Cover Story
It’s a Thursday afternoon at a studio in Miami, and Emilia is getting glammed up for a Billboard Español cover shoot. She’s wearing a baby-pink silky robe and striped slippers, and her equally silky, chocolatey brown hair is picked up in rollers as she navigates through her playlist for the perfect song to get ready. She skips through female anthems by Beyoncé, Shakira, Britney Spears, Nathy Peluso and Doechii before selecting Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music.” She sings along and dances to the beat slightly, not to mess up her wavy bucles and makeup.
“Before, to give myself confidence when I went on stage, I would tell myself: ‘You are Rihanna! You are Rihanna!’ But someone on my team recently told me: ‘Now you have to say to yourself, ‘You are Emilia! You are Emilia!’ And believe it,” she gushes.
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She is Emilia. And she’s on the verge of a global musical breakthrough as she prepares a 2025 tour across Spain, plans her first U.S. concerts in the U.S., and just recently made her debut at Brazil’s Carnival this past weekend.
In 2024, the Argentine artist earned her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard U.S. Latin Airplay and Regional Mexican Airplay charts with “Perdonarte ¿Para Qué?,” her collaboration with Los Ángeles Azules; she became the first Argentine act to be nominated for best pop vocal album at the Latin Grammy Awards with her sophomore set, .mp3; she was TikTok’s most-viewed and Spotify’s most-streamed artist in Argentina (the first female artist to do so); she sold out 10 shows at Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires in 10 hours — breaking the record previously held by Luis Miguel — and became the first Argentine female artist with four sold-out shows at the city’s Estadio Vélez, to name a few milestones.
Now, Emilia is making a serious bid for international expansion in 2025 that includes her first time at Brazil’s Carnival, where on Feb. 23 she performed “Bunda” with Luísa Sonza, her first track from an upcoming EP; a spring tour across Spain with three dates at Madrid’s Movistar Arena (formerly WiZink Center); and spending more time in Miami not only to be closer to her label, Sony Music Latin, and manager Walter Kolm, but to connect with artists and producers from different territories and develop her career further — a tried-and-true strategy that others have taken before her, including Karol G and Manuel Turizo.
“In Argentina, there are producers that I continue to work with and who are friends. I have everything there; it’s everything for me,” she says. “But I made the decision to come to Miami for a while to work and try new opportunities. I’ll always be returning home anyway. I can’t let that go. But I think what happens at the industry level here in Miami is very big. You come across new artists and producers all the time. And it’s good to experiment.”
Natalia Aguilera
Leaving the comfort of a home territory that sees you as a superstar has long been a challenge for Latin American artists. But thanks to an open-minded attitude, today, Emilia has positioned herself as a versatile pop act who can easily navigate from reggaetón to romantic ballads to cumbia to Brazilian funk and, most recently, vallenato alongside Silvestre Dangond on “Vestido Rojo.”
“She understood that she had to have her base in her home country first. She had to break into her country in every sense, in consumption, transcend that consumption in ticket sales, media visibility, visibility with brands,” says Esteban Geller, GM at Sony Music U.S. Latin. “First, she conquered her country, then the neighboring countries like Chile and Uruguay, and little by little setting foot in territories like Spain, Mexico and Colombia, while simultaneously building her story in the United States. She understood perfectly what her space was in the music scene and that what she did with Los Ángeles Azules and with Silvestre brought her closer to a more commercial space, which is also fantastic. The path has been natural.”
Emilia is already dolled up in a Y2K-inspired outfit for the photo shoot: denim mini skirt, bubblegum-pink zip-up hoodie, glitter stilettos and a fur cap that easily gives off Baby Phat clothing vibes. On her bottom eyelashes is a set of shining diamonds — eye accessories that are signature to her look. Doja Cat’s “Wet Vagina,” from her female-heavy playlist, plays in the background as she flirts with the camera with pure confidence and sensuality — something she’s worked on over time, striking that balance between sexy ingenue and likeable girl next door.
“I was always very outgoing, but I feel that today, I feel more confident with myself than ever. That took time, effort and therapy,” she says.
María Emilia Mernes Rueda, 28, was born in Nogoyá, Entre Ríos, a farming town about a five-hour drive from Buenos Aires. She’s the only child to a baker father and a cook mother. Her grandfather, a plumber but also the only musical reference in her family, gifted her a guitar when she was young so she could start taking music lessons. Growing up, her love for music expanded to uploading covers on Instagram and forming part of a local cumbia group with friends. It was a passion she never believed could go beyond a hobby.
“I thought that dreaming of being an artist, of stepping on stage and being in that world, was impossible. Super far away,” she says. “I never thought I would be able to become a professional in this and be a singer. I saw it as impossible because of where I was from. The opportunities are usually in Buenos Aires, where the casting and music producers are.”
Natalia Aguilera
But her life took a radical turn when the videos of herself playing the guitar and singing covers on social media caught the attention of Uruguayan band Rombai. At the time, the cumbia-pop group gained popularity in South America and was in search of a new female vocalist. Emilia’s first time onstage with the group was in November 2016, when she performed for 12,000 fans at the Velódromo in Uruguay. Three months later, she was performing at Chile’s coveted Viña del Mar Festival and won a Gaviota Award — an experience she describes as a “great opportunity” and “a trampoline” in her career. “The real challenge,” she says, came two years later when she decided to go solo.
In 2019, Emilia signed a record deal with Sony Music Latin and a management deal with Kolm (her former manager with Rombai), becoming the first female artist to sign with Kolm, who also manages Carlos Vives, Maluma, Wisin and Xavi.
“When she told me she wanted to go solo and make the music she liked the most, I saw her with such determination that I decided to be by her side,” Kolm says. “She is very charismatic and has her own initiative.”
Excited for what the future holds, he adds: “She moved to Miami to direct her career from the USA. Emilia has all the potential to be a global artist. She always knew where she wanted to go. This is just the beginning of a career that will be huge.”
Shortly after her debut solo single, “Recalienta,” co-written with Camilo and Fariana, Emilia earned her first entry on a Billboard chart with her Darell collaboration “No Soy Yo,” which debuted and peaked at No. 38 on Latin Pop Airplay in February 2020. She also scored chart entries with “La_Original.mp3,” with Tini; “Tu Recuerdo,” with Wisin and Lyanno; and “Como Si No Importara,” with Duki.
The lattermost song — about a secretive and daring relationship on which her rapper boyfriend Duki’s chanteos lace with Emilia’s dulcet vocals — gave the artist her first entry on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart in August 2021. The downtempo sultry reggaetón song peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100 in 2021. Emilia then released “Esto Recién Empieza,” which reached a No. 9 high on the Argentina Hot 100 in March 2022.
Natalia Aguilera
At that point, Emilia and Duki had been dating for a year; the couple made their relationship public at the 2022 Premio Lo Nuestro, where they performed “Como Si No Importara.” The collaborations have boosted both artists. Duki is a trap star, so Emilia has helped broaden his appeal to tweens. Emilia is very much a pop star, and dating Duki has given her street cred.
“We may seem different from the outside, but we are actually very similar, and we have almost everything in common. The only thing we don’t have in common is that I like sushi and he doesn’t,” Emilia says with a laugh as she opens up about her boyfriend with face tattoos. “But in general, we share everything, and we have a very nice relationship. We give each other feedback all the time. I love listening to him talk, to get advice from him. Beyond being an incredible artist, he’s a very intelligent, very cultured person. Sometimes he comes into the studio with me and we write together. We’re very passionate about the same thing and it’s beautiful to be able to share it without egos, without selfishness. It’s very genuine, and in a very healthy way.”
Despite Emilia’s celebrity in Argentina and her increasing presence abroad, it wasn’t until last year that the catchy cumbia “Perdonarte Para Qué?” with Los Ángeles Azules gave Emilia her first No. 1 on the Latin Airplay and Regional Mexican Airplay charts. It was a full-circle moment for the once teen girl who had a cumbia band back home.
“From the first time I heard it, I said, ‘100% yes!’” she exclaims. “I remember that it didn’t take me even two days to get into the studio and record it. I was so excited that they wanted to make a song with me, that they had taken me into account, being such legendary artists of Mexican culture and the world.”
Elías Mejía Avante, founding member of the Mexican group, says: “We are happy, but above all grateful to be part of this great musical milestone for her. It will always be an honor to be able to merge the talent of Mexico and Argentina, seeking to infect as many hearts as possible with our cumbia. We feel that therein lies the magic, in bringing joy and authenticity with music from the hand of one of the greats of Latin pop music today.”
Natalia Aguilera
Meanwhile, in her native country, Emilia’s a force to be reckoned with.
She’s placed 39 entries on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100 chart, 20 of those in the top 10 and five hitting No. 1. Her longest-leading hit to date, “Una Foto (Remix)” with Mesita, Nicki Nicole and Tiago PZK, ruled for 10 weeks in 2024 — the third-most behind Karol G’s “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido” (16 weeks atop the chart) and Valentino Merlo and The La Planta’s “Hoy” (11 weeks). Emilia has released two studio albums: the ultra-personal Tú Crees en Mí? (2022) and her early-2000s nostalgic set, .mp3 (2023). The latter was Spotify’s second most-streamed album of 2024 in Argentina, following Luck Ra’s Que Nos Falte Todo.
That success on the charts translated to ticket sales.
In April 2024, she kicked off her .mp3 tour with a historic 10-night stint at the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires between April and May, later adding four shows at Vélez Sarsfield Stadium in October.
“With artists in development, we’ve had extraordinary success with Emilia and her 10 arena [shows], where she played to over 290,000 people,” Marcelo Figoli, founder and owner of Fenix Entertainment, who produced the shows, previously told Billboard, confident that Emilia “is going to be a big deal in 2025.”
“I underestimated it. I usually set my expectations low, so I don’t disappoint myself,” Emilia admits. “We came out with the ticket sales, and I hadn’t done any shows for my album [.mp3]. We came out with the album in November and at the beginning of December the tickets were sold out. I remember that my team had said that we were going to book 10 Movistar Arena shows because that was the idea. And I was like, ‘I would love it, obviously, a residency at the Movistar Arena, but I see it as difficult.’ I felt like we were going to sell three, four at most, but suddenly it was 10 in 10 hours.”
“The live show is the other big leg of this industry,” Geller adds. “She’s an artist who not only works in one vertical of the business, but also has visibility in the fashion, brand and music sectors and has transcended into selling tickets, which is the best thing. She is already proving it with shows. The success she had in Argentina, the huge success she is having in Spain, that is happening because music is starting to transcend to other spaces, which will surely lead her to a long career. That’s the faithful conclusion that we are on the right track.”
The shows were also a test of resilience in other areas.
“I was rehearsing for the Movistar shows and my dad got cancer… Of the most important things in my life, the two came together and it was very emotional for me, but I was able to handle both,” she says. “Today I have my dad with me, and he can see everything I’m doing. I learned to know myself a little better. What my limits are. To make mistakes and not be so cruel to myself. To value the real people I have in my life… that family is the most important thing. I learned that I love to work and that I must enjoy the moment and not live so much in the future.”
Natalia Aguilera
But living in the future is inevitable for someone on Emilia’s path.
She’s preparing for her 2025 concerts in Europe and Latin America by working out five to six days a week, something she never did before, but is essential for next-level shows.
“The show requires a lot of cardio. You have to sing and dance, you need a good diaphragm, lungs with air, endurance. I hated training! I wouldn’t touch a weight for nothing!” she says, giggling. “But if I hadn’t trained, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Exercise has become something important for me and it does me good. I feel strong and confident.”
Emilia is now in her second outfit for the photo shoot and looks like a glistening goddess dressed in baggy jeans with gold glitter, a gold bustier and matching gold heels, posing for a second round of photos as a fan blows her wavy locks and her entourage hypes her up. This time, she’s serving sultry looks to Doja Cat’s “Agora Hills.” In the far corner, her mother, Gabriela Rueda, gets emotional as she sees her daughter in action, and with tears rolling down her cheeks, she softly tells me she remembers doing photo shoots for Emilia in the living room and her father holding the fan to blow her hair.
“I love to show the ‘Emilia Pop Star’ and get into character,” Emilia says with a smile. “I grew up watching pop divas who do that onstage and it’s like playing for a while for me. But I’m also the Emilia who comes from Nogoyá, who gets together to drink mate with friends, who has problems like everyone else, who cries because I’m very sensitive. I’ve always been firm. I’m very positive too. I’ve always had a very objective and optimistic character and personality. I think that’s what also helped me to be where I am today and achieve everything I’ve achieved.”
It’s an early evening in late September, and San Francisco is gleaming. The back patio at EMPIRE’s recording studios near the city’s Mission District is all white marble, reflecting the last rays of the setting sun as dozens of YouTube executives mill about, holding mixed drinks and picking at passed trays of beef skewers, falafel, lamb dumplings, and ham and chicken croquettes. At the moment, the companies’ top executives — EMPIRE founder and CEO Ghazi, COO Nima Etminan and president Tina Davis, as well as YouTube global head of music Lyor Cohen, among others — are sequestered in the studio’s live room for a quarterly business review, discussing the platform’s new tools, the label’s upcoming projects and how the two can best work together. A cake is adorned with YouTube’s latest milestone: 100 million members of its music subscription service.
Inside, the aesthetic is flipped: Black walls, dark wood floors and a black marble bar set the tone, while a projection screen in the main lounge area shows photos of Nigerian superstar and recent EMPIRE signee Tiwa Savage, who is in town finishing her new album. As Ghazi, Cohen and the others wrap their meeting and begin to filter into the party, everyone is ushered inside to hear her play some of her new music.
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“This is my first project at EMPIRE, and it’s really emotional for me because I’ve never had a label be this invested; most labels are not in the studio with you from morning until night,” Savage says before introducing her first single from the album, “Forgiveness,” which she will release a couple of weeks later. “They made me feel so welcome. I’ve been signed several times, but I’ve never been in a situation where it felt like home.”
The next day, at a barbecue restaurant near the studio, Ghazi is reflecting on the event — and what the connection with YouTube’s Cohen means to him. “I used an analogy with Lyor: ‘This is not a full-circle moment; this is the Olympic rings of full-circle moments,’ ” he says. “This brings so many circles of my life into place. I started as an engineer; I’m in a state-of-the-art studio that I could only dream about that I built with my bare hands. I used to listen to Run-D.M.C. — he found Run-D.M.C. The first tape I ever bought was Raising Hell — now I’m raising hell in the music business.” He laughs. “I prefer to call it ‘raising angels,’ but it’s cool. And then you have a giant like him in the record business that people used to blueprint their careers after, and now he’s telling me that he’s proud of the success I’ve had and that he watched me build a legacy. That’s validation.”
For Ghazi, 48, validation has seemingly been everywhere of late. The company that he founded in 2010 as a digital distributor for his friends in the Bay Area hip-hop scene has grown into one of the most formidable and powerful companies in the global music business. It has a record label, publishing and content divisions, a merchandise operation and 250 employees around the world, with a presence on six continents and deep connections to the local culture, politics and sports, including the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers.
And now, as EMPIRE turns 15, it’s coming off its best year yet: For 19 nonconsecutive weeks, spanning from mid-July to the end of November, EMPIRE artist Shaboozey held the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” tying the record for the chart’s longest-running No. 1 — an enviable achievement for any label, but particularly for an independent without any outside investment or corporate overlords. Shaboozey landed five nominations at the 2025 Grammy Awards, including best new artist and song of the year, redefining what is possible for an indie act and company in the modern music business.
