Karol G’s No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto + Becky G's Baraja Bendita (with Isabella Gomez Sarmiento) (Patreon preview)

Hey y'all, DJ Louie here just dropping a preview of this week's pot pantheon All Access episode. If you enjoy this snippet and you wanna hear the rest of this episode, plus weekly bonus episodes of this podcast, you can subscribe at patreon.com/potpantheon or click the link in the show notes of this episode. If you're considering subscribing to potpantheon All Access and you use Apple's App Store on your mobile device, we recommend not subscribing to potpantheon All Access using the Patreon app on your phone, where Apple is now charging unnecessary fees for new subscribers. Instead, go to patreon.com/potpantheon on your desktop to subscribe, you will still have access to all of the features of Patreon, including listening to our bonus episodes on your Apple Podcast app. We wish we had more control over this, but sadly we don't, so that's a recommendation to save you a couple bucks. You can also of course subscribe for the audio only, directly here in the Apple Podcast app. Enjoy this preview. (baby crying) Welcome back to potpantheon All Access. The podcast where we do even more over analyzing of your favorite pop stars and do other stuff too. I have a special returning guest here with me. It is Isabella Gomez-Darmyento, a reporter at NPR Music. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a big exciting August for our Latin pop girls. We decided to do a double feature today, the two G's, Becky G and Carol G. Last night I was off making with you. I called my mother to help me with pronunciation of some Spanish words, and she was giving my niece a bath, and my niece is a fan of Carol G. And she asked me, "Are Carol G and Becky G sisters?" And I said, "No sweetie, but they are friends." We have different G's. One is actually Gomez, but the other is Arraldo. These two women are friends. They were just together on stage at Coachella. I don't know necessarily that their music always has a lot to do with one another, but certainly sometimes it does. At any rate, we're gonna draw some connections here. Tell me about these two women for you and how you have covered them or listened to them, where your fandom lies, where your professionalization lies. Yeah, I have a lot of admiration for both of them. Becky G, for like over a decade, going all the way back to shower from 2014, has been in the pop Latin pop sort of pop culture realm in a number of ways, and has taken a lot of interesting turns over the last decade. She actually started out as a kid as a Selena impersonator, which is one of my favorite fun facts about her. She was a power ranger at one point. Like she's just kind of done everything. She's done the regional Mexican thing. She's done English language pop, English language rap. Then, you know, I think around the 20, like the mid-2010s, like especially around like 2016, 2017, 2018, she got really into sort of the regga don scene. Or do I know, she was one of the women that Daddy Yankee was really sort of bringing up with him. She was on some of his songs. She had the track "Majorites" with a feature from "Then Unknown Bad Bunny," which was one of the first times I remember really hearing him on like, you know, like a song that would play on the radio because at that time, I think Becky G was a lot more popular than him. So she's someone who's had a really interesting sort of unpredictable trajectory. Carol G, I think, has been more of a consistent. She's been in this sort of regga don Latin pop fields. I think her 2023 Manana Serra bonito was sort of the big breakout moment for her. And then, yeah, she had her big sort of magnum opus with Tropico Queta, which was sort of a bigger concept album. Carol is always more focused and sort of exploring regga don Latin pop and on the last album sort of Latin folklore. Whereas I think Becky, as someone who grew up in the US, has a little bit more of that, like, bicultural identity and explores that a bit more in her music. Yeah, and Carol G has taken on superstar status. She has a new album she actually announced in my city on stage during her stadium tour. This came out on August 7th. This is Nome Ara Piento de Santerre Tanto. It's not great. Big double R word in the middle doesn't make it an easier. Big double R word, yes. Columbia and superstar, the title here translates in English roughly to, I don't regret feeling so much the arrival of this album, something of a surprise. One of these songs had been premiered during Coachella in the spring, but this album was announced and then dropped pretty quickly. Almost every song here co-written and co-produced by Carol, production credit, some of her longtime collaborators, Ovee on the drums, Taney, this prolific Puerto Rican producer, best known in the States, probably first work with Bad Bunny, also Pedro Estadillo, who worked with Selena, we will get into that particular song because it is a real stitching together of some pop music history as well. Her last album only about a year ago and she's made a bit of a sonic pivot with this. The last I checked, this album was projected to debut at number eight here in the States with about 50,000 units in its first week, I always say here that 45,000 units first week is main pop girl numbers. So this is firmly in the main pop girl conversation. Carol typically is somebody who does really, really big streaming numbers and a little bit less on the physical sales, which is really how the pop girls, the vinyl variants and all of that, if she gets into that game