimentalism. Maluma’s sounds are more unabashedly commercial. And absurdly popular. His fourth release, 11:11, which came out this year, featured collaborations with Ricky Martin, Ty Dolla $ign, and most notable of all, Madonna. The pair also stunned the internet with the video for their song “Medellín,” an ode to Maluma’s hometown, which featured scenes of Madonna licking the young singer’s toes. “I don’t care,” Maluma says, laughing. “I think it’s stories like this you’ll take with you until you die—things I’ll tell my kids and my grandkids about.”
Leaning back in his chair, Maluma is wearing dark sunglasses, despite the fact that it’s early evening (and we’re inside). His tattoos curl out from beneath a black tank top, and he’s got on a pair of neon-orange pants borrowed from the set of a photo shoot—they were comfortable, so he kept them on. In person, he’s as striking as he appears on his neatly curated Instagram account; even the words coming out of his mouth are poised and pretty. “I’m a moral person. My life is my family,” he says at one point. Later, he calls himself a dreamer and says he practices gratitude every morning. “I don’t ask God for anything,” he offers. “I just thank him for the good and not-so-good experiences that end up being lessons.” It’s like a game of Mad Libs designed to make the universe swoon.
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He’s leaned into the charm since he first began as a singer, as a 17-year-old hamming it up for girls at local shows and quinceañeras. He originally had ambitions of becoming a professional soccer player, but he ended his sports run to pursue music. He jettisoned his given name—Juan Luis Londoño Arias—for the stage moniker Maluma in tribute, he has said, to his relatives (the name is an amalgamation of the first two letters of his mother’s, his father’s, and his sister’s names).
Quickly, the name spread across the country as Maluma released songs that became local hits. His mellow tone typified the most popular music coming out of Colombia in the mid-2010s—a lighter, more commercial version of reggaeton, the urban genre developed by black communities in Panama and Puerto Rico. Maluma emerged as a lovable tween heartthrob who could riff on pop and reggaeton, but by 2016 he was blending the trap and hip-hop sounds of the Latin pop-music scene—and cultivating an image as a sometimes risqué romantic. At times, the stylistic changes proved difficult for his fans. His feature "Cuatro Babys,” from the Trap Capos: Season 1 album—a song about a man who can’t choose between the four women—rattled listeners so much that one woman in Spain launched a Change.org petition, demanding the track be removed from digital platforms. Maluma continued on his provocative streak with “Felices Los 4,” an ode to a polyamorous affair.
In 2017, he infamously walked out of a Univision interview after he was asked about “Cuatro Babys.” But two years later, he’s not afraid to talk about his most controversial songs. “I liked them,” he says simply. “I didn’t do them because I had to. No one took me into the studio and said, ‘Yo, you have to record this.’ I was like, ‘I want to sing that. Fuck it. I’m not in love with four babies, but I want to say I’m in love with four babies, that sounds dope.’ ” Plus, the songs were massive commercial hits that set Maluma on his track toward global fame.
“I think people at the beginning were confused because they thought I was strictly a reggaeton artist, and my genre is the genre I do—it's salsa, it's reggaeton, it's hip hop, it's R&B, my genre is the genre of Maluma.. I admire and love all the reggaetoneros who have worked so hard in this, and I feel proud to be a part of their scene in a certain way, but I was never like, ‘I want to be like Don Omar or Wisin & Yandel.’ I wanted to figure out my own thing.” He’s achieved that, he explains, by looking at each project or album as distinct—a place where he can try out a different persona or take on a new role. He’s worked with everyone from Steve Aoki to Jason Derulo to Shakira, connecting with eclectic audiences everywhere. “I do all of these kinds of global things, but I also worry about feeding the urbano scene, because those were my fans who saw me grow up…. I try to work in all of that too, and the idea is to be big in all of the platforms.”