Even more notably, that success arrived during a year when all three major labels experienced a painful and layoff-heavy molting process, reorganizing themselves to emphasize speed, technology, artist services and distribution — or, to put it another way, to try to look a lot more like EMPIRE. (“I think the battleship has been observing the speedboat for quite some time,” Ghazi says.) Amid those changes in the business, a new school of thought has emerged: that success is often found in cultural niches that gain mainstream acceptance from the bottom up, not the top down. Ghazi embodies that change: He may not have the mainstream name recognition of his peers in New York or L.A., but in his force of personality — humble yet emphatic, as many successful founders are — and his tireless, globe-trotting pace, he fits right in among the elite movers and shakers of the business.
“This industry used to be full of super-colorful entrepreneurs that were focused on their art, and when you talked to them, they had a certain excitement and shine in their eyes. Unfortunately, there’s not that many of them [left],” Cohen says about Ghazi. “I would call him one of the few. A person that is committed to excellence, cares about the details, shows up, has continuity and he’s positive and enthusiastic.”
Hermès coat and shirt
Austin Hargrave
There’s another reason why the YouTube party held such significance for Ghazi: The video streaming service is another company born, bred and based in the Bay Area that grew into a music industry behemoth after being built on tech foundations. Ghazi worked in Silicon Valley, including at an ad-supported video streaming service half a decade before YouTube, prior to dedicating his life to music, first as a recording engineer and then at digital distributor Ingrooves. He then founded EMPIRE — and sees his company as part of that lineage. “I’ve never met a music exec that has such a grip on the three verticals — creative, business and technology — and is fluent in all of it and active in all of it,” says Peter Kadin, a major-label veteran who is now executive vp of marketing at EMPIRE. “Someone who can go from meeting with an engineering team about building out the future of our systems, to sitting with finance and going through our deal structures with all the major DSPs [digital service providers], to going to the studio at night and mixing a Money Man album. There is no other executive doing that.”
Ghazi’s tech background and San Francisco’s reputation as the center of the tech industry are among the many reasons why he has always maintained that EMPIRE will never leave the Bay. The area has been part of him since he grew up in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, during his days at San Francisco State, throughout his time in the trenches of the local hip-hop scene and even now, when he has the ear of the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, whom he’s advising on cultural matters, and is working hand in hand with the NBA and the Golden State Warriors to produce events and release projects surrounding the upcoming NBA All-Star Weekend, which will be held in the Bay Area in February for the first time in 25 years.
But for a city that has had its share of big music moments and in which several major companies got their start, San Francisco’s music, and music tech, scenes have receded over the last two decades, with many companies lured away by the brighter lights and easier connections that exist in New York or Los Angeles. It’s a fate Ghazi is determined to avoid for EMPIRE — and a trend he’s actively working to reverse.
Ghazi likes to tell a story about when he was in his 20s in the early 2000s and mixed The Game’s first mixtape at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios. The project, which came out in 2004, ultimately helped Game get signed to Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records, and when Dre and one of his executives heard the tape, they wondered who had mixed it because it sounded much more professional than the typical lo-fi promotional tapes making the rounds among underground hip-hop heads at the time. The guys invited Ghazi down to L.A. and encouraged him to move to the city and start working with them.
“I was flattered by it, but I was also furious — mad that I had to leave the Bay to build a music career,” he recalls. “I remember driving past the Capitol Tower like, people drive past this building and think, ‘I’m going to work there one day.’ And we don’t have that in the Bay. And I was like, ‘That sucks! I’m going to figure this s–t out!’
“It took me a long time — a really long time — but I figured it out.”
Prada coat, shirt, pants and shoes.
Austin Hargrave
“This might be the most mellow day I’ve had in three months.”
A few weeks later, Ghazi is driving through the streets of San Francisco, giving the signature tour of the city that he offers to anyone new in town — or anyone who may have only heard of its downtown blight and violence as depicted by the national news. It’s another beautiful fall day in the Bay, the first vintage weather after an extended heat wave, and he has cleared his schedule for the afternoon. For the next four hours, he unspools the history of the city neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street.
From the EMPIRE office in the Financial District, he drives into Chinatown, then to the Marina District and the picturesque Palace of Fine Arts. After that it’s into the Presidio, where Lucasfilm is headquartered, then over the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito, stopping at an overlook for a view of the city. Then it’s back across the bridge into San Francisco, along Baker Beach into Sea Cliff and then Richmond District, the neighborhood where Ghazi lived in a 350-square-foot apartment when he was first dreaming up what would become EMPIRE. (“I had like four f–king jobs,” he says. “Some of the happiest times of my life, though. Some of the most stressful, but some of the happiest.”)
Along the way — passing through Lands End lookout point, Golden Gate Park, the Haight-Ashbury district and Billionaires’ Row, down the famously crooked Lombard Street and into the Mission — he calls out the landmarks of his life: the apartment where he was born, his first recording studio, the place he got his first boba milk tea, the theater where he used to watch movies for two dollars, the Haight storefront where he once co-owned a clothing store, the place where he and Etminan built the wiring for the first EMPIRE office through a hole in the wall. After a few hours, he parks near the water and gets out of the car to take it all in.
“They say San Francisco’s a doom loop,” he says, looking across McCovey Cove into Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, in the late-afternoon sun. “This look like a doom loop to you?”
Louis Vuitton sunglasses and jacket
Austin Hargrave
San Francisco is personal to Ghazi in a way that goes deeper than the typical nostalgia people feel for home. And the recent right-wing news coverage by 24/7 cable networks — which has portrayed the city as crime-ridden and drug-addled, overrun by a persistent homelessness problem that the city has not been able to handle — that has proliferated in recent years has spurred him and other music leaders in the city into action.
“San Francisco had such a heyday up until the pandemic, and it’s been really hard to watch the world s–t on our city,” says Bryan Duquette, founder of Another Planet Management and a member of the core executive team at Another Planet Entertainment, the San Francisco-based independent promoter that puts on the Outside Lands music festival and operates Bay Area venues including Berkeley’s Greek Theatre and San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Duquette, who has lived in the Bay for over 20 years, met Ghazi in 2023 and found a kindred spirit determined to rectify the negative perceptions held by outsiders. Last year, Another Planet teamed with Ghazi, EMPIRE and artist management company Brilliant Corners to assemble 100 members of the Bay Area music scene to meet with Lurie, then a mayoral candidate, to discuss his plan to reinvest in the artistic community. “Daniel really was trying to get to the people who were creating culture and helping the city become, again, what it was seen as globally,” Duquette says. “And Ghazi is a really big piece of that.”
Lurie’s outreach ultimately won him much of the creative community’s support, and in turn helped win him the election; he was sworn in as the 46th mayor of San Francisco in January. “The arts and culture have always defined us, and I firmly believe that EMPIRE and Ghazi are going to be part of the revitalization of our city,” Lurie says. “He knows what’s going on in the music world better than just about anybody, and I’ll be listening carefully to his guidance and his counsel.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and Ghazi in 2025.
Courtesy of EMPIRE
EMPIRE’s fierce independence, too, is an expression of the Bay’s ethos. “He’s a representative of the independent grind and the culture here; that’s something that everyone in the Bay can resonate with, just coming from the ground up and being the underdog,” says P-Lo, the Bay Area rapper who has been with EMPIRE since 2017. (P-Lo is spearheading a project with the Golden State Warriors’ content division, Golden State Entertainment, that will be released ahead of NBA All-Star Week and distributed by EMPIRE and will feature more than a dozen Bay Area artists.)
But that independence, and particularly the eye-opening success that EMPIRE has experienced over the past few years, has also brought scrutiny — and tests of Ghazi’s commitment, particularly during a time of intense consolidation in the music business. When a media report circulated in November 2023 positing that LionTree was lining up a $1.5 billion bid to buy EMPIRE — “Most believe Ghazi is not a seller, but big checks have changed other people’s minds,” the report needled — Ghazi was furious and sent a staffwide email emphatically denying it, according to multiple employees. A week after EMPIRE’s YouTube event, he was even more publicly defiant, insisting while onstage in October at the industry conference Trapital Summit in Los Angeles: “I’m not for sale. Period. I am dead serious. I am living my purpose. There’s no price on that.”
It’s a frustrating topic for Ghazi, not least because it implies a fundamental misunderstanding of who he is and why he does what he does. “You don’t understand — I just don’t care about money,” he says. “It’s not my motivation.” Instead he talks about the principles instilled in him by his father, a Palestinian refugee who brought his family to America to put them in a position to control their own paths if they were willing to work for it. “I don’t see myself ever working for somebody else,” Ghazi continues. “I’d rather retire. There’s no price for my autonomy. It’s the greatest gift to a leader.”
Still, his insistence on sole ownership — and the sheer force of personality that he exudes in binding the company together — has left enough of an opening for industry analysts to wonder about succession planning, about what might happen to the company when, or if, Ghazi decides to hang it up. He freely admits he won’t stick around as a hands-on CEO forever, but also that EMPIRE is about legacy for him and that he values legacy and autonomy — the freedom to chart his destiny — more than anything else. In that sense, he’ll never truly leave EMPIRE, even as the rumor mill keeps churning. “I always admired athletes who retired when they were on top. I want to be at the top of my executive game when I quit,” he says. “I don’t want to be the guy who hung on for too long. I’m already the owner, so I could still hang around as a chairman, but I don’t need to hang around as the guy running s–t day to day.”
Austin Hargrave
But that’s not happening anytime soon. In the past six months alone, EMPIRE has expanded into Australia, East Asia and South Africa and completed the acquisition of Top Drawer Merch to bring another monetization vertical into the fold for its artists. Ghazi is engaged in the industrywide debates surrounding superfandom revenue and is constantly seeking new opportunities; the two weeks prior to this driving tour, he had been in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Cambodia, Singapore, Bali, San Francisco, Paris, Marrakesh, Singapore again, Seoul again, Las Vegas, Seattle and back to San Francisco: taking label meetings, shooting music videos, meeting with DSP partners, attending conferences and awards shows and directing work on the EMPIRE studios here, with the goal of expanding the company’s reach step by step — taking the stairs rather than the elevator, as he puts it.
“The goal is to be in all the places that make sense for us culturally,” he says. “Is the music interesting? Is the culture interesting? Holistically, how does it play with our DNA? What’s the cost of acquisition and retention? Do I like the music here? But the initial fuel is the passion; then, from there, start to figure it out.”
Joice Street is mobbed. The Nob Hill alley, around the corner from the Bruce Lee mural that adorns the wall next to the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum, is the location this afternoon for P-Lo’s “Player’s Holiday ’25” video shoot, and dozens of people, including some of the Bay’s biggest rappers — Saweetie, G-Eazy and Larry June among them — are filming on a basketball court on the roof of a building overlooking the city. Ghazi is there, not just because EMPIRE is distributing the song, which will appear on P-Lo’s album with Golden State Entertainment, but because he’s scheduled to make a cameo in the video.
Ghazi spends more than an hour on the rooftop, where he seemingly knows everyone — and everyone wants a minute of his time. But soon he heads back to the studio to return to work. The vibe there is low-key, but a typical cross section of artists and creatives are at work: Nai Barghouti, an Israeli-born Palestinian singer, flautist and composer, is in Studio C, working on songs for her new album before heading back out on tour; two producers from dance label dirtybird, which EMPIRE acquired in 2022, are in the live room, “ideating the next big hit of 2025”; a regional Mexican group sits on the patio outside, figuring out songs on a guitar; YS Baby from EMPIRE-owned viral content aggregator HoodClips (which has over 11 million followers) is talking about the podcasts he has lined up. Later, Japanese rapper-singer Yuki Chiba — whose 2024 collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, “Mamushi,” reached No. 36 on the Hot 100 — takes over Studio A, where he plays a slew of songs slated for upcoming projects and discusses rollout plans.
EMPIRE may have gotten its start in Bay Area hip-hop and made waves on the front lines of West African Afrobeats, but these days it embodies the global outlook that Ghazi always envisioned; Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” after all, is a country crossover hit out of Nashville that reached No. 1 in 10 countries. EMPIRE partnered with Nashville-based indie promotion company Magnolia Music to handle its country radio campaign, and from there the single branched out to other formats, ultimately becoming the first song in history to go top 10 on four different Billboard airplay charts: country, top 40, adult top 40 and rhythmic. And Ghazi sees himself as a global citizen helping people around the world — “creating microeconomies” within the territories EMPIRE operates, he says — not just within the confines of the Bay Area.
Shaboozey and Ghazi at the 2024 CMA After Party.
Becca Mitchell
He is also the highest-profile Palestinian executive in the music business and has openly condemned the humanitarian crisis that has erupted during Israel’s war in Gaza. His Instagram profile picture is the Palestinian flag; he regularly shares videos and photos decrying the violence against civilians; he helped facilitate the remix to Macklemore’s track dedicated to Palestine, “Hind’s Hall,” and went to Seattle in October to support the rapper at a Palestinian benefit concert, despite Macklemore not being an EMPIRE artist. He stresses that he does this on a personal level, explicitly not to politicize the company. When asked if he feels a responsibility of sorts, given his profile, to help raise awareness about that humanitarian crisis, he simply says, “I feel like I want to be proud of the man in the mirror.” (“He’s Palestinian and I’m Israeli; we shared our great pain and anxiety over what’s happening in the Middle East,” says Cohen, who also calls Ghazi “a genuinely good guy.”)
But despite its global activities, EMPIRE has stayed focused on its local roots — and is continuing to strengthen them, too. In 2020, it started putting on the cultural festival 415 Day (which takes its name from a San Francisco area code) and has gotten further into live events through its deepening relationship with Another Planet. The San Francisco studio has become not just the creative center of EMPIRE’s operations but also an event venue for the city’s music and civic communities. And in a massive move in January, EMPIRE purchased the 100,000-square-foot historic Financial District building One Montgomery, built in 1908, for $24.5 million, according to The San Francisco Business Times; Ghazi plans to move the company headquarters there after renovating it. Eventually, One Montgomery could become the San Francisco version of the Capitol Tower that Ghazi envisioned all those years ago.
“There have been so many times that people have told him he couldn’t do something, and then he was able to do it, that it gave him all the fire and was the catalyst for him to be the person he is today,” says Moody Jones, GM of EMPIRE Dance, who has been with the company since 2018. “They told him he was crazy to have a music company in San Francisco; that he would never compete with a major; that he would never get out of hip-hop; that he would never open up a studio. They told him San Francisco would never be cool again. And every single time he was able to show them that, ‘No, I’m right.’ ”
That all builds into the larger cultural role Ghazi is playing in his city and beyond. Lurie just announced the inaugural San Francisco Music Week, a celebration of the city’s local music industry culminating in an industry summit with a keynote conversation with Ghazi. And while he says he’s not interested in San Francisco politics, he wants to be consulted from an advisory perspective on cultural events in the city and try to bring in more events beyond just music — Art Basel San Francisco is one that he has begun to advise on, though that project is currently on pause. He has worked with the city and the NBA on a slew of events around NBA All-Star Week and discusses the Super Bowl and World Cup in 2026 as further opportunities to showcase all that San Francisco has to offer. “For events like the NBA All-Star Game, Super Bowl LX, the World Cup, we get to show off all the greatness here, and Ghazi and EMPIRE and the artists they represent are part and parcel to what makes San Francisco so great,” Lurie says. “We need more Ghazis.”
Ahead of All-Star Week, he has made a series of moves and partnerships with the NBA and the Golden State Warriors, including with the game NBA 2K25, with which EMPIRE partnered for a first-of-its-kind deal that includes a limited-edition vinyl box set with 13 tracks by EMPIRE artists; EMPIRE artists on the game soundtrack; and Ghazi and some of EMPIRE’s artists scanned into the game itself. At the studio in September, he sat for an interview with NBA 2KTV host Alexis Morgan — who, to Ghazi’s delight, is also from the Bay Area — that will be part of NBA 2K25’s bonus features.
Ghazi (right) with NBA 2KTV’s Alexis Morgan.