and the team starts teaming on the physical sales, I think that she can push a lot because the fandom is really massive to be able to do a stadium tour. Almost no one is able to do a stadium tour in the pop game, like that's very, very hard. That is the tippy top of current startup. Could you help situate us where do you see Carol G within the different worlds that she exists in? Both in the United States and also globally as a popster outside of that bubble? - I would honestly say Carol G is the main pop girl in Latin pop. She's kind of, I think, the successor to what someone like Shakira has historically been and obviously Shakira is still very active. Shakira is kind of on another level of pop royalty at this point. But I think Carol G is sort of the it girl of the moment. I think the only thing that would rival that is maybe Rosalia, but I think Rosalia is much more of like an art pop girl and a tour and a very different sense than Carol. But yeah, so Carol, obviously huge in Colombia, huge across all of Latin America. And I think Carol was the first Latina artist to ever headline Coachella. And I think that really helped sort of cement that superstar status in the US as well. Like she's not just a big Latin American international star. She has also become a very big deal here and is starting to sort of get her flowers here in the US as well. - Yeah, I think the Coachella was a big moment as well for Anglos in the United States and elsewhere certainly with the streams being able to see the scale of production and the way that she does pop spectacular. The other paratex here that we should mention is that this is a breakup album. Carol was in a relationship with a Colombian producer and performer fade who our listeners will know from the new Madonna record. He is on the song Read My Lips. He previously actually opened for Carol. Then they collaborated, then they started dating. There was a long sort of will they won't they. I was looking through a relationship timeline and there was a real period where people were gossiping about it and I think they tried to keep it public but her start I'm certainly was so big that that became incredibly difficult. But she split from him and then in January went out to Hawaii and was in a lot of isolation. There is a great L profile of Carol. There documents a lot of this and she did hiking and she created this sort of breakup record. Let's do a bit of a gut check. How do you feel about this record? What are your top lines on it? - It's growing on me. I spent the weekend listening to it. I think part of what's difficult about this album is it's such a pivot from Tropico Queta which was this kind of sweeping and themic concept album about Latin American showgirls historically and sort of literally traveling around the different rhythms of the continent. Whereas this is a much more quiet sort of intimate, sad girl I almost it's like emo coqueta album. But in a way I kind of respect that. I think that this feels like an album that she really made because it was where she was emotionally and she needed the music to sort of work through this very unintentionally, maybe intentionally, public split from someone who was also very famous and who was very much a part of her public image. So yeah, I think it's grown on me. I think there are moments where it gets really slow and it feels a little monotone. But there are some highlights for sure. I think Carol is someone who has always been very good at singing about heartbreak and sort of turning it into a positive thing. Like, you know, thinking about her Santusa with Nicki Minaj from right before the pandemic. Manana Serra bonito, which was all about a breakup but with this sort of like optimistic sheen on it. I think this album, "No Marra Pientues en Tirtanto" is a lot more of like Carol wallowing in her feels. And it's kind of refreshing to see her go there. Although I think there are moments where it feels like it's lagging a little bit. - Yeah, I was watching a bit of the Coachella performance over the weekend and seeing the visuals, I think that it's a really interesting study in contrast and speaks to what you're saying. So there was all of these vivid colors, oranges and yellows and reds and greens. This time if you look at the cover of this record, it's just this hazy blue. It's still very emotive. There's still a lot of emotion here, but she's playing with it much, much, much more limited palette. and. And that bears out in the music itself as well. There are a lot of slower songs on this record, and it is a very emo, is sort of the right word for it, being an incredibly emotional record. I think in many places it's quite beautiful, but it is not necessarily what we expect from her. And I got to thinking sort of about Kylie Minogue and possible princess and pop albums where a diva takes a turn and asks her audience to come along. And the surprise release I think plays into that as well. This feels to me like a project that is for the hardcore fans. It is for her specific audience. I don't know that these songs are necessarily going to travel really far outside of her core audience, but I think she needed to write sort of this letter about how she was feeling to her core fans. Does that make sense to you? That's 100% how I interpret it as well. And I think that that's why it's growing on me. That was just a preview. If you want to hear the rest of that episode, plus weekly bonus episodes of this show, you can subscribe at patreon.com/potpantion. Click the link in the show notes of this episode, or subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app.