Lido Pimienta, after Leonard Cohen and a dembow-classical hybrid, takes on a Colombian president

Lido Pimienta does not arrive at interviews with a publicist's choreography. In a 10 July 2026 Guardian profile, the Colombian-born, Toronto-based musician tells reporter—she is, characteristically, blunt: being a billionaire is tacky. The line is a thesis statement disguised as a complaint. It is also, by her own account, the through-line of everything she has done since leaving Barranquilla for Canada as a teenager — a sustained refusal to treat the music industry, the diaspora, or Latin American electoral politics as arenas in which the wealthy deserve the loudest microphone.

Pimienta's complaint matters because the platform from which she is now making it has grown considerably since her last album cycle. She is no longer the upstart splicing dembow with chamber music for cult audiences. She is the artist who in 2020 beat Leonard Cohen to Canada's largest music prize, the Polaris Music Prize, with the record Miss Colombia. The same record carried an anti-misogyny and anti-racism programme dense enough that Miss Colombia functioned less as a song cycle than as a manifesto set to rhythm. The new profile makes clear that Pimienta intends to spend her current prominence not on a victory lap but on a fight she believes the country's new government has forced on her.

A career that turned a private argument into a public one

The Guardian piece reads Pimienta's early life in two registers that are easy to miss separately. First, there is the biographical scar tissue: a Colombian childhood, a young woman who left, a young woman who spent years in Canada working service jobs while building a sound that did not ask permission from Anglo radio formats. Second, there is the working method: she has, by her own description, treated every record as an argument with power — about race, about gender, about who gets to define Colombian-ness from a Toronto studio.

The consequence is a catalogue that does not sit comfortably inside any genre shelf the streaming economy has built. Dembow runs into classical string writing; folk cadence runs into political chant; the mood shifts from seduction to accusation inside a single track. Miss Colombia was the inflection point — the record that persuaded the Polaris jury to elevate a Spanish-language political project above one of the most decorated songwriters in Canadian history. The Guardian profile uses that fact not as trivia but as evidence that the Canadian critical apparatus, at least once, decided cultural boundary-pushing outweighed commercial reach.

Confronting a new Bogotá

What is new in the 10 July interview is the direction of the confrontation. Pimienta is no longer mainly arguing with the Canadian mainstream that once ignored her, or with the Latin pop industry that long tried to flatten her. She is arguing with Colombia's current president. The Guardian profile frames her remarks as part of a wider generational clash in Colombian cultural life, in which diasporic artists have begun treating the country's politics as something they have standing to speak about, and in which a new administration in Bogotá has, in her telling, given them plenty to speak about.

The exact policy disputes are not itemised in the available reporting, and this publication will not fill the gap with specifics the source material does not support. What the profile does establish is the register: Pimienta is treating the new presidency as a question of class — who owns, who performs, who speaks — rather than as a routine left-right disagreement. The "billionaires are tacky" remark is the rhetorical anchor. It also marks a deliberate refusal to pretend that cultural authority and economic authority can be cleanly separated.

Class struggle as artistic method

The interview's most useful line for thinking about Pimienta's work is her description of what she calls, colloquially, going "Enya mode." The phrase is doing more work than it appears to. She is naming the conscious choice to strip production back to voices and a small set of textures, often at the moment when listeners expect a beat to drop. The politics of that choice, for Pimienta, are inseparable from its aesthetics: refusal of maximalism is refusal of the industry template that says louder equals more valuable.

That methodology, applied to a Colombia-facing project, has predictable consequences. Colombian popular music in the streaming era is dominated by producers and labels with foreign distribution deals. Diasporic artists like Pimienta, who arrived at international visibility through festival circuits and prize juries rather than through the Bogotá label system, are by construction outsiders to that economy. When they then turn their attention to the country's electoral politics, they are not merely weighing in as fans. They are implicitly disputing who gets to be the cultural voice of the nation. The "tacky billionaire" line, read in this light, is as much about Colombian oligarchy as about Silicon Valley or Toronto real estate.

What the profile does not yet resolve

The interview leaves several questions that the sources available to this publication cannot answer. The new Colombian president's policy positions are referenced only through Pimienta's account of them; the article does not present a response from the administration or from Colombian industry figures who might disagree with her framing. Her next album, which the Guardian piece gestures at repeatedly, is not described in enough detail for this publication to summarise it. And the broader question — whether diasporic artists speaking back to Latin American governments are reshaping those countries' cultural politics or merely registering dissatisfaction from a safe distance — is one the Guardian raises without resolving.

What can be said with confidence is that Pimienta's profile no longer reads as an underdog story. The Polaris win, the international touring circuit, and a public persona willing to be photographed making uncomfortable points have moved her into a category in which statements about billionaires land as policy interventions, not as grousing. The 10 July interview is the clearest evidence yet that she intends to occupy that category deliberately.

Stakes

For Colombia's cultural sector, the stakes are concrete. An artist of Pimienta's visibility spending her current cycle in open dispute with a sitting government changes the cost calculation for younger diasporic musicians weighing whether to wade into domestic politics. For the new Bogotá administration, the stakes are reputational: a high-profile cultural critic is not, by herself, an electoral threat, but the pattern of which artists line up publicly against a government matters in a country where cultural capital and political capital have historically traded at close to parity.

For the wider reading public, the stakes are also methodological. The interview is a reminder that the most interesting work in Latin American music right now is not happening inside the reggaetón-dominant streaming economy. It is being made by artists who insist that questions of class, race, and national belonging can be addressed in the same record, and who are willing to lose commercial momentum to make the point. Pimienta's quarrel with Colombian billionaires, Colombian presidents, and the global music industry in general is one project. The new profile suggests she is not close to finishing it.

Desk note: Monexus led with the artist's own framing — class as the organising question — rather than with the more familiar "identity politics" line that most English-language coverage of Pimienta defaults to. The Guardian supplied the interview; this publication read it as evidence of a wider pattern in which diasporic Latin American artists are turning their attention back toward national politics from a position of consolidated international stature.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lido_Pimienta
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Colombia_(album)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_Music_Prize