Courtesy of 2K
But ultimately, it is all about the music. Shaboozey’s career is now in a superstar arc, and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” will soon become EMPIRE’s fifth record with more than 10 million equivalent units in the United States according to Luminate, with over 1 billion on-demand streams. A few years ago, EMPIRE was flying largely under the radar, but Ghazi now has it at the top of its game, with a track record that speaks volumes in an industry based just as much on history as on what’s coming next.
“You always learn, all the time; you’re always adapting to what’s going on around you,” he says. “And sometimes you can’t believe how far you’ve come. But that only inspires you to go further.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
It’s an early evening in late September, and San Francisco is gleaming. The back patio at EMPIRE’s recording studios near the city’s Mission District is all white marble, reflecting the last rays of the setting sun as dozens of YouTube executives mill about, holding mixed drinks and picking at passed trays of beef skewers, falafel, […]
As the clock strikes 10 on a chilly January night in Atlanta, Travis Scott, the King of Rage, is preparing to unleash a performance that will take his career to new heights — literally. Scott has already notched a dizzying number of accomplishments for a modern hip-hop star: four No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, the highest-grossing tour ever by a solo rap act, the first rapper to sell out Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium. But tonight, perched on the roof of Mercedes-Benz Stadium and not much more than 10 feet from its edge, he’s dreaming even bigger.
As his latest song, “4X4” — which became his fifth Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 when it debuted atop the chart in early February — pulsates through the speakers, La Flame rubs his hands together before launching into the pretape of his halftime performance for the College Football Playoff National Championship. At the cue of video director Gibson Hazard, rap’s ultimate daredevil bounces around fearlessly, savoring the thrill and danger of the moment.
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The 33-year-old native Houstonian, who was once a ball boy for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, has love for his hometown’s sports culture — and its accompanying theatrics — that runs as deep as his passion for its unique strain of Southern hip-hop. As a teen sitting in his grandfather’s kitchen, he watched the nail-biter 14-inning game-three battle between his beloved Houston Astros and the Chicago White Sox in the 2005 World Series from his grandfather’s kitchen (the Astros lost that game, and the series in four). He recalls witnessing Rockets legend Tracy McGrady’s jaw-dropping 13 points in 33 seconds against the San Antonio Spurs in 2004. Scott’s own unyielding spirit for captivating audiences on the biggest stages was born in these historic sports moments. “I was a ball boy for the Rockets when T-Mac was about to leave [the team in the late 2000s] and he was kind of fizzling out,” Scott remembers as he scarfs down a Domino’s pizza slice the day after recording his fiery performance. “I always wanted him to win.”
While Scott may no longer be chasing rebounds inside Houston’s Toyota Center, his bond with sports is stronger than ever, fueled by his competitive streak and relentless drive to be as legendary as his superstar athlete friends Tom Brady and James Harden. “12 is one of my favorites,” Scott says, referencing Brady’s former jersey number. “I go to him when it comes to achieving the highest level of greatness. I have a couple of people I can name [when I need advice], but 12 is somebody I can turn to when it comes to that because time and time again, when it comes to having to go and get it, I’ve seen him do it.”
Over the last couple of years, Scott has mounted the type of high-stakes comeback that might make a Hall of Fame athlete take notice. In October 2021, a deadly crowd surge killed 10 people at his Astroworld Festival in Houston, throwing the decorated rapper’s career into jeopardy. After numerous lawsuits were filed against Scott, a grand jury declined to indict him on criminal charges; the families of the 10 victims reached settlements with him and Live Nation. But in 2023, as a dark cloud still loomed over him, Scott returned. His album Utopia, delivered that July, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with an impressive 496,000 album-equivalent units, according to Luminate, and landed 19 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. And the star-laden album featuring Beyoncé, Drake, SZA and The Weeknd wasn’t just a blockbuster hit — it catalyzed Scott’s post-Astroworld comeback.
Martine Rose top, jacket and pants; Oakley boots.
Gunner Stahl
That October, Scott launched his Circus Maximus Tour, an interactive spectacle where he let his imagination run free. He created an amusement park-like atmosphere where he invited fans onstage to get on actual rides (“Amusement parks, to me, are the illest things ever,” he says), and his fire-breathing performances showcased the same audacity that made him the poster child for rage rap when he first rose to fame in the mid-2010s.
It wasn’t just the biggest tour of Scott’s career: With $209.3 million grossed from 1.7 million tickets sold, according to Billboard Boxscore, the 76-date trek became the highest-selling outing ever by a solo rapper. Stateside, Scott played mostly arenas — save New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium and his history-making SoFi Stadium gig — but his overseas fan base propelled him to stadiums in South America, Oceania and Europe, where he performed massive shows in cities including London, Milan and Cologne, Germany, selling more than 71,000 tickets at the lattermost. Scott and his longtime manager, David Stromberg, say they want to conquer the Asian touring market next.
“It’s always a challenge to create a new chapter of what the live shows look like,” says Stromberg, who has worked with Scott for over 10 years. “We thought that the [2018-19] Astroworld Tour was our highest peak. We were in arenas and now we’re in stadiums.” In April, Scott — who was slated to headline Coachella in April 2020 before the pandemic forced the festival’s cancellation — will appear for a performance there billed as “designing the desert.” And, Stromberg says, “With Coachella coming up, we need to figure out a new chapter.”
While Scott’s disruptive spirit has propelled him to chart and touring glory, his savvy on the branding front has drawn attention from a variety of major companies. Brands such as Nike, McDonald’s, Audemars Piguet and Epic Games have launched significant partnerships with Cactus Jack, Scott’s label and lifestyle boutique. Athletes like Aaron Judge, Jayson Tatum and Jayden Daniels have sported Scott’s Nike sneaker line. And last July, Scott got the ultimate sports co-sign when Michael Jordan wore a pair of unreleased Travis Scott x Air Jordan sneakers to the beach. After watching Cactus Jack flourish, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin partnered with Scott, popular retro sports brand Mitchell & Ness and Lids to launch a merch line called Jack Goes Back to College featuring a range of college-themed apparel and accessories.
“Normally, someone will come to work with us, give feedback and we’ll do all the work,” Rubin says. “With Travis, it’s 100% driven by him, and that’s because he knows his fans and the market, and he has such a strong feel for what the market wants. [When we collaborated], he completely designed the products 100% on his own. He has such great vision and product skills that I’ve never seen before.
“I’ve seen so many people in this world, but the fandom and loyalty he has from his fans is truly extraordinary,” Rubin continues. “Someone could offer him a billion dollars, and if it’s not brand-right and he doesn’t feel it’s right for his customers, he will not do it. That’s why he’s so careful about everything that he does. He wants to make sure it’s the right product and the right vision. Travis may be the most authentic person I know. He’ll never sell out.”
Gunner Stahl
Scott and Rubin promoted the Jack Goes Back to College line with a 36-hour college campus tour, making stops at Louisiana State University, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas, where they spoke to the schools’ athletic teams and even worked behind campus bookstore registers to sell their products. Throughout, Scott was everywhere — giving motivational speeches, showing up for an impromptu performance (at LSU local bar Friends) and joining football practice at UT, where he even helped with punt returns. And he’s eager to do all that again and more.
“When I was talking to Trav at the National Championship game [this year], he was like, ‘All right, what four schools are we doing next year? We’re out. We did three last year; we’re doing four next year,’ ” Rubin says.
His passion goes beyond the gridiron: Two decades after watching the Astros in the World Series, he’ll host current Astros players — and a slew of other current and former baseball and football greats, along with music stars like Metro Boomin, Teyana Taylor and Swae Lee — at the Cactus Jack Foundation’s HBCU Celebrity Softball Classic in Houston on Feb. 13.
Though Scott was largely consumed with touring and further building Cactus Jack over the past year, he returned his focus to music last August, when he released his acclaimed second mixtape, 2014’s Days Before Rodeo, to streaming platforms. Initially a free download — and a steppingstone in Scott’s career — the project bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 361,000 album-equivalent units, falling 1,000 units short of Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet. A month later, Days Before Rodeo rocketed to No. 1 after Scott offered vinyl editions of the project online, securing him the fourth No. 1 album of his career.
“When I was coming up, people always looked at me [strangely],” Scott says. “I don’t know. I’d always hear a little s–t of ‘Is it rap? Is it this? Is it just a vibe?’ I’m pushing hip-hop. It’s 50 years old but still has time to stretch. I feel like, ‘OK, I’m leading the new charge of what the next 50 years of this s–t is going to be like.’ ”
Prada top, jacket, pants and shoes; Oakley sunglasses; Eliantte jewelry.
Gunner Stahl
Like sports, music is ultracompetitive. How do you stay at the top of your game?
A lot of people say I’m at the top of my game all the time, but I’m still striving to get to that point. I could see it in spurts or moments like, “Oh, this is ill!” It’s like a full 360 universe I’m trying to connect, but I’m always inspired, and I think that’s what keeps me motivated — not just content. I’m always working toward the next thing. It’s not like in a bad way where you don’t sit and enjoy, but I always want to push the limits. I feel like there’s always been random lulls that come my way that try to suppress the sound, and I feel like I’ve always been trying to take one foot forward every day to break down those barriers.
I feel like you’re the Stephen Curry of rap because you revolutionized hip-hop and broke boundaries for the new generation, sort of like how Steph changed the game with the three-point shot. Can you see that?
Yeah. I probably wouldn’t have said it out loud or anything like that. I like to believe the things I’m doing are pushing music and where things can go. With Steph, he changed the game in a wild way. Whether it’s good or bad, everyone’s shooting from half-court and s–t, which is dope as f–k. It’s just revolutionizing the game and showing there’s no limits to what you can do as a player. Having the lines, literally, lines saying this is the limit and [saying], “Nah, f–k it. I’m shooting from [half-court]. I’m going to do what I have to do to get this W.” And not being content — you see, he works on his craft every day. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to catch [his] three-point record, and he’s still working on his craft. “How can I evolve? How can I get better as I’m getting older?” It’s dope.
You partnered with the WWE and escorted Jey Uso at L.A.’s Intuit Dome during Monday Night Raw on Netflix. What was that experience like?
The energy out there was crazy. I was telling [Superstar] Triple H, “This s–t is wild.” For my shows, I try to create that maximum energy level and have [the audience] feel like they could reach their highest level of ecstasy — the feeling of being happy and free. Not to sound so trippy, just see that enjoyment. When I’m performing, it’s the energy of what a hardcore match can be. [Popular WWE-style match] Money in the Bank — ladders, tables and chairs — anything. It’s like, “Ah, this s–t is ill.” I can’t wait for this year [to get in the ring]. I’m training to get ready for this. It’s going to be some dope s–t.
Gunner Stahl
If you do get in the ring, who’s your first opponent?
I’m going to leave that under wraps right now. I’m a little bit more of a mystery. I might pop up and start tearing s–t up. I’m more of a “Let me get into that hardcore s–t [type of guy].” It’s heavy. [WWE Superstar] Mick Foley-type heavy. You never know where you about to go lay some smack on a motherf–ker. I might pop out and start some s–t.
How has your brand, Cactus Jack, become so dominant?
We try to be ourselves and be organic. I’m still a fan of fandom. [I have] that sort of understanding [that] it’s not just me — got my guys Don [Toliver], Sheck [Wes], Bizzle [Chase B]. You know, all of us who make it a whole family. Organically, just being us and creating those experiences, that’s what I love to do. Whether I’m collaborating with someone or working with someone and trying to push design, it goes hand in hand, [whether we’re] tailoring beats or tailoring clothes.
On your college tour, you visited three different campuses in 36 hours. What is it about the college energy that you enjoy the most?
When I was in college [at the University of Texas at San Antonio], it was lit, and it’s still lit. I feel like every kid should go to college whether you’re trying to do the books or not, just for the experience: the [socializing], community and just riding for something [is great]. School pride is amazing. You go to these games and see 100,000 people in the same color cheering loud for the people that’s repping. It’s just lit.
You’ve said you want to go to Harvard University and possibly study architecture. Is that still something you hope to pursue?
It’s crazy. The construction game is the most frustrating thing in the world. Me traveling, seeing modernism, different houses, structures and things, when you go to different countries and see how people create a structural design with literally nothing, people can put up structural places in shorter times than we do in the U.S. And even just creating things from scratch, the engineering and planning of things takes forever. I just got a true passion for it and I always want to create, so I need to learn this s–t. I’ve always wanted to learn just the engineering part and technical aspects of it. I can draw ideas and create 3D renderings all day, but how do I physically get this to work and put it together? It’s a tedious process.
You and Michael Rubin have a good relationship. How has he helped you push the Cactus Jack brand forward?
I watch how he runs a multibillion-dollar empire and try to be hands-on as much as possible. Just be active. The call-and-response. Get to it on an everyday basis. To be able to run something on that level, you have to go hard at it, through the good and the bad. You could have problems, but it’s how you respond — just trying to stay connected. You could be the higher-up, disconnected and have people run it for you. Try to be as hands-on as you can and as multifaceted as you can. I apply that to what I got going on.
Gunner Stahl
How do you maintain high intensity and inspiration as you spread that energy into different areas, like music and merch?
It all goes hand in hand. Since day one, I’ve had that mindset. The key to it all is having a solid team and people understanding what you’re trying to achieve. They connect with you and have that same drive. Every day is a new day, but as you get through it, you learn so many things. I’ve been in this for a minute and think as we grow, we learn so much s–t. I try to stay firm on it. Remind people what we’re trying to work toward and this is what we have to achieve. It’s not easy. If I can be up early, we all can. Just having that discipline. I just got a good support system. [Without them], I’d be f–king drowning out here.
Your 7-year-old daughter Stormi’s favorite song is Days Before Rodeo’s “Mamacita.” How does it feel to see not only her but also younger fans appreciate your older work like that and your debut mixtape, 2013’s Owl Pharaoh?
I love it, man. F–k! I still listen to that album, too. It just reassures me that I’m not f–king crazy. This s–t hard. That’s how I know that Stormi’s turnt. Out of all the songs, that song’s turnt and she loves it. Her new favorite song is now “Thank God.” I don’t know if it’s because she’s on it. She didn’t know she was on it until she heard the album. She’s like, “That’s me!” She knows every word. It’s cool to see even the youth is tapped in on that level. It’s ill. It gives me a reason to wake up.
Your debut album, Rodeo, turns 10 this year. Do you have special memories from that era?
I do. I got a lot. Rodeo is lit. The only thing I wish from that album, and I probably should do for the 10-year anniversary, is that the action figure would come out on a USB and not a CD. That’s the main thing and it never happened. That album creation was everything for me: touring, working on the album and being at Mike Dean’s crib all day. Rest in peace, Meeboob [Dean’s late dog]. Man, we love that dog. It was lit, man.
What has been your own biggest championship moment in your career?
When I was walking through SoFi and had my little ones with me, they got on the stage. I remember my [3-year-old] son, [Aire] — he can talk — he was like, “Yo, who’s performing here?” My daughter was like, “Daddy!” My son was like, “All these people.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s going to be kind of turnt.” He’s like, “For real?” Stormi’s like, “Yeah.” She’s like describing the show. There’s all this pyro and people are going crazy. I was like, “Yeah, this is tight.” I always wanted to do stadiums, and it was kind of cool to have the little ones understand and know what I’m doing. They were amped for the show. So that was lit.
How do you define greatness at this point in your career?
I think it’s the ability to wake up and still go hard at this. Still have the drive to go hard and not give up on what you set out to do from the beginning. That’s greatness for me. Achieving that level no matter how many times you could be shunned from a Grammy or whatever the f–k could happen. It’s waking up every day to be like, “There’s still somebody out there listening and somebody that cares.” Let’s go hard for that and yourself. I really care about that — it keeps me going.
You had your Super Bowl moment in 2019, performing with Maroon 5 at halftime, but that wasn’t a full-fledged Travis Scott production. Is that still on your bucket list?
