Latin Grammys 2021 Live Updates: Bad Bunny and Camilo Win Awards – The New York Times

The song, written by Yotuel Romero, Descemer Bueno, Maykel Osorbo, Eliecer “el Funky” Márquez Duany and the reggaeton pair Gente de Zona, is nominated for two Latin Grammys, including song of the year, and will be performed on the show Thursday night.

“These are the first Grammy Awards for the people of Cuba, the first Grammys for freedom,” Romero said in a phone interview from Miami. “These are the first Grammys where it’s not Yotuel nor Gente Zona that are nominated, it’s patria y vida, it’s Cuba.”

The song is a rare instance of Cuban artists directly taking on the regime: The title is a twist on one of the most iconic slogans of the Cuban revolution, patria o muerte, (homeland or death), a phrase that Fidel Castro often used to end his speeches.

“It was the antithesis of homeland or death — homeland and life,” Romero said. “I knew that phrase was going to bring a lot of controversy.”

And generate controversy it did.

After it was released in February, the song was heavily criticized by government figures like President Miguel Díaz-Canel and former culture minister Abel Prieto, who called the track a “musical pamphlet.” and wrote, “There’s nothing more sad than a chorus of annexationists attacking their homeland” on Twitter.

But the official criticism did little to stem the song’s popularity. After decades of isolation, internet use became widespread in Cuba in 2018 — many young Cubans are now highly active on social media, where the anthem spread like wildfire. The accompanying video has been viewed more than 9 million times on YouTube.

The song’s release came just a few months after hundreds of artists, intellectuals and others demonstrated outside the Ministry of Culture in Havana to protest a slew of recent arrests, including that of the rapper Denis Solís.

“That protest transformed the narrative of the opposition in Cuba,” said Rafael Escalona, the director of the Cuban music magazine AM:PM. “There was fertile ground for someone to reap the fruits and create a protest anthem.”

On July 11, “Patria y Vida” was transformed into a rallying cry, when Cuba witnessed its largest protests in decades, with Cubans protesting over power outages, food shortages and a lack of medicines.

“This is my way of telling you, my people are crying out and I feel their voice,” the song says. “No more lies, my people ask for freedom. No more doctrines, let’s not sing of homeland or death but homeland and life.”

Hundreds of people were jailed after the July demonstrations, and at least 40 more were detained on Monday as the regime moved to stifle another planned march.

The risks extended to the songwriters too.

While most of the artists who collaborated on the song were well known internationally before the track’s release and were also living outside of Cuba, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky still lived on the island: Both were arrested earlier this year, and Osorbo remains in jail. Romero, who lives in Miami, said that he cannot return to the island for fear of arrest.

But despite the crackdown, Romero said he is confident that the emerging movement fomented by Cuba’s youth and given a soundtrack by “Patria y Vida” is only just getting started.

“This is no longer a movement, it’s generation. It’s the generation patria y vida,” he said. “The generation patria y vida has come to bury the generation patria o muerte.”

Carlos Melián Moreno contributed reporting from Santiago, Cuba.

The Argentine vocalist María Becerra makes the kind of shimmering pop-reggaeton and relaxed R&B that commands the charts. Though she released her first EP in 2019, her 2021 debut album, “Animal,” put her on the map; she currently has nine features or solo songs on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100.

The Argentine producer Bizarrap is a fixture in his country’s trap scene: His freestyle and music sessions, which have become YouTube favorites, showcase upcoming rappers’ lyrical skills over beats he produces himself. In 2021, he expanded his collaborators to include artists outside the borders of his home country and across Spanish-language hip-hop. Snow Tha Product’s session, a bilingual flood of barbs and punch lines from the Mexican American rapper, is also nominated for best rap/hip-hop song.

Panama is central to the history of reggaeton, but it’s only recently that artists from the isthmus are getting back into the spotlight. Boza is one of the musicians leading the pack. His fluid reggaeton and glossy dancehall has made him a TikTok sensation; last year’s viral “Hecha Pa’ Mi,” which also appeared on his debut album “Más Negro Que Rojo,” has over 100 million YouTube views.

Zoe Gotusso, a songwriter from Argentina, has a breathy, confiding voice; on her hit single “Ganas” and on her solo debut album from 2020, “Mi Primer Día Triste” (“My First Sad Day”), she floats it over largely acoustic folk-pop arrangements that often hint at South American rhythms.

Humbe — the Mexican songwriter Humberto Rodríguez Terrazas — made his 2017 debut album, “Sonámbulo” (“Sleepwalker”) when he was 16. He wrote, produced and performed his second album, “Entropia” (“Entropy”), almost entirely on his own, backing his fervent high tenor with largely electronic arrangements and singing, in his hit “El Poeta” (“The Poet”), about a compulsion to make music. After garnering millions of plays on TikTok, Humbe has just released his second album of 2021, “Aurora,” a pandemic collaboration with Emiliano Rodríguez, his brother.

Rita Indiana is a certified multihyphenate: one of the foremost figures of contemporary Caribbean literature, and also a force in Dominican music. Her debut album with the band Los Misterios dropped in 2010, establishing her as a cult figure in the Dominican underground. In 2020, she released “Mandinga Times,” her return to music after a decade focusing on her literary career; the album, co-produced by Calle 13’s Eduardo Cabra, is an irreverent, apocalyptic reinvention of gagá, reggaeton and other Afro-Caribbean sounds, sliced up with metal textures and piercing one-liners, like on “Como un Dragón”: “While you were writing a chorus, I wrote five novels.”

Andrés Vicente Lazo Uslar, the Venezuelan songwriter who records as Lasso, has been making albums of earnest, upbeat pop-rock since 2010. On his latest, “Las Cuatro Estaciones” (“The Four Seasons”), he upholds the classic-rock ideal of a concept album, following the cycle of a yearlong romance.