Of course, flitting between the pop and urban worlds is a harder sell for reggaeton purists and artists known for blade-sharp rhymes. In October, Bad Bunny tweeted a verse from the Puerto Rican artist Anuel AA, declaring, “Nunca flow Maluma, siempre REAL G.” Roughly translated, the sentiment describes having “real flow” and not “flow Maluma”—seemingly a dig at the Colombian artist’s radio-friendly delivery. But Maluma seems self-aware when it comes to the reaction that the softer musical style and the earnest-romantic persona can elicit. When he collaborated with J Balvin for the song “Qué Pena” in September, the two of them started the video by making fun of each other in the opening scenes. Balvin puckers his lips and blows kisses at himself in a mirror before reciting Maluma’s signature line: “Maluma, baby.”
The back-and-forth was surprising since rumors of a rivalry had trailed the two artists for so long. “I never felt anything bad toward him, but all the attention on the genre and people created this tension between us,” Maluma says of Balvin, noting that their backgrounds growing up in Medellín and performing pop-reggaeton made it easy for the industry to pit them against each other. Eventually, they talked things out. “I said to him, ‘Yo, bro, come on, I used to listen to your music when I was 14 years old. I used to go to quinceañeras, if you were performing there. I used to see you performing, I was your fan, cabrón.”
The supposed feud, in the end, seemed petty in the face of more existential industry quagmires that Maluma encountered. As his profile rose, he was pushed into following the footsteps of stars like Ricky Martin and Shakira and recording songs in English. He flew to LA and worked with producers in Los Angeles. Maluma is fluent in English, but he didn’t want to change the language in which he’d always sung. “They wanted me to be like the version of another American artist. But I’m not the version of anyone. I’m me and I’ve worked hard for people to know me for that, for my own essence, for me as an artist.” He says he recorded six or seven songs in English, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever release them. “I don’t feel that connected. Every time I sing in English, it feels like I’m reading,” he says with a sheepish smile.
His goal is straightforward. “I want to be recognized in the world as a Latino and as an artist from Colombia who sings in Spanish. I want to break barriers in Spanish with my language, with who I am, and with my essence. I think I don’t need to sing in English for people to like my music,” he explains, offering that he’s gotten better at tuning out the voices of others and following his own instincts. “If you listen to criticism, what’s going to happen is you’re going to lock yourself in a room because people are going to say, ‘No, make reggaeton. No, make trap. No, make romantic songs.’ If you listen to what they say, you’re going to stay at home and you’re never going to do anything.”
It’s on this topic of creative expression that Maluma’s voice takes on a more urgent tone. “When you think of big artists, big painters—do you think Fernando Botero, who’s one of the biggest in Colombia, do you think when people said, ‘Don’t paint with volume, don’t paint big people,’ he said, ‘Wow, okay, I’m not going to paint this because they’re telling me not to?’ If you don’t like it, go buy a skinny geisha painting. And that happens to me—I do what I like and if people don’t want to listen, there are millions of options on Spotify, millions of artists, but I have to be real about what I like.”
Another reason Maluma is less willing to compromise these days is practical: He’s realizing how valuable—and limited—his time now is. Touring constantly, he’s coming up with lyrics in hotels, in cars, and on his plane, which he bought to travel more comfortably. When I ask him how often he writes, he eyes his phone cautiously before eventually reaching over to grab it. “Right now, I was about to put down an idea that I just got on my phone, but I said no because I felt, like, [that would be] disrespectful [to] you,” he says, opening the Notes app.
Despite it all—the constant demands of work and travel and the pressures of booming popularity—Maluma insists he’s a laid-back family guy. “I’d rather stay home and listen to music and have good wine and talk about life,” he says. He tries to create a sense of home by bringing his family on the road with him, but balancing the growing demands can be challenging, he says, motioning with his chin toward an adjoining room. “My dad is over there,” he tells me, “but I’ve barely seen him.” Meanwhile, in Orlando, fans are already gearing up for the next packed show.
Julyssa Lopez has covered music, art, and culture for, among others, 'The Washington Post', 'The Guardian', and NPR. This is her first article for GQ.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2020 issue with the title “Maluma World.”
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs and set design by William Ukoh
Grooming by Barry White for barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Production by Rodeo Production
As a movie icon, a global pop icon, and an internet-melting fashion icon, nobody owned 2019 quite like Jennifer Lopez.