Hell yeah, man. Yeah, tell the [NFL] to hit me up. They know who to call. Word.
Gunner Stahl
Where are you heading musically on your next album?
I want to say the title right now, but people aren’t going to understand it. I have some more tweaking to do.
Fair. But where are you going sonically?
I feel like for Utopia, I was striving to push things to a high level. I’m still reaching for that. I’ve been having so much fun with music and s–t that I think it’s cool to be artistic and have fun with it. I’ve been producing more, making a lot of the album, and going in on that level is making it more exciting. I can’t wait, actually.
At this point in your career, is there anyone left that you want to get into the studio with?
Yeah, it’s this band called Khruangbin I want to work with. This might be crazy, but I would love to get Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter on a hook.
Why Taylor or Sabrina?
Because I have some ill ideas.
You and Carpenter were going head-to-head last year on the charts when her album beat Days Before Rodeo in its opening week.
Charts, shmarts, man. Who measures that? Her album’s cool. Days Before Rodeo is 10 years old. It all works.
With everything you’ve been through over the last few years to now having the biggest tour ever for a solo rap artist, do you feel vindicated that your fans still support you?
I love the fans and I’m appreciative, but I’m still striving to prove what I’m here to do, what I mean and what I stand for, especially when it comes to performing. To the fans, I feel like a lot of times, because I don’t do a lot of interviews or talk a lot, Travis Scott can be misunderstood. What I care for can get misunderstood. But every day, I’m going to strive to show that greatness.
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
As the clock strikes 10 on a chilly January night in Atlanta, Travis Scott, the King of Rage, is preparing to unleash a performance that will take his career to new heights — literally. Scott has already notched a dizzying number of accomplishments for a modern hip-hop star: four No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, the […]
Kai Cenat — the eternally upbeat streamer whose profile has exploded in recent years to make him the most popular personality on the Amazon-owned Twitch platform — is taking a moment to think.
In the five years or so since he’s become a full-time content creator, Cenat has had some of the most famous hip-hop artists, athletes and actors come to his house to drop in and join the “chat,” the affectionate word he uses for any of the 700,000-plus people who subscribe to his channel. He’s thinking over whether he can recall a favorite moment among so many, but it’s tough. It wasn’t when SZA and Lizzo stopped by together in the fall, nor when NBA All-Star Kyrie Irving taught Cenat’s friends and family how to play basketball. It would be reasonable to think it might be one of the many times Kevin Hart, one of his idols, swung by to kick it during the holidays.
Sitting in the basement room of his mountainside Georgia mansion, the 23-year-old needs a beat or two to consider the options. The room is a temple of adolescence, with pictures of his favorite basketball players, vintage arcade machines like Pac-Man and a gaming racing wheel. He has a huge walk-in closet and a king-size bed, both of which are being used by his three-person styling team. The only part of the room that hints at some sort of professional living there is the desk at one end that contains the computer and camera setup that power his streaming empire. Dressed in a BAPE hoodie and stonewashed denim that make him look like he’s straddling sartorial eras, Cenat finally settles on an answer: The May weekend last year when Drake and Kendrick Lamar dropped a total of four songs, three of them back to back.
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“That was the most fun experience I’ve had,” he says with a smile bright enough to power a Tesla. “I’m not going to lie.” It’s tough to tell if he’s actually super excited or just trying to manage his constant and unbridled childlike energy.
“We never experienced something like that,” he explains. “It was a good week. Everybody had their opinions. I was literally hopping on stream and had like 60,000 viewers. As soon as they dropped, my s–t was spiked to like 100,000.”
When it came to the beef that ended up taking over hip-hop for the better part of 2024, most popular streamers took sides or called winners, and Cenat was no different. “I’m cool with Drake,” he says. “So people would expect me to be on Drake’s side.
“But I’m not going to lie,” he continues. “Kendrick won that battle. It was good. I loved every second of it. I was just appreciating the moment. Like, bro, we got bangers right now that’s dropping back to back and everybody’s talking about them. It was definitely fire.”
Kody Phillips top, Louis Vuitton pants, AMIRI hat, Jacob & Co. watch.
Andrew Hetherington
For a person who makes a living by staring straight into a camera for hours on end and connecting with strangers, appearing truthful and genuine is crucial — and it’s one of Cenat’s superpowers. It’s what has allowed him to not only become the most popular streamer on Twitch, but also the most popular streamer in hip-hop and, arguably, one of the most powerful people in all music. No other streamer has been able to corral as many artists to be a part of their online world as Cenat has — and very few have earned the cultural respect from fans and artists that he has. His words hold so much weight that he’s able to materially affect the careers of the superstars his fans care about. That’s why during that weekend in May, Drake told Cenat to “stay on stream” before dropping his “Family Matters” dis track — he knew a good review from the jovial streamer would bode well for him not only in his sales, but in his battle with Lamar. But it’s also why, after the streamer said Drake’s “The Heart Part 6” was weak, Drake allegedly blocked him.
That’s just one of many major moments Cenat has driven for music’s biggest stars over the past few years. He’s had spats with Nicki Minaj, Blueface and Ye, though he eventually made up with all of them. (Minaj even gifted him a pink throne that he proudly keeps in his bedroom and doesn’t let anyone sit on.) Most recently, while on a stream in early January, he panned Lil Baby’s highly anticipated fourth album, WHAM, even questioning why certain songs were added to it. WHAM trended on X — mainly due to jokes about Lil Baby being washed. While it’s unfair to attribute to Cenat the initial negative reaction Baby’s album received on social media, he had a significant hand in spreading the sentiment that it wasn’t Baby’s best work. That’s just the power Cenat holds in 2025: He’s a self-made institution. Like EF Hutton, when Cenat talks, people listen.
All of that has made him, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing Gen Z has to 106th & Park or TRL, the erstwhile midday live-music shows that used to air on BET and MTV and were appointment viewing for any fans wanting updates on their favorite artists. Cenat’s stream is now the main place to tune in to see artists having fun and feeling comfortable enough to let loose and relax. “Yeah, people will be saying that,” he says with an impish grin. “For everyone to come to play music or just have a fun interaction, it means a lot to me, honestly, because I didn’t think, out of everybody, they would want to come over to my house. I still haven’t got to like really let it sit in and really let it digest, but it does mean a lot to me, and I’m just having fun as I go on.”
Building a platform to rival the biggest cable music stations of the 1990s and early 2000s should take at least a decade — but it’s important to understand how quickly all this has happened. Cenat, who first started posting on YouTube in 2019, is not an overnight success. But considering how integral he’s become to the cultural fabric, you could be forgiven for thinking he’s been ingrained in the hip-hop internet landscape forever.
Before first appearing on the platform, the Bronx-born creator had moved to Georgia at a young age with his mother and siblings, living in a homeless shelter while his mother worked multiple jobs to create a better life for them. It was tough, but Cenat says with his trademark positivity that he doesn’t remember those times as rough or bad. The family eventually made its way back to New York, and Cenat enrolled at SUNY Morrisville to study business administration. In search of a creative outlet, he started posting funny skits on YouTube. For Cenat, the decision was a no-brainer: “I watched YouTubers growing up — that’s why I understand it so well.”
Andrew Hetherington
Andrew Hetherington
Mainly filmed in his dorm room and around campus, Cenat’s skits were low-rent affairs with minimal costumes or production where he came off as a slapstick comedian in the tradition of Martin Lawrence. His most viewed videos were his challenges, like the popular “Try Not To Laugh Challenge” that he still does to this day and clips like the Extreme Ding Dong Ditch series, which sounds crazy but was just Cenat and his friends playing the childhood game in different locations. They didn’t get massive traction, but they caught the eye of fellow Bronx-bred creator Fanum, who invited Cenat to join the AMP (Any Means Possible) collective of YouTube creators. Soon, Cenat was posting videos at an increasingly rapid pace, as well as appearing in clips by other AMP members.
By 2021, Cenat was ready to branch out from YouTube and grow his audience another way. He decided to try livestreaming and landed on Twitch, the platform Amazon acquired in 2014, as his new home. At the time, it was being used mainly by gamers to livestream gameplay while avid fans watched like a professional sport. Cenat enjoyed playing video games, but his first foray onto Twitch was through what are known as “just chatting” streams, where he’d sit down with a camera on his desk and, yep, just talk with his audience. By the end of his first day on Twitch, he had 5,000 followers. By the end of his first month, he had 70,000. The next month, 140,000 people tuned in.
Despite Cenat’s brand now being so closely associated with hip-hop, he didn’t start producing music content, really, until he started streaming. “When I started streaming, most of my content was blowing up based off me just reacting to different songs and listening to albums when they drop and just enjoying it for what it was and just saying, like, my opinions on it,” he remembers. “And then, like, people just loved it.”
In fact, he didn’t even listen to rap until he was a teenager. Growing up, “I did straight Michael Jackson up until high school” — which is when Cenat became a fan of a hometown hero who was then dominating the charts: A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie. “That was my real transition,” he says. “I went from Michael Jackson to A Boogie, and I explored from then on.”
His musical exploration has fueled his Twitch channel’s growth: Thanks to his Mafiathons — monthlong 24-hour streaming marathons that he’s held with some of the most famous names in music, sports and entertainment — Cenat now has the most subscribers on Twitch (728,535 at press time) and holds its record for the most concurrent streamers at 720,000. He’s now also one of the richest streamers in the world, according to Forbes, which estimates his 2024 earnings at around $8.5 million. (Cenat declined to comment on his earnings.)
Andrew Hetherington
His manager, John Nelson, credits these streaming marathons with cementing the Kai Cenat brand. “His first 24-hour stream [in January 2023] is really when his trajectory went off,” Nelson says. “And it’s interesting — I believe it was that one that ended with Ice Spice [on camera]. Funny, because both of them took off at that same time. Two New York kids. And, you know, they were both very popular then, but they weren’t the megastars that they are today.” Each of Cenat’s Mafiathons has helped him not only grow his audience but also break Twitch records; the most recent, in November, featured a who’s who of pop culture that included Serena Williams, GloRilla, Sexyy Red and Druski that helped him break the record for most subscribers, with more than 340,000 new people paying $5.99 to join Club Cenat.
Yes, more than 720,000 people pay money to watch a 23-year-old talk about whatever comes to mind and prank his best friends. But why, exactly?
“I just think it’s the creativity,” Cenat says. “This is just the vibe I give off, like on my stream. I try to make it as fun as possible. And being able to, like, break ice with anybody who comes on.”
It’s the creativity, sure. But it’s the combination of that creativity with his comparatively radical sincerity that has endeared him to Fortune 500 companies like McDonald’s, T-Mobile and Nike. It’s also what drew the likes of Snoop Dogg, the veritable hip-hop pitchman who’s able to move between disparate worlds, to tap the young star to work together. And it’s the reason Hart, the blockbuster comedian who has mastered the art of multimodal content more than perhaps any other superstar, took a liking to him over any other streamer of the moment.
Cenat, much like Snoop and Hart, has built a brand on being genuinely unproblematic, which, combined with his affable demeanor, has appealed to an unusually large swath of people. Unlike several other popular streamers, he hasn’t delved into the incel echo chamber side of streaming culture that has, in part, been popularized by Twitch competitor Kick. The Australian-based streaming platform reportedly offered Cenat $60 million to switch to Kick, but he turned it down.
When asked why, Cenat struggles to articulate a clear metaphor. “Say, for example, you go to Steph [Curry] and you’re like, ‘Hey, man, we want you to be a running back [in] the NFL. You’re so good at basketball, but we want you to just leave everything behind right now and go to NFL football and be a running back,’ ” he says. “It doesn’t make sense! I’ve been on Twitch. I’ve built a core community. Kick is not my home. My home is definitely Twitch. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s what I live by.”
Andrew Hetherington
Andrew Hetherington
And, unlike a number of popular streamers, he’s managed to stay clear of the political discourse that dominated the conversation in 2024. “It’s just because I don’t understand it. Some people say I should just do some research on it and, like, inform myself,” Cenat explains. “Now, I’m living in America, so it’s good to know what’s going on in politics. But like, I’m just not educated enough to speak on that.”
On the early January day I sit down with Cenat, Adin Ross, the superstar Kick streamer who famously interviewed President Donald Trump and gifted him a Tesla Cybertruck, made a statement apologizing for “raising a toxic community” on the platform and vowed to do better. “I want to rebuild,” Ross said. “I want to actually completely revamp and reset everything. I want to go back to stuff that matters. With that being said, every stream that I do, especially at this point, until I say something else, is going to be something that’s heartwarming and something that’s meaningful.”
Sounds a lot like Cenat, doesn’t it? He brushes off the idea. Cenat believes a fan base is a reflection of the creator. “So if you feed it nonsense, you’ll get nonsense. [Ross] realized what happened and now he’s trying to make a big change.”
But regardless of how he frames it, Cenat still has major clout. On Aug. 4, 2023, a full-on riot ensued in New York’s Union Square when he announced to his massive audience that, to celebrate his first streaming marathon, he would be giving away PlayStation 5 consoles and gift cards there. But he didn’t have a permit. Around 3 p.m., large crowds started to form in Union Square, and police took notice when people began to destroy public and private property. The New York Police Department called in 1,000 officers to the scene — and then all hell broke loose. Cars were destroyed, store windows were broken, and seven people were injured, including three NYPD officers. Over 60 people were arrested, half of them minors. It was a rare dark day for Cenat — but it proved just how big his brand and celebrity had gotten.
In 2023, Cenat and his small team — his assistant/production partner Brianna Lewis, his videographers and manager Nelson — traveled to Nigeria. And when they stopped by Makoko, a small, impoverished waterfront settlement on the outskirts of Lagos, they realized they were out of their depth.
The village didn’t have broadly available internet like the city itself, so Cenat couldn’t stream. But what really caught him off guard was the state of the Makoko Children Development Foundation School and Orphanage. “I went over [to Nigeria] just to go visit it, see how it is, and I went out where I just seen things that I was like, damn,” he says. He decided then and there to at least try to help improve the town. “I stumbled across this school that they had in this very small school building. These small classes and the kids were so eager to learn even in the condition that they were in. Don’t get me wrong: When I went to Nigeria, I seen beautiful parts. They got great big houses, fire cars — like, Nigeria is beautiful. [But] the place where I went to was Makoko.”
His first plan was to just fund some renovations to the school, but soon that didn’t feel like enough. So he decided to give 20% of his earnings from his November Mafiathon 2 to build a brand-new school in Makoko. “Hopefully it comes out exactly like what I’m imagining,” he says. “They said it’s going to be done this year probably, and I want to go back to Nigeria and see how it is and [have] like a grand opening. I want to be able to stream that.”
Andrew Hetherington
Cenat’s work in Makoko offers a window into how he envisions his future. He has dreams of doing more with the streaming format, but also, maybe, leaving it all together. Though he loves streaming, he wants to act in and direct movies. (Not TV, though: In his words, “No one watches TV anymore.”) Hart, whom he now calls a friend, has been helping him prepare for that next stage of his career; Cenat won’t share specifics, but says Hart has given him certain movies to watch and has been advising him. “I would love to be in movies and stuff; he definitely pushes me,” Cenat says. “He tries to connect me to the right people that direct and write movies and produce them.”
Would he leave streaming behind for Hollywood? Perhaps — but not right now. “Our good friend, [YouTube superstar] Mr. Beast, was like, ‘Why would you use something that you’re so good at to catapult you into another category? Just be completely dominant in the category that you’re in right now and just take over that.’ And I’m like, ‘Damn, he does make a good point.’ ”
His current solution to the conundrum: eschew Hollywood entirely and produce a movie on his own. “I want to be able to, like, put it out to the world,” he says. “I’m going to take a hit financially. But like, I want to be able to put it out to the world and just see if a company will pick it up.”
