‘Being a billionaire is so tacky!’ Musical firebrand Lido Pimienta on exploitation, class struggle – and going ‘Enya mode’

Source: The Guardian Link: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/10/lido-pimienta-colombia-caribenya-interview Published: July 10, 2026 Keywords: Canada After beating Leonard Cohen to Canada’s biggest music prize and splicing dembow with classical, the cross-cultural artist is now confronting Colombia’s new president When I speak to the Colombian Canadian musician Lido Pimienta , it’s in the run-up to Colombia’s presidential election, and she is worried. One of the two remaining candidates, Abelardo de la Espriella , “is so rightwing he wants to open up our beautiful country to fracking and the influence of the US,” she says – and at one point in his campaign, De la Espriella said he wanted to “disembowel” the left . He later waved that away as a mere figure of speech, but Pimienta fears that leftwing artists like her “would be target number one” for a De la Espriella presidency. He ended up winning in a narrow victory that brought praise from Donald Trump and a promise of “a new era, a change of order”. Despite the potential risks, the singer-songwriter has never shied away from speaking her mind. Since the release of her breakthrough second album, 2016’s La Papessa – which beat Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, the last album released during his lifetime, to win Canada’s prestigious Polaris prize – 39-year-old Pimienta has made ebullient, genre-defying records that hiss with indignation at racism, colonialism, misogyny and music industry expectations. Continue reading... --- This article was automatically collected by the Observatory News Scraper.