Born in New York to Chilean parents, the pop star Paloma Mami was 18 when she wrote her first song, “Not Steady” — a bilingual pop-dancehall hit that led her to become the first Chilean artist to sign to Sony Music Latin. Her debut album, “Sueños de Dalí,” elaborates on the sounds she’s been exploring since she was a teenager, blending bleeding-heart R&B with celestial reggaeton lust.

The Mexican songwriter Marco Mares, born Marco Antonio Mares Díaz, breezes through styles from Mexico and beyond — ranchera, cumbia, bachata, reggae, even rapping — in genial songs about the ups and downs of love.

Juliana Velásquez was a child actor on Colombian TV before emerging as a songwriter. She released her debut album, “Juliana,” in April, and it sets her whispery voice and haunted, vulnerable lyrics amid delicate acoustic arrangements one moment, startling electronic phantasmagoria the next.

Fast forward to 2019. Popular reggaeton artists, like Daddy Yankee, Nicky Jam and Balvin, participated in a social media campaign against the Latin Grammys. When no reggaeton artists received nominations for any of the 10 major categories, several performers posted an image of a crossed-out gramophone on social media with the statement, “Sin reggaeton, no hay Latin Grammy,” or, “Without reggaeton, there is no Latin Grammy.”

In April 2020, in what appeared to be a response to the backlash, the academy announced that best reggaeton performance would be added as a separate category. (Previously, the genre was nominated under the blanket categories of “urban music.”) The disagreement around the genre’s place in the awards flared once again when Balvin tweeted out his call for a boycott this year.

But this time, it landed differently. The most fervent criticism came from the Puerto Rican rapper Residente, who has more than two dozen Latin Grammys, and posted an Instagram video that eventually mushroomed into a bitter online battle. In the clip, Residente explained that several reggaeton and rap artists, including Bad Bunny, Rauw Alejandro and Myke Towers, were recognized across the awards this year. He said that boycotting the show would be especially disrespectful to the salsa legend Rubén Blades, who is receiving the person of the year honor.

But the real barbs arrived when Residente began to tear into Balvin’s music. “It’s as if a hot dog cart got offended because it can’t win a Michelin star,” he said in Spanish. Balvin simply responded by commenting, “I respect your opinion” on the post. Eventually, Residente deleted the video.

But the saga was far from over. Balvin shared an Instagram post promoting a new line of fake merch, featuring cartoons of hot dogs and food carts. Residente, whose music is known for being fearlessly political, uploaded a second Instagram video, this time lambasting Balvin’s music, career and character, and claiming that he had helped Balvin craft a message for social media during protests against corruption and income inequality in Colombia last year.

The spat seemed to end with Residente reposting his original video and silence from J Balvin. But the larger conversation surrounding their personal disagreement about reggaeton’s place at the Latin Grammys doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon.

In 2019, after a group of artists announced a boycott of the Latin Grammys because reggaeton was largely left out of the nominations, critics online pointed out that the protest should also recognize that reggaeton wouldn’t exist without the Black Latinos who pioneered it.

As one of the largest platforms for Spanish-language music in the United States, the Latin Grammys showcase dozens of genres rooted in Black Latin American traditions, but often the artists chosen to perform are white or lighter skinned, raising questions about whether the academy is doing enough to reflect the reality of the music it promotes. Not unlike the organization behind the English-language Grammys, the Latin academy is an institution that’s often criticized for being slow to respond to conversations about race, gender and identity.

“I am incredibly proud of my Latin background,” Gomez said in a statement at the time. “It felt empowering to sing in Spanish again.”

The video, directed by Los Peréz and produced by Kim Dellara and Clark Jackson, has racked up over 84 million views on YouTube. It opens inside of Gomez’s heart as her literal heartbreak starts to heal, crystalline fragments stretching toward each other.

“It doesn’t hurt me like before,” Gomez sings in Spanish. “The injury from your love has healed.”

The seven-track “Revelación” also features Rauw Alejandro and Myke Towers (both also nominated for Latin Grammys this year). The EP peaked at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart.

Camilo also shared a songwriting award for best tropical song, “Dios Así Lo Quiso,” recorded by Juan Luis Guerra with Camilo’s father-in-law, Ricardo Montaner, who was also one of its songwriters — and who, after a four-decade career, finally got his first Latin Grammy with that song.

C. Tangana benefited from the genre-hopping lineup of his album “El Madrileño,” which qualified him to win best alternative song for “Nominao” and best pop/rock song for “Hong Kong.” More than two dozen engineers shared the best engineered album award for “El Madrileño.” In prime time, Camilo and C. Tangana will be competing for top awards.

“Every person is a universe,” Laferte said on a video call, speaking through a translator. “I love to do these different voices because it represents all of my personalities: when I’m fragile, when I’m stronger, when I’m fun, when I’m upset. And that is what I want to do. That is what art is. I want to transmit all of these feelings and have people feel as much as I do. And I want them to get goose bumps when they hear my songs.”

Laferte — her full name is Norma Monserrat Laferte Bustamante — was productive through the pandemic. This year, she has released two very different albums, she is touring North America and she is set to perform Thursday at the Latin Grammys.

She recorded “Seis” (“Six”) in 2020 as the quarantine was beginning in Mexico. Released in April, the album delves into vintage Mexican regional styles — norteño, banda, mariachi — backed largely with acoustic instruments. And on Oct. 29 Laferte released the very distinct “1940 Carmen,” named after the Airbnb in Los Angeles where she recorded it. The new album embraces Southern California folk-pop and includes her first songs in English.