For the moment, Cenat remains laser focused on streaming. After all, his is one of the only streams that can genuinely help (or hurt) an artist’s career, at least in his mind. When Cenat panned GloRilla’s 2023 single “Cha Cha Cha” with Fivio Foreign, the Memphis MC blocked him on social media. He felt he was just being honest. “If there’s some bad music, I’m going to let you know it’s bad,” he says. However, according to Cenat, after their dustup, Glo glowed up. “We’re good friends now. And ever since I told her that one song was bad, she’s been making hits!” He’s not wrong. Ever since that spat, Glo has notched five songs in the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And when the biggest names in entertainment are DM’ing and texting you to ask to visit your crib and hop on your stream, what could possibly measure up next? Going bigger — even bigger than the movies. “I want to go to space!” Cenat exclaims. “I want to be the first human in space to float around, [stream] and talk my talk to my chat and then come back down to Earth.”
He’s serious, too. He wants to do everything he wanted to do as a kid, living and dreaming in that homeless shelter. “I want to have the whole Avengers on my stream one day,” he says with the enthusiasm of a middle schooler. “I really believe that’s going to happen one day.”
This story appears in the Jan. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Jennie’s to-do list is growing by the minute. For the last year, the pop star has been so consumed with the launch of her own label and arrival of her highly anticipated solo debut album — plus, now, the impending reunion of Blackpink, the globally renowned K-pop quartet she is part of — that she hasn’t had a moment to envision her ideal release-night party. That is, if she even has time for one.
“I like planning parties. I like creating an album,” Jennie says. “It’s fun, but sometimes it gets hard. I’m just trying to make sure everything is perfectly done.”
Sitting on a cozy couch in a small back room of a photo studio in Seoul’s Gangnam district, Jennie’s post-shoot look on this late-October afternoon calls to mind Gossip Girl “It” mom Lily van der Woodsen after a particularly tiring day. Leaning back in matching black pants and zip-up hoodie after hours spent staring at a camera, Jennie slides on a pair of dark-lensed Gentle Monster sunglasses to give her eyes, and perhaps herself, a bit of a break. (She partnered with the eyewear brand in April 2024 on her own line, Jentle Salon.)
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The 28-year-old appears at ease despite the chaos swirling around her. She’s also strikingly self-aware, which seems to be both freeing and consuming for her — she knows the pursuit of perfection is exhausting and never-ending, and yet she’ll settle for nothing less. Recently, this has manifested in the secrecy surrounding her upcoming album, which for the self-described “workaholic” is far from manufactured marketing mystique. Rather, it may well be a way to buy time until she feels the project she has dreamed of for so long is as close to perfect as possible — even as pressure to release it builds.
“It’s not nice to be someone who’s always like, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say anything,’ ” she says of the album she began working on in early 2024 — and that the world still knows very little about. “I want to say I’m almost there,” she offers. One of her biggest takeaways from the process? “I’m just going to say, ‘I don’t do well with time,’ ” she says with a laugh.
Jacquemus top and AREA hat.
Songyi Yoon
Since Jennie became a YG Entertainment trainee at 14 and a Blackpink member at 20, her career has been clearly defined and carefully handled — a meticulous approach that has yielded historic results and global fame. In 2019, Blackpink became the first K-pop girl group to perform at Coachella, and just four years later, the first Asian act to headline the festival. And the group — rounded out by Lisa, Rosé and Jisoo — made history in 2022 as the first South Korean girl group to top the Billboard 200, with its celebrated second album, Born Pink.
Yet that well-paved path to stardom also offered Jennie little time to explore her own creative voice. From Blackpink’s 2016 debut through 2023, she released just two solo singles, both through the group’s label, YG: the aptly titled Korean-English “Solo” in 2018 and the dance-pop “You & Me” in 2023, the latter of which peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart. All the while, Jennie was growing eager to piece together “the puzzle of my dreams,” as she calls her solo-album-to-be. So in 2023, when Blackpink re-signed with YG for group activities and its members became free agents for the first time in their careers for solo activities, she jumped at the chance.
“While I was on my last Blackpink tour [it wrapped in 2023], I couldn’t stop myself from starting to plan ahead. I’m just like that,” she says. “I listed out the things that I want in my life and started pinpointing, or prioritizing, what’s my very next step. And instantly, I was like, ‘I still haven’t accomplished the dream of releasing a solo album.’ I wanted to satisfy myself by achieving that goal.”
With a clear runway, she set out to do just that. In December 2023, she announced her own independent label, OddAtelier (commonly referred to as OA). At the start of 2024, she began her “album journey” in Los Angeles, where she says she worked on “99%” of the project, whose title has yet to be unveiled. By September, she announced a partnership with Columbia Records, and in October, she released the album’s fierce and sassy lead single, “Mantra,” which peaked at Nos. 2 and 3 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. and Billboard Global 200 charts, respectively.
“It’s been a long process because American artists, they usually take a few years to make one album, but we have time limitations because [this year] she’s got to go back into Blackpink activities again,” says Alison Chang, OA’s head of global business and Jennie’s self-described “right hand.” “She really wanted to show her artistry through this album, and in the beginning, we were meeting producers and writers who she didn’t really match with. I think finding her sound throughout this process was kind of hard, and landing with ‘Mantra,’ that took a very long time. Just finding that first perfect single to let the world know this is the start of her solo career.”
And while Jennie’s years as a trainee prepared her for nearly every aspect of stardom, nothing could have braced her for the pressure and responsibility that comes with being truly in charge.
“The thing is, even back in the [trainee] days, I was never OK with what other people approved. I would check on every single team like, ‘Can I look at other options?’ ” she recalls. “So I am used to the process, but it’s more of a mental thing. The idea of ‘you’re on your own, make the right decision.’ And sometimes that’s the scariest feeling. Sometimes I wake up like, ‘I don’t want this overwhelming control.’ ”
“Just touched down in L.A.,” Jennie sings on “Mantra,” later noting, “We’ll be 20 minutes late ’cause we had to do an In-N-Out drive-by” — and days after its release, she found herself back in town.
She was there to perform the playful pop hit on Jimmy Kimmel Live! — her solo U.S. TV debut — and it was the first time in a long time she had seen her fans, who gathered en masse for the appearance. “Mantra” “was a good start for her because it [showed the] things people still expect from Jennie — she’s dancing and she’s singing and rapping at the same time,” Columbia vp of A&R Nicole Kim says.
Later that night, it was Jennie’s turn to be a fan: She attended Charli xcx and Troye Sivan’s Sweat Tour and snapped pics with Charli, Sivan and her pal and The Idol co-star Lily-Rose Depp. Jennie made her TV acting debut on the shocking 2023 drama about an aspiring pop star (Depp) and her controversial relationship with a producer (The Weeknd); Jennie’s collaborative single with Depp and The Weeknd, “One of the Girls,” became her first appearance on the Hot 100 under her own name.
Jennie feels “more freedom” in L.A. compared with her native Seoul, saying, “I could definitely go out and eat whenever I want to, wherever I want to,” but adds that the biggest difference between the two cities is who surrounds her. “I learn a lot from people [in L.A.]. It’s a great environment, especially for people in music, to meet people that can inspire you.” (She was back in November for Tyler, The Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, where she made a surprise appearance during Matt Champion’s set to perform their 2024 collaboration, “Slow Motion,” and posed with Doechii backstage. In April, she’ll return to California to make her solo debut at Coachella.)
It’s why, Jennie says, recording most of her album in L.A. was “very intentionally done. I just really wanted to throw myself out there to experience it. [In Seoul], I was so comforted in an easy environment that I created a long time ago, and I didn’t enjoy it. I was like, ‘No, if this is your career and if this is your life, explore and learn.’ I kept telling myself that.”
Alexander McQueen coat, David Koma top and Coperni bottoms.
Songyi Yoon
Jennie had worked with just one producer, acclaimed K-pop veteran Teddy Park, prior to her debut album — so when it came time to build a new creative network in a new city, she says the process was “rough.”
“I struggled a lot in the beginning,” she admits. “A few months, I would say, was just me throwing myself out there, walking into rooms filled with new people. I just had to keep knocking on the door, like, ‘Is this it?’ ‘Is this it?’ and then eventually, we got to a point where I found a good group of people that I linked with, sonically and as friends.” (“Mantra” was co-written by songwriters affiliated with management, recording and publishing company Electric Feel such as Billy Walsh, Jumpa and Claudia Valentina, among others, and was mostly produced by El Guincho, known for his work with Rosalía and Camila Cabello, among other left-of-center pop girls.)
Jennie spent six years as a YG trainee before being placed in a group — the longest of any of Blackpink’s members — and while working on her solo album, she reflected on those early days, especially her individual tastes. Back then, she had time to listen to “so much music,” she recalls. “I can’t explain how much that helped in terms of the beginning era of making this album. I never really had a chance to look back at myself [during Blackpink’s rise], so [this process] was a time to really be like, ‘What was I interested in back then?’ Those times played a big role to get it started.”
So did her childhood. Born in South Korea as Jennie Kim, she recalls her mother playing a lot of ’90s pop music, which she says was “rare” for anyone living in Korea at the time. “She had a big passion for Western culture, too,” Jennie says. “She would be playing Norah Jones and Backstreet Boys … Naturally, I was drawn to R&B and, of course, Korea is known for its K-pop culture. So that was also very familiar. I was just always into the idea of music.” (Jennie says she and her mom still “live super close to each other,” allowing them to see each other often.)
Markgong top
Songyi Yoon
From a young age, Jennie also craved independence. Following a vacation when she was 10 with her mom to Auckland, New Zealand, Jennie spent the next five years there attending school and participating in a homestay with a Korean family. That’s primarily where she learned English and where she ideated her alter ego of Ruby-Jane, inspired by the desire for a middle name like her new friends all had. “I feel like I am great at creating different characters within myself,” she says. “I like that about me.”
These characters, it seems, all come to play on her upcoming debut (along with a few features she’s hesitant to share more on just yet). “I intend to complete myself as Jennie Ruby-Jane, for that to be a whole person, in a way,” she reveals. “You’ll definitely know what I mean once the album drops, but because I’m playing with a lot of different genres and elements — I’m rapping here, I’m singing here, I’m harmonizing here, I’m talking here … The overall sound was me making sure I like every single [song]. I didn’t want to be forced into putting a song onto my album — that’s what I really fought for. And I was lucky to have all these people believe in me and support me so I could get to a level where we were like, ‘Wow. I think we’re ready.’ ”
When it came to her new label, Jennie knew what she wanted in a name: something that looked and sounded pretty, that represented herself and her team — but that wasn’t so specific it would box them in. “I wanted it to be [a name that signifies] we’re open to do anything,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone to label what we were.” OddAtelier, named for the French word for a collaborative workshop or studio, “just made sense,” she says. “Atelier is a place where we create art.”
Still, soon after deciding to launch it in late 2023, Jennie took a look at herself in the mirror and thought, “ ‘Do you realize the choice that you’ve made?’ It was really an all-or-nothing situation,” she says. “I didn’t one day decide I want to make a label for myself. For me, building the relationship with my team, we started dreaming together, naturally. Because a lot of them I’ve worked with for a long time. So when we had a chance to go our individual way, I thought that would be like six years in the future. I didn’t think it would be so soon. So I got the courage to start my independence in life, and every step of the way has been a learning process for me. I’m studying this whole new world. Now that it’s been a year, I can say I’m glad I was brave enough to have started this label. I couldn’t be more proud.”
As for whether she plans to sign other artists to OA, her response makes clear how overwhelming a moment this is: “I’ve been getting this question left and right, and my answer is ‘Please, I am so busy on this album. Let’s not even get my brain on that path just yet,’ ” she says while laughing through a polite sigh.
Chang, OA’s global head of business, met Jennie in 2019, when she was working with YG Entertainment USA handling licensing, merchandising and intellectual property for acts including Blackpink. The two “just hit it off,” Chang says. “We formed this bond, and then from there, we just saw each other every day, and it evolved into managing her stuff along with Blackpink. We went on tour together, and then [in 2023], she was like, ‘Hey, I want to create OA.’
“From the day I met her, I just knew, ‘Wow, this girl is so smart,’ ” Chang continues. “She knows what she wants. She’s ambitious. Our standards for each other are so high. As a solo artist, she’s able to spread her wings a bit more and have more authority over her creative direction and strategy for how she wants to develop into an even bigger global artist.”
Jacquemus dress
Songyi Yoon
The hope is that Jennie will become the Korean pop star to represent the Asian music market — a bit like Bad Bunny does the Spanish-language one. But she and her team couldn’t conquer the world on their own. Chang knew that if the goal was to break even wider in the United States, they would need more resources and experience. “It was just a given,” she says. “We needed to partner with an American label.”
She and Jennie took “a lot” of label meetings in late 2023, but ultimately signed with Columbia for its “proactiveness” and how much the team they met had researched Jennie ahead of time. “Jennie values her roots and heritage more than anyone else, and while she does want to establish herself as a global artist, including in the U.S. market, she also deeply cares about her base and wants to make them proud,” says Kim, who worked at HYBE with acts including BTS prior to joining Columbia. “And I think our team is working really hard to support her in achieving that.” (For additional support, Jeremy Erlich will co-manage alongside OA; as Interscope’s executive vp of business development in the late 2010s, he helped facilitate the conversations between the label and YG that ultimately led to their global partnership and Blackpink signing with Interscope.)
But as the web around Jennie spreads, she remains firmly at its center — and is intent on calling the shots. Jennie attributes that to the woman she calls the “No. 1 boss lady”: her mom. “I don’t even have to look anywhere else. She’s taught me how to be a woman, how to be a boss, how to be myself. She’s my idol,” she gushes.
While coming up in Blackpink, Jennie says she had to learn how to compromise; with her own album, the only person she has to do that with is herself. “It’s a fight between me, myself and I — I’m not easy to convince,” she says. “It’s not easy working with me.” And that’s why Jennie craved this experience: It forced her to look into a metaphorical mirror.
“I needed this. I wanted this,” she says, her tone growing more confident. “The more I get to know myself, the more I try to love myself. I’ve had a time in my life where I didn’t — I had no clue how to do that. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I was living for. The time where I was feeling clueless. The fact that I’ve moved on from that phase and being so committed to myself, I’m very proud.
“It’s so easy to lose yourself, which is OK,” she continues. “There was also a time where I was feeling lost about ‘K-pop,’ ‘pop music,’ all these labels that I was chasing after … Now that I look back, I just want to tell myself, ‘Maybe enjoy it a little, feeling lost in the struggle, because there will be a time where you don’t even have time to think you’re lost.’ ”
Blackpink’s group chat is ID’d with a simple yet fitting emoji: a family of four. Jennie says her groupmates check in there as often as they can.
“We are all so caught up with life. Obviously, we can’t be calling each other every day,” she says. “Even though we know we can’t see each other so much, it doesn’t really feel any different than all the other years because we know we’re here for each other. They’re literally a phone call away. And at this point, we respect each other’s space so much. So if there’s anything to be happy for, to celebrate, we’re all in it together.”
For the group’s dedicated Blinks, Blackpink’s 2025 reunion, which will include new music and a tour — and follows Rosé’s just-released solo album, a forthcoming album and a role on The White Lotus for Lisa and an acting gig on a forthcoming K-drama and a Dior campaign for Jisoo — is indeed cause for celebration. “I’ve missed the girls. I’ve missed doing tours with them. I miss our silly moments,” Jennie says. “I’m excited to see what everyone brings. You know, everyone took their own journey [during] this time, and I’m excited to share that with the girls. I want to say it’s going to be the most powerful [versions] of ourselves that anyone has seen.”
