Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella“I Like It,” by Cardi B, J Balvin and Bad Bunny, is currently #1 on Billboard‘s Songs of the Summer chart, making it two years in a row that that chart — and the Billboard Hot 100 — have been topped by a song sung mostly in Spanish. But if J Balvin has his way, in the near future, “mostly” will become “entirely.”
Balvin, a Colombian star who scored a massive pop hit last year with his “Mi Gente” remix featuring Beyonce, teamed up with Liam Payne earlier this year for the song “Familiar.” A couple of weeks later, “I Like It” was released, and soon became Balvin’s first Hot 100 #1.
“I think Spanish is the new mainstream,” he tells ABC Radio. “It’s gonna take a process, y’know…it’s gonna take a while, but we on the way. And I’m so grateful for that.”
In fact, Balvin wants to be the one to have a huge pop single sung completely in Spanish, which hasn’t happened since Los Lobos hit #1 in 1986 with “La Bamba.”
“That’s my dream, you know? I love English music and I don’t have a problem with it, but I wanna be a legend, a living legend…so I just wanna cross over in Spanish,” he tells ABC Radio. “I think we’re on the way.”
“I wanna make history,” he adds. “I wanna tell my kids, one day when I have them…’Yo, I did this.'”
As Billboard notes, so far this year, there have been around 13 songs on the Hot 100 in Spanish or mostly in Spanish, so that time could be coming soon. Meanwhile, J Balvin is the subject of a YouTube Artist Spotlight story, which goes live today at 7 p.m. ET on his YouTube channel. It’s called Redefining Mainstream.
Copyright © 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
