“A mamacita since she was 14,” the song says in Spanish, with a chorus that repeats: “And even though that little baby has an owner, she goes out whenever she wants.”
These lyrics from a recent reggaeton hit have set off a firestorm after eight of Colombia’s biggest artists banded together and released the song this month. The track, which includes global superstars Karol G, J Balvin and Maluma, is called “+57,” a reference to Colombia’s country telephone code.
Commercially, the song was a hit. It has been streamed more than 35 million times worldwide, and immediately shot up to the top spot on Spotify in Colombia, where it remains.
But it has also drawn outrage over lyrics that many Colombians say sexualize children, setting off a fierce debate between those who say the song reinforces negative stereotypes about Colombia and those who say the genre is being unfairly attacked.
Many music experts say “+57” received more attention than most reggaeton songs because of the collection of prominent artists involved and because it was branded as if it represented Colombian culture.
Over the past two decades, Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, has emerged as a center of reggaeton, a genre with dance-hall and hip-hop elements that was born in Panama and popularized by Puerto Rican artists.
At the same time, Medellín has also become known as a hub for drugs, partying and sex tourism, a reputation that many Colombians say reggaeton lyrics help reinforce.
In the song, “+57,” a woman hides from her boyfriend the fact that she is partying until the early hours of the morning — not an unusual subject matter for the genre.
But it is the words that refer to the woman as attractive “since she was 14” that have provoked the most indignation. References to drugs and explicit remarks about women’s bodies in the song have also upset many Colombians.
The country’s culture minister, Juan David Correa, in an interview, called the song “banal, childish” and “inconsequential,” and said it perpetuated the idea that Colombia is “a poor, precarious country, where we can treat women as persons of lesser value and sell a city as a big open-air brothel.”
The director of the country’s child welfare agency, in a video on X, said “the song reveals a pattern of crime” of sex trafficking that puts children at risk. Lawmakers have proposed a bill punishing artists who promote explicit lyrics and have signed a petition asking Karol G to take down the song from digital platforms.
Even President Gustavo Petro weighed in, writing, “In every artistic genre there is art but also ignorance.”
Many criticized Karol G in particular, one of the few prominent female reggaeton artists who through her sex-positive lyrics has become a symbol of women’s empowerment and sexual liberation.
Her smash hit “Bichota” repurposed a Puerto Rican term for a drug kingpin — “bichote” — to mean, according to her reinterpretation, a “boss bitch.”
She has also founded a women’s empowerment organization that provides scholarships to “women in vulnerable situations,” including those who have served time in prison and teenage mothers.
Within days of the release of “+57,” the lyrics were changed, without any explanation given, to “since she was 18,” and Karol G had apologized on Instagram.
She wrote that the lyrics “were taken out of context,” but added: “I take responsibility and I realize that I still have a lot to learn. I feel very affected and I apologize from my heart.”
Other artists on the track, including J Balvin, Blessd and Ryan Castro, however, have stood by the song.
“If you don’t like the song,” said the singer-songwriter Blessd in one Instagram video, “don’t listen to it.”
Reggaeton has been a polarizing musical style since it first took off in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, said Christopher Tibble, a Colombian journalist who has researched the genre’s history.
The songs often describe the social conditions of the marginalized communities the genre emerged from and their political critiques and sexually explicit lyrics have often angered the authorities. The Puerto Rican National Guard even raided music stores to seize records for violating obscenity laws in the 1990s, when reggaeton was still largely underground.
The backlash served mostly to make the genre more popular, helping to spread its appeal across Latin America. As it flourished in Medellín, it became “a little whiter, a little softer, a little more pop,” Mr. Tibble said, while still paying homage to its “more street, more urban, rougher origins.”
Reggaeton songs have, perhaps not surprisingly, spurred controversy in the past.
A 2016 Maluma song about being in love with “four babies” who “always give me what I want” triggered an online petition to remove the song from digital platforms. In 2021, a J Balvin music video that featured Black actors performing as dogs on leashes prompted condemnation from Colombia’s vice president.
But reggaeton’s defenders say a double standard is being applied.
Many more traditional genres, they say, also feature misogynist lyrics but have not come under fire. Diomedes Díaz, known as “the king of vallenato,” a popular Colombian folk music genre, sings in one song about falling in love with a “young girl” and pursuing “females of 20, 15 and 14.”
“But don’t let her be jealous and don’t let her be bold,” he adds, instead favoring a woman “who knows how to iron a shirt.”
Alex Sánchez, who has worked in the reggaeton music industry for 20 years and has produced music videos for several performers on the track, said he listened to the song before it was released and did not think it would generate any controversy.
“I thought it was a normal reggaeton song,” he said. The backlash, he added, reflects a lack of “awareness of what we are giving to the people, to the youth, to the country.”
Nonetheless, he said, the reaction to the song could serve a useful purpose as a “wake-up call” when it comes to writing reggaeton lyrics.
While a healthy debate about misogynistic lyrics across all musical genres is necessary, the fury over one particular song stems from a disdain for reggaeton in general, said Pablito Wilson, the author of “Reggaeton: A Latin Revolution.”
“People who hate it with all their souls believe that this is their great moment of glory to destroy reggaeton,” Mr. Wilson said.
There is a long history, he said, of moral panic about popular music.
“Madonna was super controversial when she came out and nowadays nobody cares,” Mr. Wilson said.
Andrea Sañudo, 36, who works at a logistics company in Medellín, said she had been listening to reggaeton for years. The music, she said, “goes through you” and brings “an enjoyment and relish of my body, of my sensuality.”
“It is part of me,” she added. “All the important moments of my life are marked by a reggaeton song.”
As a Black woman and former social worker in poor neighborhoods, she said she takes issues of exploitation and violence seriously, but is skeptical of the criticism of this song.
“This generalized indignation on the part of certain intellectual sectors is not genuine, it is hypocritical,” she said. “I worked for 12 years in the territory, and I never saw the faces of any of these people in the street with me.”
Reggaeton, she believes, is central to Medellín’s culture.
“Reggaeton is part of our narrative, and we have to be more responsible and ask ourselves what we want reggaeton to say about us,” Ms. Sañudo said. “But that cannot go through this moralistic classist bias, of telling the other everything you listen to is bad.”
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