As Blackpink’s members continue to grow, Chang says the best part of her front-row seat to Jennie’s journey has been seeing her evolution. “People don’t really know, but she’s a very shy, introverted person,” she says, “and seeing her throughout this whole process, I’m just really in awe of how much she’s grown. She put her heart into this.” As Kim recalls, while Jennie was recording her album, there were periods when she would be in sessions every day until six or seven the next morning: “It was surprising to me that she wanted to stay longer and write more. She was really, really passionate. It was inspiring for me to see her working so hard in the studio.”
Annakiki dress
Songyi Yoon
Most of Jennie’s album, as a result, is rooted in deeply personal songwriting about “what I’ve experienced, what I resonate to or what I want in my life. That’s one other thing that’s changed from being in Blackpink, is that I get to say my message in my way.”
And with so much time to reflect — both in and out of the studio — parts of Jennie’s life came into focus for the first time, including the realization that this is her life. Given her fluctuating schedule, she says her body often struggles to catch up or get into a rhythm, but over time, she has become better at prioritizing self-care. Her ideal day off (“Which is rare,” she says) includes morning coffee or tea, Pilates, a sauna or bath, dinner with friends and organizing her home. “That’s healing for me,” she says.
Understandably, she was thinking of such things while getting her hair and makeup done earlier today as she prepared for her Billboard shoot, and they inspired a thought that she shared with her team. “I said if I ever had a chance to tell people that are in their teenage [years] that look up to this job or this world, all I can say from experience is, ‘This is your life — and you have a whole lifetime to live.’ Not the next 10 years, not the next three years. It’s amazing to chase after your dream, but don’t forget to live.”
For now, Jennie is taking her own advice. When asked if her solo debut is the start of a continued solo career, her answer is succinct: “Let’s not put pressure on me. I want to live my present for now, and then let me ease myself into the next thing.”
Has she ever done that before?
“Oh, definitely not,” she says. “Every day has made me into who I am right now.”
This story appears in the Jan. 11, 2025, issue of Billboard.
In July, Jamaica’s most influential living artist walked out of a Kingston prison after 13 years, drove straight to his mother’s house for a tearful reunion over steamed fish and okra — and dove immediately into preparations for Freedom Street: his first performance since his release, and the biggest concert the country would see in nearly 50 years.
Locked up for the murder of Clive “Lizard” Williams, Vybz Kartel went away as a 35-year-old man at the height of his career with seven children, two of whom would make their own musical debuts in 2014. But even behind bars, he never stopped making music — managing to secretly record and release five projects that would reach the top 10 of Billboard’s Reggae Albums chart.
“Being in prison, you can’t feel sorry for yourself. I didn’t have time to do that. I had kids to feed. I had family to take care of. I had health issues, too,” Kartel tells Billboard in a private room at Downsound Records, the live-entertainment producer behind Freedom Street, in Kingston. “There was no time to be weak. You just fight the case and do the right thing.”
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Now, just days before Freedom Street — his New Year’s Eve show that will draw over 35,000 people to Kingston’s National Stadium — Kartel tells me he’s been holding daily three-hour rehearsals to ensure a “Taylor Swift- or Madonna-style” show while he records a new album at several studios, including one his children built for him while he was away. As I follow the Teacha around Kingston over the course of a sunny December day, fans of all ages stop him to profess their love and grovel for selfies — and if they aren’t trying to get his attention, they keep their eyes glued to him and hum whatever song of his comes to their minds.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Vybz Kartel is the most influential Jamaican recording artist since Bob Marley. But understanding Kartel’s singular career means grasping that his pop stardom and underground dominance have always worked in tandem. For every song of his that became a global mainstay, one of his raw, evocative mixtapes simultaneously ruled the streets of Kingston. Born Adidja Azim Palmer in Portmore, Jamaica — a coastal municipality about 15 miles outside of Kingston — Kartel has racked up 1.58 billion official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate, making him one of dancehall’s commercial giants. But his countless controversies and towering sociopolitical influence have also made him a divisive cult figure.
His ’90s Alliance era cemented him as one of dancehall star Bounty Killer’s protégés and the genre’s fastest-rising star, wielding an impressive songwriting approach that blended his private and public personas through riveting gangster narratives and sexually explicit anthems. In the early to mid-2000s, Black Kartel reigned, with spunky, lewd hits like “It Bend Like Banana” launching his near-absolute rule over Jamaican society, which culminated in a seismic yearslong beef with fellow dancehall star Mavado (born David Brooks). By the dawn of the ’10s, White Kartel — by this point, the skin-bleaching he controversially sung of in 2011’s “Cake Soap” had visibly altered his skin tone (and spawned a new nickname) — had achieved several bona fide global crossover hits despite Jamaica’s banning of “daggering” songs (extremely sexually explicit tracks).
Fittingly, the Kartel I meet today is clearly a changed man. This newest iteration of Kartel is calmer and more collected; he seems firmly in his Unc era — cream Amiri beanie, custom tour T-shirt and a naughty joke always in his back pocket. His excitement for his upcoming show beams through the black sunglasses he never takes off, and the reverent air of gratitude around him is unmistakable. Kartel and his co-accused — Shawn Campbell, Kahira Jones and Andre St. John — have always maintained their innocence, and their second chance at freedom was hard-fought. According to a unanimous Court of Appeal ruling in summer 2024, the trial judge marred the original guilty verdict by allowing the jury to proceed despite knowing that one juror had attempted to bribe the others.
“Towards the end of my incarceration, I started connecting more with God. That’s why I tattooed ‘love God’ on my forehead,” Kartel reveals. “Nobody can tell me that God isn’t real. Ten years ago, I would have been saying something else, but God is real.”
Destinee Condison
Kartel’s return marks the start of a new era for both him and dancehall at large. In a Downsound Records rehearsal room, a poster displays five different Kartels with varying hairstyles, fashions and skin tones, each representative of a different chapter of his illustrious career. But whether he’s sporting a New York fitted or showing off his locs, the 48-year-old man known to his fans as Worl’ Boss has always been a chameleon, unafraid to alter his appearance to deepen his own mythos.
Inspired by dancehall icon Ninjaman and uncles who “used to DJ around the sound system,” Kartel began “writing 10 to 15 songs a day” as a teenager and released his debut single, “Love Fat Woman,” in 1993, which eventually landed him a spot in The Alliance, a group of dancehall DJs. “I’ve been fascinated with writing ever since I found out Babyface wrote [Karyn White’s 1989 hit] ‘Superwoman,’” he recounts. “As a kid, I was like, ‘How does a man write a song for a woman?’”
Two major factors ignited Kartel’s mainstream ascent in 2003: The release of his debut album, Up 2 Di Time, and a contentious clash with Ninjaman at Sting, Jamaica’s longest-running one-night-only reggae/dancehall showcase. At the time, Sean Paul was leading the early 2000s stateside dancehall crossover wave, but Kartel’s gritty “gun tunes” and X-rated “gyal tunes” were a far cry from the sugary-sweet riddims that made their way to top 40 radio. He smartly gilded his edgier lyrics with slick wordplay and head-spinning flows; Kartel could, and still can, dictate Jamaica’s culture with the flip of a single phrase. But some of those lyrics courted levels of controversy that threatened his — and the genre’s — continued crossover: In 2004, the U.K. Music of Black Origin Awards revoked Kartel’s nomination for best reggae act, alongside fellow Jamaican dancehall artist Elephant Man, over homophobic lyrics — a longtime point of tension in the genre as a whole. Twenty years later, speaking to Billboard, Kartel alludes to an evolution in his point of view: “The world has changed, and sometimes, you got to change with the times.”
By 2006, Kartel’s highly publicized split with The Alliance culminated in him joining the Portmore Empire — a collective of artists hailing from the neighborhood and signed to his Adidjahiem Records, which he’d established three years prior — leading to a feud with The Alliance’s Mavado, who took it upon himself to reply to Kartel’s disses. From 2006 to 2009, Kartel and Mavado lobbed searing disses at one another over the hottest riddims; Kartel even once carried a coffin with Mavado’s name on it onstage. Jamaica’s youth divided themselves between the camps — Kartel’s Palestine-referencing Gaza crew and Mavado’s hood-repping Gully clan — and, in certain cases, committed street violence in their names. On Dec. 7, 2009, in an effort to end that strife and unite the country’s youth, the two officially ended their feud with a joint performance; the next day, both met with Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding.
Like any good dancehall clash, the Gaza-Gully feud only boosted Kartel’s popularity. Buoyed by its irresistible interpolation of Ne-Yo’s “Miss Independent,” Kartel and Spice’s intensely carnal “Ramping Shop” duet reached No. 76 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 2009, marking both artists’ charts debut. His crossover continued with 2010’s “Straight Jeans & Fitted” and “Clarks,” the latter a team-up with Popcaan, Kartel’s most successful protégé — a testament to his influence on late-’10s dancehall crossover artists. But as Kartel finally started to snag true crossover smashes, he continued oscillating between being dancehall’s global face and an underground provocateur: In 2011, he became the first musician to receive an artist-specific ban from Guyanese radio.
Kartel calls Lil Wayne his “favorite rapper,” and his life outside the studio mirrored that of the hip-hop legend in 2011. Charged with two separate murder counts, Kartel was found not guilty of murdering Jamaican businessman Barrington Burton by one jury, while a different jury found him guilty of the murder of Clive “Lizard” Williams. On April 3, 2014, Kartel was sentenced to life in prison after a 65-day trial, one of the longest in Jamaica’s history.
While incarcerated, Kartel clandestinely recorded — with the help of an iPad and his producer, Linton “TJ” White — a litany of projects, including 2016’s King of the Dancehall, which spawned “Fever,” arguably the biggest dancehall crossover hit of the latter 2010s. “Fever” entered two Billboard airplay charts and has earned over 104 million official on-demand U.S. streams — a win for Jamaica in a year when non-Jamaican artists such as Drake and Justin Bieber had propelled dancehall back onto top 40 radio. But between his incarceration and dancehall’s nonstandardized approach to music distribution (compilations of years-old singles tend to lord over regular studio album cycles), Kartel’s impressive consumption numbers don’t paint the full portrait of his cultural impact.
“Freedom Street [will] bring dancehall back as a serious contender in the international market,” says Downsound Records owner and CEO Joe Bogdanovich, who also notes that 700 police officers and private security workers were enlisted for the event. “[Kartel] is more conscious of good over evil and he’s doing something really positive for the youth and himself. That kind of positivity is going to make Jamaica uplift fans around the world.”
Destinee Condison
The concert — which featured explosive appearances by Spice, Popcaan, Busta Rhymes and more dancehall heavyweights — set the stage for Kartel’s incredibly busy 2025. A deluxe version of his 2015 Viking (Vybz Is King) album is due later in January, while a proper comeback album is currently in the works. “Kartel won’t say nothing. Then, tomorrow, he drops a banger that he recorded last night or the day before,” producer Cordell “Skatta” Burrell jokes. “So there’s not much I can say!”
Outside of the studio, Kartel can finally focus on the kinds of major life activities he couldn’t address in prison — like treating his Graves’ disease and wedding planning (he got engaged in November). The evolved, post-incarceration Kartel is ready to reclaim his throne — but don’t expect a run for Parliament. “Everybody loves me on both sides — I want to keep it that way!” he quips.
“Freedom Street is about Vybz Kartel’s journey for the past 13 years,” Worl’ Boss explains. “The concept is me coming out of prison, the road to that freedom and celebrating with the fans as I go into the new year a free man. We were planning this concert before I even got released. I’ve been prepping for this concert since birth.”
What was your first time back in the studio like after you were released?
The first song I recorded when I came out was at my house. When I got arrested, my kids were [so small]. Now, I’m out and recording in a studio that my children built.
How exactly did you record while incarcerated?
Initially, I figured out how to record using an iPad but a lot of times, the sound was metallic because the cell didn’t have padding like a recording studio. The sound bounced all over the place. Then, I figured out that I could use my mattress as a sponge over my head.
Me and Linton “TJ” White produced the riddim for “Fever.” At the time — don’t come for me! — I used to love watching Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries. Every time this show ended, a voice would say, “XOXO, Gossip Girl,” so that’s where I got the concept from to start “Fever” with “XOXO, my love is very special.” I recorded the song line by line, looking outside to see if anyone was coming. One line, look outside; two lines, look outside. It was necessary at the time to do what I love most. I would send the iPad out to TJ and then he got it mixed by Dunw3ll and the rest is history.
The entire process probably took a half hour. If I was in a studio, it would take maybe five or six minutes.
Did you ever get caught?
Never. I had people in other cells. If someone was coming, they would knock on the grill. [The guards] found a recording device lots of times, but they never caught me in the act of recording.
Were you aware of just how big “Fever” was even while you were away?
Not initially, but when we released the video and the numbers started going up, I [understood]. I wanted to shoot a video for “Colouring This Life,” but TJ thought how I was flowing on “Fever” was tough. I was like, “Alright, do whatever, man,” and he shot the “Fever” video. Bro, in a few months… Jesus Christ! I was like, “Good choice!” (Laughs.)
Being in prison, you can’t feel sorry for yourself. I didn’t have time to do that. I had kids to feed. I had family to take care of. I had health issues, too. There was no time to be weak; you just fight the case and do the right thing. It was crazy seeing the impact the song had, especially when it [got certified] gold [by the RIAA].
How far into your sentence were you when you started recording new material?
In 2013, we started running out of prerecorded material, so we started recording new songs. I dabbled in it one time in 2012 with “Back to Life,” but the quality [wasn’t the best]. Young people were in the comment sections of the new songs like, “No way Kartel can see the future!” (Laughs.) They knew what was up.
What went through your head when you learned your sentence was overturned?
We had been fighting for so many years, so the feeling was overwhelming. The other guys I was charged with started getting ready and putting their clothes on, but then the judge said, “The case is overturned, but we are sending it back to Jamaica [from the United Kingdom] to let them decide if they’re going to retry the case or throw it out.” I was just listening because, as a ghetto yute, I’m used to disappointment. I don’t get excited too quickly. It’s never over till the fat lady sings, right? I was sitting with my legs crossed in my cell, listening to the radio and talking to my lawyer on my cell in my cell — get it? (Laughs.) He was like, “Yo, I think this is it,” and I said, “I’m going to put my clothes on.”
Immediately as I hung up, it was like an earthquake. [The decision] came over the radio and everyone in the prison was listening. Imagine 2,000 people shaking the bars and rumbling and celebrating — that’s when I knew, “Yeah. This is it.” I put my clothes on, jumped up, they came for me, I packed and left. I didn’t even bring anything with me; I gave my sneakers and TVs and stuff to the guys still in there.
What was the first meal you had after your release?
Steamed fish with okra. My mom made it for me. I went to her house first before I went anywhere else. It was a tear-jerking moment; tears of joy, and, in a sense, tears of sadness to know that I missed out on so much with my mother and my kids. [Kartel has five sons and two daughters.] My mom didn’t say anything to me when I went away because I never made her come visit me. It’s not her fault that I was in there. Why would I want her to see me in that place? I only saw her once during my incarceration; I was so sick that they had to take me to the hospital. I said to the superintendent, “Can you grant me a special visit, so I can see her?” And she and my dad came to the hospital.
How does present-day Kartel compare to the man that went away 13 years ago?
The Vybz Kartel of now is more chill and more mature. He’s more laid-back. The one that went in was a beast. I’m still a beast musically, but Iooking back at my personal evolution, I like who I am now. The Vybz Kartel of old gave me musical fame and fortune, so I don’t have any regrets about him. But I don’t want to go back to that Kartel. I’m good right here. That evolution was something I never knew I needed, but I did — especially having faith in God and believing and seeing him work.
I was born in the ’70s, so of course I grew up going to church. I started going around 11 years old, and, like most Jamaicans, when you reach a certain age, you start to fuss about going. I haven’t been to church yet since I’ve come home; every day my mom is asking me, but I’m going soon, mom!
