Lido Pimienta's class war moves to Bogotá: why the Polaris winner is confronting Petro's Colombia

On a summer afternoon in 2025, the Colombian-Canadian musician Lido Pimienta sat down with The Guardian and refused to soften a single sentence. The headline wrote itself: Being a billionaire is so tacky!. The interview, published in July 2025 and recirculating this week as her profile continues to rise on the back of her Polaris Music Prize win, captured an artist who has spent the last decade refusing to choose between experimentalism and politics — and who is now training both barrels on her birth country's new government.

This is the read worth holding: a working-class Afro-Indigenous Colombian woman who took home Canada's most lucrative music award by beating Leonard Cohen's posthumous album, then spliced dembow with string quartets, is choosing Colombia as the next front. The new Petro administration, the first left-of-centre government in modern Colombian history, opened a door she has been trying to walk through for years. Whether she walks through it on her own terms, or against the government's grain, is the question her current interviews keep circling.

From Mississauga to the Polaris

Pimienta's path to the Polaris Music Prize — awarded in 2017 for her album La Papessa, an electronic record threaded with Latin and Caribbean rhythms and sung partly in Wayuu, an Indigenous Colombian language — has become the kind of origin story music press likes to retell: working-class immigrant kid, conservatory-trained, told the industry didn't have a slot for her, made the slot anyway. The Guardian's 2025 profile, in its opening pages, fixes the economic backdrop of that origin: the indignity of class, the slights of Canadian cultural gatekeeping, the loneliness of being brown in a music press that wanted her to be either a folklorist or a crossover commodity.

She did neither. Miss Colombia (2020) and La Papessa before it operated as a deliberate refusal — a record that opened with English-language provocation and settled into Spanish-language dembow, that invited the London Symphony Orchestra into arrangements built on Colombian coastal percussion. The Polaris jury's decision to award her over Cohen's posthumous You Want It Darker was, in the moment, treated less as a coronation than as a small act of cultural rebalancing: a Spanish-language record, made largely outside the major-label system, taking the country's biggest prize.

"Being a billionaire is so tacky!"

The Guardian interview, anchored in Pimienta's recent return to public view, lands hardest on the question of money and taste. She is blunt about the grossness of contemporary wealth display; she is blunter still about the cultural permission artists now receive to perform solidarity with the very rich. The headline line — "Being a billionaire is so tacky!" — is delivered not as provocation but as plain arithmetic. A few thousand dollars in Canadian grants, she notes, has produced more audibly different music than nine-figure label budgets.

It is the kind of statement that travels well in 2026, when the cultural conversation about class has thinned out into lifestyle aesthetics. Pimienta is uninterested in that conversation. She is interested in the structural fact that the global music economy still extracts from the Global South — from Colombian cumbia, from Caribbean dembow, from West African polyrhythm — and sells the extract back as luxury product. Her project, as she describes it, is to refuse the extraction while still working inside the industry that demands it.

That refusal now has a destination: Colombia. The Petro government, inaugurated in 2022 on a platform of "total peace" with armed groups, land reform, and a slow redistribution of the country's extractive wealth, has named the cultural sector as a frontier. Pimienta is asking, with the impatience of someone who has watched the project from Toronto, what that actually means in practice.

The Bogotá question

What Pimienta wants from a left-of-centre Colombian state is the same thing she has always wanted from the Canadian state: funding without control, recognition without co-option, infrastructure without ideological capture. Her interviews make clear she is not naïve about the difference between a sympathetic minister and a working studio. The Guardian piece records her scepticism — that a government promising peace can, in the same breath, underwrite the cultural apparatus of an extractive economy that produced the inequality its politics is supposed to repair.

This is where the artist-as-citizen framing reaches its limit and the artist-as-stakeholder framing begins. Pimienta is, in effect, applying for a seat at a table whose existence she is also criticising. That tension is not a contradiction; it is the working posture of a generation of left-cultural figures who came up under austerity and now find themselves negotiating with governments that share their enemies but not necessarily their tastes.

What the music itself argues

The structural argument lives in the records. La Papessa opened with English and closed in Wayuu. Miss Colombia placed dembow under orchestral arrangements that no major label had bothered to commission. Her recent work, as described in The Guardian's profile, leans further into the collision — classical composition treated as folk material, folk rhythms treated as concert-hall substance. The argument the music makes is the same one she makes in prose: the hierarchies of genre are economic, and they can be re-engineered.

It is not the only argument available. A counter-read holds that the fusion form itself — dembow meets strings, Indigenous voice meets electronic production — has been so thoroughly absorbed by global festival culture that its oppositional charge has faded. Pimienta's willingness to keep producing inside the form, the counter-read argues, is evidence of an artist who has run out of new terrain rather than one still breaking it. The Guardian interview, which grants her the floor for most of its length, does not really press her on this. A second, more sceptical read is owed.

What to watch

The near-term question is whether the Colombian cultural ministry, which has spoken publicly about centring Afro and Indigenous voices, will commission or merely consult. The mid-term question is whether Pimienta's next record — the one The Guardian's profile implies is imminent — will be made inside Colombian institutions, inside her Toronto network, or in the increasingly common third space of artists working across borders on grants stitched together from both. The long-term question is whether the political energy of a figure like Pimienta can survive the gravitational pull of a state apparatus that, however sympathetic, still answers to extractive capital.

Pimienta, for her part, has stopped pretending the question is theoretical. The interview is unambiguous: the taste for billionaires, she argues, is a taste for the system that produces them. Her next move, in music and in Colombian politics, will be a measure of how seriously that argument is meant.

Desk note: this article draws on a single profile published by The Guardian in July 2025. Where the wire framing emphasises the artist's biography and stylistic innovation, this publication foregrounds her explicit class analysis and the structural tension between her project and the Petro government's cultural agenda. The counter-read on fusion form is added editorially and is not sourced from the wire.