J Balvin can't be located. Not right now, anyway. “We think he's in the mountains, but we're not sure,” the Colombian singer's publicist tells me apologetically over the phone.
I'm not entirely certain, when he says this, which mountains we could be talking about. Or which continent, even. Balvin was just in the Middle East. And right before that, we'd just missed each other when he touched down in North America. But our planet is a big place, and if the pace of the previous nine months is any indication (he'd circled the globe on several occasions as part of a massive tour), the guy could be literally anywhere.
He'd been bouncing through festivals in places like Morocco, Mexico, and the Netherlands; he'd been boomeranging across the U.S., joining Bad Bunny, with whom he released an album in the summer. He had posted up for a residency in Ibiza and headlined at Lollapalooza (a first for a Latino artist). And he'd captured all of it for his 35 million followers on Instagram, curating a feed that's a kind of collage of frenetic grandiosity—a sort of document that could, should it be properly preserved for posterity, someday grant historians a glimpse into the life of a 21st-century global megastar. Like ancient cave drawings, but with private jets and shots alongside Scooter Braun and Kylie Jenner.
When his publicist finally locates him, Balvin is ensconced in conditions way more quotidian than I pictured. The 34-year-old is at home on the outskirts of Medellín, where he occasionally has spotty phone reception—an inconvenience that strikes me as far too humdrum for one of the world's biggest artists to endure. He tells me that he's been here unwinding, seeing family, exercising, bonding with his niece, and enjoying time at his house, a place he calls “a temple, where Jose can be found and where Jose connects.” It's a remark that sounds like the yogi-style captions often appended to his social media posts.
Here at home, Balvin says, he's taken an intentional approach to ensuring that the place remains largely free of reminders of his professional duties and aspirations, free of clues that he's the guy who's presently trying to dismantle the confines of Spanish-language music and reorder the global pop galaxy. “There are no Latin albums, no Grammys, no Billboards, none of that—all of that is stuff my mom has,” he tells me. “If anyone were ever to come here and enter the house, you would never know it belongs to an artist or to J Balvin. There are no traces of music here.”
What the house does seem to offer is space and distance, particularly after a period of nonstop projects and collaborations with the likes of Selena Gomez, Sean Paul, the Black Eyed Peas, and Rosalía. Oasis, his 2019 album with Bad Bunny, cracked the top 10 on the Billboard 200 and bonded Balvin to the Puerto Rican star—an artist who in some ways reflects a younger, more radical version of the aesthetic that Balvin embodied when he jumped out of his local Colombian scene about six years ago. “I was, like, the only crazy one, the only one with colors and these different things, and then he came along and I formed an interesting balance with him,” Balvin says of Bad Bunny, with whom he expects he'll work again. “In the future, it could be that there's an Oasis II, you know? It'd be no problem. We're really connected, and there's a lot of respect there.”
Meantime, Balvin is prepping for his own pivotal next chapter, a new album, called Colores, that drops in March and that represents a kind of creative leap. On the surface, the project appears almost startlingly simple: Each song is named for a different color. But the premise fits squarely with Balvin's larger mission to tear down language barriers in music. Titling songs is a part of that—of course, delivering giant, universal hits that work across borders is the real trick Balvin is trying to master.
Each song also comes with a Colin Tilley-directed video that uses the color to explore a concept, sound, and story, aimed at making the album unfold like a sensory-exploding buffet that might give you synesthesia. “There's a saying, ‘Para los gustos, los colores,’ ” Balvin explains. Roughly translated, it means “for every taste, there's a color,” and the idea allows Balvin and his longtime producer, Alejandro Ramirez, a.k.a. Sky Rompiendo, to play with versatility, testing a new approach for every track. Sky Rompiendo actually sings on one of the tracks—a first for the producer who’s often seen as the behind-the-scenes architect of the Medellin sound. But Balvin is trying to dole out other album details carefully. “I’m not like, ‘The album is coming, the album is coming, the album is coming’.... I don’t want to hype it,” he says, adding later, “When the album comes out, let it be a surprise for people with the whole concept.”