Destinee Condison
How has Kingston changed from when you first went away?
The roads look different. The other day, my fiancée [Sidem Öztürk] had to tell me where to drive, and I’m like, “You’re from England!” But she’s been here for two years while I was locked down, so she got to know the place. Even on the highway going to the country, she had to drive me. It’s like relearning your own country. It’s fun, though! The other day, I literally got lost. I couldn’t believe it. I eventually figured it out, but so much has changed.
In hip-hop, there have been a few instances where prosecutors tried to use artists’ lyrics against them, which has sparked interesting debates about music censorship. Do you have any thoughts?
I don’t think art should be censored for the artist. It should be censored for the consumer. For example, “Vybz Kartel does adult songs, don’t let your kids listen.” But you can’t tell me that, because your children have ears, I can’t sing what I want to sing. That’s rubbish. The same shop that sells sweets also sells alcohol. If you catch your 10-year-old son drinking a beer, you’re not going to run to the beer-maker like, “What the hell are you doing?” So, if you catch your child listening to Kartel, don’t come to me. That’s a “you” problem.
Drake has called you one of his “biggest inspirations.” How do you think he handled his feud with Kendrick Lamar last year?
I’m not a fan of Kendrick. I don’t even listen to Kendrick, so I wouldn’t know. What does he rap? I saw it on the internet, but no disrespect to the dude, I hear him, but I don’t listen to him. Drake is more in tune with Jamaica and the culture. Drake is a better and bigger artist.
When did you and Mavado last speak?
When I came out! But we spoke a lot of times while I was inside. His son is also in the same prison that I was in. His appeal is coming up next year. Our sons grew up together, were in the same class at school and went to each other’s houses for birthdays. They’re still friends to this day. Me and David cool.
Since you went away, Afrobeats has exploded in global popularity. How in tune with that world are you?
Shatta Wale, Wizkid and Burna Boy are my three favorite Afrobeats artists. I like Tems too. Afrobeats is nice, you can just vibe to it. I think Buju Banton was saying something [controversial] about it [during an interview last year], but I understand where he’s coming from. Buju is a dancehall/reggae artist, so he’s going to be singing more conscious stuff about society. But there is a space for happy, fun music.
Destinee Condison
How can dancehall score another crossover moment?
What they do now is called trap dancehall, so it’s going to take a minute for the big markets to get used to it. It’s the kids’ time now. I like Kraff Gad and Pablo YG. Once the sound catches on in mainstream markets — London, New York, Toronto — I think they will have success.
There was a big thing a few years ago — I was even a part of it — with older artists saying, “This music is not going to go anywhere!” The music that runs the place is dictated by the kids at all times. That doesn’t mean the legends can be removed, but don’t fight the kids. Let them do what they’re doing.
I think the lyrics could [also] be a bit more tolerant and less X-rated. Says Kartel! (Laughs.) Afrobeats made such a big global impact because it can be played anywhere and for all ages. The lyrics need to be more commercialized and more tolerant, and sky’s the limit. Jamaica gave the world five genres: reggae, rocksteady, ska, mento and dancehall. We had hands in creating hip-hop and reggaetón. We’re not short of talent.
You’re nominated for your first Grammy, for best reggae album for Party With Me. How does it feel to finally earn that recognition?
If I wasn’t incarcerated, I would have been nominated already. But I understand, why would they want to nominate a dude in prison? I know if I wasn’t arrested, based on the trajectory that my career was on, I would have definitely won. But I’m very, very grateful.
[The 2024 Party With Me EP] was done in prison. I was under a vibe and got some beats from [producer] Din Din. It was getting closer to crunch time because the case was now in England. I was writing to keep my mind occupied, ended up with these songs and said, “Let me just put them on a little EP.” Bam, Grammy.
How’s the process of organizing your catalog been going?
Slowly but surely. I’m going to shoot videos for a lot of those songs I released while in prison. I’m in talks right now with a few American companies that want to give me a distribution platform so I can sign artists and get Jamaican dancehall music released in a more standardized way. We’re also working on a new album.
Destinee Condison
When will you be back in the United States?
We put the documents in. It would be a good look for all of us who are nominated to be at the Grammys. I’m headlining Wireless Festival in England this year. I’m already booked for some German shows in July. My No. 1 market was always America, but, over the last two years, my biggest streaming market is now the U.K. My fiancée is from the U.K. too. [The couple met during his incarceration in 2015 after she found him by “stalking his babymother’s Instagram”; he moved her to Jamaica in 2022.] I think that has a lot to do with the love, like, “Oh, wow. He’s dating one of us.”
When’s the wedding?
We wanted to do it in January on my birthday, but we’re going to wait because of unforeseen circumstances. Maybe Valentine’s Day. I’m such a romantic, right?
How did you prepare for Freedom Street?
We did roughly three hours of rehearsal each day, but the first one was four hours and eight minutes — and we still didn’t DJ half of the songs. We sacrificed around 1,000 songs and ended up down to three hours. And that’s just like my performance. Everybody and their mom wanted to come. And I have no problem with that anyway, because it’s New Year’s! Let’s ring it in in a star-studded manner.
Where are you most excited to perform?
The entire Caribbean and New York — that’s Jamaica outside of Jamaica.
Speaking of New York, would you ever hop on a song with Cardi B? She recently jumped to your defense when people criticized your post-release appearance.
I love Cardi! We got a song coming out next year. We are actually in the process of writing it. Even if I have to walk, I’m performing that song in New York!
In North Miami’s Electric Air Studios, surrounded by a collection of Gibson guitars, a grand piano and various percussion instruments, Edgar Barrera earlier in December found himself in an unusual position: in the spotlight.
“I’m not used to this,” Barrera admits, dressed in Prada shoes and a Chanel jacket. His voice carries a hint of vulnerability as he debates whether to smile or maintain a serious demeanor for the camera. This rare moment of hesitation from a man who is usually so sure-footed in the recording studio underscores the paradox of Edgar Barrera: a towering figure in Latin music who is most often behind the scenes.
This year, the 34-year-old further cemented his formidable impact in the music industry. He ends 2024 with 23 song credits as a songwriter and 19 as a producer on the Billboard Hot 100, with tracks ranging from pop stars like Maluma, Shakira and Karol G to música mexicana mavericks like Peso Pluma, Grupo Frontera and Carín León. He just secured his second consecutive nomination for the Grammy Awards’ songwriter of the year, standing out as the only Latino and only producer to achieve this distinction for two straight years. He also garnered three Latin Grammys, which included consecutive wins for songwriter of the year and producer of the year. Barrera, who topped Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs Producers year-end chart in 2023 and finishes 2024 at No. 2, is a key player designing the sound of modern-day Latin music.
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“Edgar is someone who knows what he wants, and that, to me, is something that sets him apart from all other songwriters,” says Peso Pluma, who is with Barrera in the studio the day of this photo shoot. Barrera has collaborated with the música mexicana hit-maker on several tracks, including “14-14” and “Santal 33,” from Peso’s groundbreaking album Éxodo (2024), which debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200. “He is someone very dedicated with a lot of values, a very educated person who respects you musically as an artist,” adds the “Vino Tinto” hit-maker.
Peso is one of the many artists who have praised Barrera’s steadfast work ethic and humility. “He is one of the most important producers of our time and yet he is one of the most humble human beings,” Maluma says. “He is the same person as the day he started and that’s an amazing quality to have.” The Colombian superstar attributed many of his hits to his collaboration with Barrera, including “Según Quién” with Carín León, “Por Qué Será” with Grupo Frontera and most recently “Cosas Pendientes.”
Over a decade into his career, Barrera’s adeptness in straddling diverse musical genres has rendered him one of the most coveted songwriters and producers in Latin music. His portfolio boasts extensive work with household names like Shakira (“Soltera”), Christian Nodal (“No Te Contaron Mal”), Grupo Firme (“Ya Supérame”), Camilo (“Vida de Rico”), Becky G (“Chanel”) and Marc Anthony (“De Vuelta Pa’ la Vuelta”), in addition to non-Latin stars such as Ariana Grande (“Boyfriend” with Social House), Madonna (“Medellín” with Maluma), XXXTentacion and Lil Pump (“Arms Around You” with Maluma and Swae Lee) and Shawn Mendes (his “KESI” remix with Camilo). In January 2021, he made history by topping four Billboard genre charts — pop, rhythm, tropical and regional Mexican airplay — with four different tracks, an unprecedented feat for a Latin songwriter.
But how did this “border kid” raised between Roma, Texas, and Miguel Allende, Tamaulipas, Mexico, harness his unique cross-cultural experiences to rise as one of the most in-demand songwriters and producers in Latin music?
Barrera grew up in a home filled with music. His father, a member of the 1970s grupera band Mister Chivo from San Miguel Allende, instilled in him a deep passion for music; and discovering his uncle’s songwriting credits on an Elvis Crespo album further fueled Barrera’s musical ambitions.
“In my house, there was always music playing all the time. All those nights I would see my dad listening and listening to vinyl because his band recorded a lot of covers,” Barrera says. “One time, my uncle bought an Elvis Crespo record that had one of his songs in the credits, and I realized that there is a part in music where you don’t have to be the artist but part of the artist’s career.”
Mary Beth Koeth
While he was raised in Mexico, he regularly crossed back into the United States for schooling — a common occurrence in border towns. However, Barrera’s passion for Latin music often put him at odds with the school’s more rigid musical curriculum. “I remember that in school I was scolded all the time. It was forbidden to play grupera songs or any other type of music other than the classical music they taught us, or jazz,” he recalls. Yet, this didn’t deter him, and together with like-minded classmates, they indulged in the joys of playing songs like the Mexican ska-punk track “Pachuco” from Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del 5to Patio, “Carnavalito” or the Mexican cumbia of “Juana La Cubana” by Fito Olivares y Su Grupo. During these school years, he played the saxophone. (As a preteen, he had already learned both bass and guitar.)
“All these young musicians from across the Rio Grande Valley would gather to compete and form a unified band made up of the most talented musicians from each school,” recalls Marco Roel Rangel, a fellow bandmate from McAllen, Texas, who remembers Barrera as a standout musician nearly 20 years ago. “Once a year you’d get to play in a band comprised of all the other top musicians from other schools for one weekend. The Roma [Edgar’s school] kids, who were formidable competitors, would walk into the rehearsal space playing a synchronized song they had prepared called ‘Carnavalito.’ Almost like [saying], ‘Hey, we’re from Roma and we’ve entered the building,’ ” Roel Rangel says. “It was unusual to hear this Latin tribal sound. But Roma brought that Latin flavor; going from Tchaikovsky and Pavel to ‘El Humahuaqueño’ is a vibe.”
“I remember we were the rebels at school when we played those,” Barrera says. “We felt like we were playing the forbidden, and at the end of the day it was what I liked to play.”
When it came to college, Barrera initially enrolled as an electronic engineering student and took a classical guitar class. “That’s when I started studying music more seriously.” His guitar teacher urged him to audition for the Berklee College of Music. Instead, he took a detour to the Miami music studio of Colombian songwriter-producer Andrés Castro, a revered figure in Latin music known for penning some of Carlos Vives’ greatest hits.
“I met Edgar through a friend of mine, Luigi, who worked with A.B. Quintanilla. He was 18, 19 years old and was studying electronic engineering. He wanted to do an internship because it was going to be worth it for his career. They were deciding whether he should study that or music,” Castro recalls.
Castro, almost offhand, told Barrera he was welcome to come work in his studio. Barrera took him at his word and drove from Texas to Miami. “Obviously, it was a life change to come to live here. He was committed to his career to the fullest. And the first thing I can highlight about him was his attitude of service.
“He arrived and instead of thinking, ‘Well, it’s an internship, I’m not getting paid, I’m going to stay put,’ he was looking to see who he could make a coffee for. If he had to take an artist and pick them up at the airport, he would pick them up,” Castro continues. This eagerness to serve, learn and genuinely connect with others in the industry rapidly transformed Barrera from a hopeful intern to a respected collaborator.
“I started from the bottom, being the one who went and brought everyone’s food, the one who served the coffee,” Barrera says. “But thanks to that I also learned to never look down on anyone’s work, much less the one who serves me coffee, because maybe tomorrow he could be the next producer of the year, or songwriter of the year, as it happened to me. I had the opportunity to meet many artists and industry executives.”
Mary Beth Koeth
Castro remembers the bonds that were nurtured in the studio. “When an artist like Carlos Vives came to the studio, we would do more than just make music. We discussed life, what he desired, what he was searching for, his thoughts, the moment he was living, the music he was listening to and things that had caught his attention. That’s where the creative process began. Edgar saw a lot of that in the studio.”
The Colombian producer also vividly recalls a defining moment early in Barrera’s career. During a session with the renowned Panamanian singer-songwriter Omar Alfanno, the young Barrera, who was typically expected to just observe, proposed an idea for a song that Castro and Alfanno were struggling with. Initially surprised, Alfanno cautioned him, “Young man, that’s not how things are done,” Castro remembers, highlighting the respect required during songwriting sessions. However, impressed by Barrera’s insight, Alfanno gave him a chance, marking Barrera’s official entry into the world of professional songwriting.
As Barrera’s career flourished, Latin music also underwent dynamic shifts. In the late 2010s, while música urbana’s popularity soared — with reggaetón’s commercial growth eclipsing other Latin genres — regional Mexican music began to carve out a new and thrilling identity. While the south-of-the-U.S.-Mexico border genre had remained an enduring force within Spanish-speaking communities in the United States and Mexico for decades, a regional Mexican-urbano hybrid began to ascend Billboard’s U.S. Latin charts, led by Natanael Cano, Junior H and Fuerza Regida, followed by Peso Pluma.
Parallel to this movement was the music of Christian Nodal, a Sonoran superstar who innovates within the confines of música mexicana with his unique blend known as “mariacheño,” a fusion of mariachi and norteño music. His groundbreaking approach reached a new height in 2021, when “Botella Tras Botella,” a collaboration with Mexican rapper Gera MX — co-written and co-produced by Barrera — became the first regional Mexican music track to enter the all-genre Hot 100 chart.
Nodal praises the creativity and connection present in his work with Barrera: “Working with Edgar was always a lot of fun. There was always an instant connection on the songs. He came from the urbano school, and bringing him into my world was always a challenge,” Nodal explains. “I think that’s why we were able to reach a middle ground between urbano and regional. We always had very good chemistry, and we found the lyrics and melodies that could touch the heart so that people could enjoy it and feel it. It was always genuine.”
Among Barrera’s major bets was the 2022 signing of Grupo Frontera, a popular six-piece band from Edinburg, Texas, to BorderKid Records — an imprint the songwriter had launched earlier that year. Grupo Frontera was fresh off its first major hit, “No Se Va,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot Latin Songs chart.
“He took a chance on us when we were just starting out,” Grupo Frontera says in a statement. “We didn’t even know what we were doing and he has been with us every step of the way. Our bond with Edgar is extra special because we are from the same town. We have similar values and traditions, and he really understands us. That’s reflected in the music we make together.” Barrera adds: “They share with me a very similar growth because we grew up on the border, we have many friends in common, they are from my town. We have the same values, and we understand each other very well when we work.”
Mary Beth Koeth
“Aside from being technically one of the best and very detail-oriented — everyone who works with me knows I am, and he is always up to the task — the amazing thing about Edgar is his ability to bring together artists, composers and producers and always make sure that things get done with the right team to achieve the best result,” says Shakira, who collaborated with Barrera on her latest hits such as “Soltera,” “El Jefe” with Fuerza Regida and “(Entre Paréntesis)” with Grupo Frontera. “Many songwriters do not combine all the elements and ensure the ideas are carried out, but he has as much of a business mind as he does an artistic one.”