Still, he's hell-bent on using his influence as a pop star to take big creative swings. His close friend the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami designed the album artwork, and those who buy physical copies of Colores will receive a small print in their CD jewel case. In this way, the broader project ties together Balvin's interest in what he calls “all aesthetic things.” His intentions are decidedly multimedia. “Beyond what I am as J Balvin, I'm representing a culture, you know? I want for us Latinos to be seen as we should be,” he says, “respected for a cool, different aesthetic, for interventions in fashion, in art, in music, in social life, in humanitarian issues, spirituality.”
His aspirations are lofty, and Balvin is constantly trying to level up. Fabio Acosta, his manager since 2014, tells me that the singer carries around a notebook into which he's frequently scribbling, adding to an infinite list of goals. And when he imagines what's possible, Balvin has a unique opportunity for optimism: There's no existing blueprint for a Latin artist achieving full global stardom by singing exclusively in Spanish. And because nobody before him has mapped the outer limits of what Balvin—and artists like him—can be, Balvin figures he can shoot as far and high as he wants. Acosta put this into some perspective for me when I asked him who Balvin sees as a kind of career model. “I don't think there's an example,” Acosta says, “because what he's trying to do is have his music, sung entirely in Spanish, reach every corner of the globe. There might be songs that have been popular on an international level, but not careers.”
But there are contradictions inherent in what Balvin is up to, and a quandary his career presents is how to chase popularity on a planetary scale while pushing art forward in progressive ways. Balvin prides himself on taking sonic risks. As the new album shows, he wants to experiment with production and with sound. Still, his music features softer edges, coming as it does from the slicker, poppier traditions of the Medellín scene. To critics who compare his songs to the more revolutionary reggaeton originally produced in Afro-Latin communities, Balvin's efforts can still feel too palatable, too innocuous, too moderate. And his message of constant positivity elides controversy in a way that has frustrated some fans.
Following protests against the Colombian government that were met with police violence, Balvin took the stage in Medellín and urged tolerance and love, adding that “I am neither left nor right.” It exasperated many people, who also felt he'd waited too long to weigh in on the unrest, but he says he has no qualms about the way he's approached such issues. “My conscience is very clear as a citizen, and I know what I've done,” he says. “Having a clear conscience is the best thing you can do for your own peace of mind.”
“Peace of mind” is a phrase that comes up often in our conversation. At this point in his career, Balvin says, he wants to prioritize his health above anything else. Careening into uncharted musical territory sounds impressive, sure, but it can be exhausting, and he says he's employing self-care habits intended to prevent burnout while also helping him to keep his occasional struggles with depression and anxiety at bay. “That subject is taboo, and few people have the balls to talk about it and accept it and say, ‘This is a reality, and it happens to me,’ ” he explains. “Artists are given this level of godliness, as if nothing happens to them and they're outside of good and bad, and it's not like that.” Balvin has tried to open up that dialogue with his fans on social media. “That was kind of like my homework, to humanize [it] and say, ‘I’m like you, and yes, I have all of these blessings, but I also have bad moments and you have to find professional help and psychiatric help.’”
Part of the calculus includes protecting himself and his personal life. “To tell the truth, I don’t like talking too much about my partner, my girlfriend, what I have. I came into this world to make good music and inspire, and I also have to leave something for me, no? For Jose.” He says he's overcome dark moments with psychiatric help, meditation, and exercise, and even when things get hectic, he won't forgo taking time off for his health. “My well-being isn't negotiable.”
Which is why he's thankful to be back home in Medellín, where stardom feels distant and music hardly exists. In the days ahead, maybe he can lose himself in the mountains. Maybe the phone reception will be blissfully unreliable. He'll take it easy, if he can. Because before he knows it, Jose will be due back on a plane—and J Balvin will be due back on a stage.
Julyssa Lopez wrote about the pop-star aspirations of Maluma in the December/January 2020 issue of GQ.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2020 issue with the title “The J Stands for Jose.”
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Arnaud Pyvka
Styled by Matthew HensonGrooming by Barry White for barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Tailoring by Christy Rilling Tailors
Set design by Dorothée Baussan for MHS Artists
Production by That One Production
Special thanks to Gramercy Park Hotel