“I’m a creative before I’m an executive, and I give a lot of freedom to artists,” Barrera adds, emphasizing his commitment to his relationships with them. “When it comes to business, I try to educate the songwriter,” he says. “I help them make their own publishing company, and then we make a business together — your publisher with my publisher. I try not to be their owner but partner. We [at BorderKid Records] are a tool for them, to help them make more money, and that they own their music always.”
Within this framework of mutual growth, Barrera continues to push musical boundaries. “A lot of new experiments with artists are coming; we’re experimenting with new things,” he says about upcoming music.
Barrera’s role fluctuates between mentor and musical collaborator and innovator. Recently, for example, he spent time with Shakira as she prepares for her 2025 Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran stadium tour, making new arrangements for her live band. He’s been working on new music with Peso Pluma, and, also, with Karol G. “The day after [working with Peso], I worked with Karol another three days in a row, and it’s always a breath of fresh air making corridos with Peso one day to then doing another kind of music with Karol,” Barrera says. “I like it because I don’t get to do the same thing with one artist and then the other.”
However, despite the exhilarating pace of his professional life, Barrera is embracing a new personal development: fatherhood. “I just became a dad,” he says proudly. “I’m in another stage for the first time in life looking for that balance.”
I asked Barrera if his songwriting process has changed since. “Yes, a lot,” he says. “Now I’m thinking, like when I write a lyric, ‘When my daughter hears it, she’s going to think this was her dad.’ You think twice. But I’ve always tried to give a good message in the songs.”
Bro, everything I thought I knew was gone. I thought I had a grasp on s–t. The songs that’s been out three weeks went up more than the classic records.”
It’s an early Tuesday afternoon in mid-November and Tyler, The Creator is still in disbelief. Just a few weeks earlier, he’d released his new album, Chromakopia, and the response was unlike any in his entire career. “It’s been a f–king crack in my reality, for this album where I’m just crying about being 33 like a b–ch.”
Three days before our conversation, he’d performed a set largely dedicated to the album at Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, a two-day music festival in Los Angeles that he started in 2012 and continues to curate. This year was the 10th edition, a triumphant moment for an event that began with seven acts and now feels like a smaller, more walkable Coachella for locals — complete with music and food and rides and merch and fashionable selections from Tyler’s line GOLF — in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.
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At Flog Gnaw, Tyler took the stage atop a shipping container, wearing a green suit fit for a bellhop in a slightly bizarro Emerald City, a bust-like mask with cutout holes for his eyes and an Afro with two peaks and a valley between them — an ensemble with hints of Janet Jackson circa Rhythm Nation (at least from the neck down), and which Tyler described to me as both “Captain Crunch” and “a gay dictator.” It’s the uniform of the character he takes on for his new album, both haunting and militant, the latest alter ego the Hawthorne, Calif., native has assumed. After performing the first four tracks, he paused to thank those in the audience for their love — and let them know that Chromakopia was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a third straight week. Only Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter did three straight weeks in 2024. “To do that, at my 10th carnival, in my f–king city, what are we talking about?” The crowd cheered for him and themselves: Together, they did it.
Tyler released his album on a Monday instead of the standard Friday; he wanted people to start their week with Chromakopia instead of in the middle of the night as their weekend began. The decision reflected three distinct sides of his personality — putting the music over everything, rejecting industry norms and a confidence that, regardless of the day of the week, his fans will show up. “The hope was that people listened actively, not alongside thousands of other things that come out every Friday,” says Jen Mallory, president of Columbia Records, which has been releasing Tyler’s music since 2017’s Flower Boy. “Of course, shortening the release week is not an instinctive idea in today’s market, but when you deliver the creative T did alongside the album — visual trailers, touring announcements, live events and more — it was undeniable. And the absolutely massive response indicates that his hypothesis was more than correct.”
“I kept telling n—as for a year-and-a-half, ‘Whatever I put out next, I’m putting that b–ch out on a Monday,’ ” Tyler says. “I’m not doing that stupid Friday s–t. We’re putting that s–t out on Monday and everyone’s going to know about it.” The plan worked, with Tyler hitting the top spot that week, even while handicapping himself with a shortened sales week. Only Beyoncé, Swift, Carpenter, Travis Scott, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar had bigger first weeks in 2024. “I knew people would be interested,” he says with a confusion that he’s embracing. “But I didn’t expect this.”
Luis Perez
Following his short Flog Gnaw speech, he transitioned into songs from his catalog. But even as fans enjoyed his earlier material — belting every word of “Dogtooth,” moshing to “Lumberjack” — there was a palpable eagerness for Tyler to get back to the new album. The opposite is typically true at festivals; an artist’s faithful primarily in attendance to see their favorite bring the hits to life. But that Saturday night, Tyler was performing for people who hadn’t turned off Chromakopia since its release 20 days prior. And as he marched through his eighth studio album, the crowd was right with him, screaming along to every lyric, ad-lib, chant — even Tyler’s recordings of his mother that appear throughout the album and rang out as if she was the voice of the nighttime California sky.
Tyler and Sexyy Red traded verses and threw ass at the crowd during “Sticky,” a big fun song built around horns and whistles and beating on the cafeteria table. “I wanted something for the drill team at the f–king pep rallies,” Tyler told me, “something for the band to play at halftime.” His wish came true before his performance; Jackson State University’s Sonic Boom of the South broke it out earlier in the day in its matchup against Alabama State. He brought out ScHoolboy Q — whom Tyler describes as one of his few real friends in the music industry — for “Thought I Was Dead,” and, 10 minutes later, he performed “Balloon” with Doechii and Daniel Caesar, fueling a “Doechii, Doechii” chant and thanking Caesar for his help in finishing Chromakopia. The love and appreciation was at an all-time high, both in the crowd and onstage.
“I have friends that’s been to about every show,” Tyler says after Flog Gnaw is over, “and they were like, ‘That’s the loudest crowd I’ve ever heard.’ ”
I was prepared for the adoration Tyler gets in his city because I saw him in June at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, up the street from where he grew up. It wasn’t even his show — this was The Pop Out: Ken & Friends, Lamar’s first concert since his beef began in the spring with Drake. “I wasn’t even supposed to go — I was in Atlanta working on this album,” Tyler explains. “But I landed that morning and couldn’t miss this s–t. And I don’t even get FOMO at all, n—a — I’ll go to sleep. But I’m cool with Kenny and Dave [Free] and Tim [Hinshaw] from Free Lunch. So I went home, showered and ran straight there.”
He performed two songs, including “Earfquake” from his 2019 album, IGOR. Seemingly everyone at the Forum knew every word. “I genuinely think I’m better at my R&B singing s–t as a whole than my rap s–t,” he tells me. “And those are usually my biggest records.” And when Tyler screamed “Say what!,” the capacity crowd turned into the Southern California Community Choir, belting, “Don’t leeeeeeeeeeeeeeave, it’s my fault.”
Tyler, The Creator photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Luis Perez
For years, Tyler has continued to complicate what a pop star can embody. He’s taken on different personas, different looks, rapped about different things and keeps getting bigger and bigger. But as he’s become one of popular music’s most reliable and admired mavericks, he’s existed outside of the L.A. hip-hop zeitgeist. The city wasn’t a leading identifier for him, at least compared with a Lamar, a YG, a Vince Staples. But he’s central to the current historic run of Los Angeles music, as well as the community that makes L.A. one of the special hubs for hip-hop.
“I’m really from the city,” he says. As he continues to talk about home, his accent gets thicker and thicker. That love for Los Angeles is why he started Flog Gnaw in the first place: “Outside of sports stuff, it felt like L.A. didn’t have something that was its own thing.” With this year’s fantasy lineup — including Staples, Kaytranada, Playboi Carti, André 3000, Erykah Badu, Denzel Curry, Faye Webster, Blood Orange and Syd — Tyler’s wish to at least somewhat correct this came true. “I’m happy that Flog Gnaw has folks from the city feeling like this is theirs,” he says a bit coyly. “At least that’s what it feels like every year.”
“I’m not who they were introduced to at 20. I’m not even who I was a year ago,” Tyler says, sounding a bit annoyed at the notion that he possibly could be. “When they’re like, ‘I want the old version,’ I know it’s because they’re still there. But I’m not. And I’m OK with it because my identity doesn’t rest in a version of myself.”
I first saw Tyler, The Creator perform in 2012 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan. His rap collective, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), had become an online sensation over the last few years — not just for its transgressive music, but also for antics that felt like the Black evolution of Jackass — and there was a level of buzz around the show, both from the rap-fan concertgoers and the young music bloggers eager to see if the phenomenon would translate offline.
While some in the audience anticipated possible appearances by erstwhile members Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean, it was Tyler, the gang’s de facto leader and chief provocateur, who defined the show. He’d mostly been known for his 2009 debut album, Bastard, and the Odd Future mixtape Radical that came the following year, both notable for their distinctive production and shocking lyrics. But Tyler’s true star turn came in 2011 on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Odd Future’s first nationally televised appearance. Beforehand, Tyler tweeted, “I want to scare the f–k out of old white people that live in middle f–king America.”
He kept his word, as he and fellow Odd Future rapper Hodgy Beats performed “Sandwitches” from Tyler’s second album, 2011’s Goblin, backed by The Roots. They wore ski masks and raced around the stage like it was a hardcore show as the camera occasionally panned to scattered garden gnomes and this one creepy white girl floating around the band, her long dark hair covering her face like she was in The Ring. Tyler eventually left the stage, ran to Fallon’s desk and finished the episode on the host’s back. It was a cultural reset — an undeniable TV moment.
Like many at that 2012 Hammerstein show, I wanted to feel that Fallon energy in real life. And while Tyler did replicate it there, my own takeaway was very different: Yes, he was the leader, a true frontman, but even more so, he was head cheerleader for every Odd Future member. When Frank sat at the piano and sang “White,” Tyler went to the side, pulled out a Polaroid camera and started taking photos. As Earl, in his first performance in two years, pushed through his verse on “Oldie,” Tyler brought their entire crew onstage to back him — a wall of support, a visualization of a musical and cultural movement that deserved attention.
Luis Perez
Tyler, The Creator loves to love things. He’s a fan of the highest order, a quality that often gets lost during a climb to the top and a trait of his that hasn’t wavered to this day. When I arrived for our first of two conversations for this story, a couple of days before his Flog Gnaw performance, Tyler was standing with his longtime managers, Christian and Kelly Clancy, obsessing over something on his phone. Someone had sent Tyler a Pharrell Williams performance clip, one he’d been hunting for for the last decade, and his mood was a mix of Christmas morning, winning the lottery and discovering buried treasure. His enthusiasm was entrancing: a star whose inspirations still made him feel like a little kid.
“The ones who were the North Star for me, if you generalize it, they were always left of center,” Tyler says. So it’s no shock that he decided to musically and aesthetically follow suit. “If I’m 12 and folks at school are like, ‘That’s weird, that’s wack,’ I’m like, ‘But the n—as on my walls will think it’s cool. And y’all can’t compare to them. So f–k y’all.’ ”
That mentality is part of what makes him a singular artist. He isn’t shackled by the fear of failure, the driving force that stifles creativity. The other driving force comes from his mother, Bonita Smith. “I got hugs at home,” Tyler proudly says. “I’m very lucky and grateful to have grown up in a house full of love, with a cheerleader that was like, ‘Be yourself,’ ‘Do what you want,’ ‘F–k what they think,’ ‘I’m your friend.’ ” On Chromakopia’s first track, “St. Chroma,” she says, “Don’t you ever, in your motherf–king life, dim your light for nobody.” The combination of her influence, teenage rebellion and the blueprints left by his favorite artists gave him a confidence that became foundational. “I have no choice but to be opinionated and don’t care if I look dumb as f–k. Even if I change my mind the next day.”
Chromakopia, like most of Tyler’s discography, tells the story of his life in the present. “Everything is self-indulgent to me,” he says about making songs, because he’s not doing it to be relatable or appease an audience or some former version of his fandom. Few artists have as honest and combative of a relationship with listeners as Tyler. He’s constantly vacillating between inspiration and frustration. He loves watching people respond to his tweets about favorite lyrics and songs, what grew on them, what they hated at first. Because it’s not about whether you like his music or not — it’s that he craves true engagement. “Expound on that f–king thought, b–ch,” Tyler says of the opinions, the comments, the takes, the lack of articulation about why you like or dislike something. “If I was president, the first thing I would do is take podcast mics away from n—as.”
It can be risky for artists to abandon the sound or subject matter that gave them initial fame, a decision that some fans treat as a betrayal. But this album, much like 2017’s Flower Boy, 2019’s IGOR and 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost, is a time capsule, a front-row seat to the life and mind and current creative headspace of Tyler Okonma. On Chromakopia, he explores themes ranging from monogamy (“Darling, I”) to unplanned pregnancies and fatherhood (“Hey Jane”) to the trappings of fame that run throughout the album. “It’s people saying that they can’t relate to the song,” Tyler says of “Noid,” the first single. “Of course you can’t. That’s why I made the song, because you don’t know what it’s like not to go outside and not own yourself, people stealing from you, voice-recording you, following n—as home, people trying to trap you — nobody trying to trap y’all n—as. I’m a catch.”
The album is deeply personal. “I’m a super extrovert, but I’m a very private person with my life,” Tyler says, “so putting some of this stuff on wax was a lot for me.” The day after Chromakopia’s release at a show in Atlanta, he went further: “It’s so honest that I think I had to wear a mask on my own face to get that s–t out.” He faces those fears on the album’s aptly titled emotional high point, “Take Your Mask Off,” and when he performed it at Flog Gnaw, by the song’s conclusion, his mask was gone.
Tyler does have a level of maturity that can come from growing up in public, which, as he points out, he did: “I’ve been famous and financially stable since I was 19, on my own since 16.” And now, at 33, he’s a veteran, making music about getting older and what it feels like. “I told my homie, ‘This is the 30s album,’ ” Tyler says. “This album is probably s–t that folks go through at 24, but I’ve lived a different life. N—as around me are having kids and families and really being adults and I’m over here like, ‘I think I’m going to paint my car pink.’ That feels crazy, but it’s all I know.”
Tyler, The Creator photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Luis Perez
And the reception to Chromakopia makes it clear that plenty of Tyler’s listeners do share his worries, anxieties, dilemmas. “People are connecting with the words in a way that feels bigger than me,” he says. “I’ve never hit people at this level.”
When I ask him about the album’s closer, “I Hope You Find Your Way Home,” he lights up. “I think the way you end an album is so important!” he exclaims. From Kevin Kendricks’ neck-tingling synthesizer to Tyler’s own background vocals alongside Daniel Caesar and Solange Knowles to his grand finale of a rap verse, it’s a reflection and a resolution, one filled with hope for our respective journeys ahead. “I knew that’s how I wanted to end it, with the synth, just letting n—as sit there and think about whatever the f–k just happened,” he says, clearly thrilled with the way he landed the plane.
But for Tyler, uncertainty about the future is also a source of joy. He’s currently dipping his toe back into acting, with his first feature film, the Josh Safdie-directed, Timothée Chalamet-starring Marty Supreme, on the horizon. “This is where I am at 33; who knows what I’ll be making at 36,” he says. “My 30s have been so much iller than my 20s. I’m excited for us to be 43 years old and see where we’ve taken it. I don’t know what the f–k I’m doing at that point, maybe bald — with one braid and a dangling earring, making gospel, telling everyone about the zucchinis.”
Whatever it is, he’s excited, as always, by the unknown. “I’ve never not stuck to my guns. Any version y’all see me in is the most honest version at that time,” Tyler says. He’s brash and bold and uncompromising about his art, but it’s also clear how grateful he feels. “I’m so blessed and fortunate. Thirteen years in and my latest s–t is my biggest. Sometimes it’s like, ‘What the f–k, this can’t be real.’ But then it’s also like, ‘I told y’all.’ It’s beautiful.”
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.