Balvin was a minor Colombian artist who became the fifth most streamed on the planet without using English, showing how embracing national pride can be a force for cultural good

If I had to make a personal playlist for the past decade, J Balvin’s 2012’s early reggaeton track Tranquila would make the cut because of the nostalgia it conjures up around sunshine, good food and dancing with cute Colombian boys. That year, I was living my best life in Bogotá, and Tranquila blasted out of nightclubs, bodegas and Blackberrys up and down the country. Its rather corny music video was shot in Cartagena, far away from the touristy colonial city, and presented a skinny Balvin covered in tattoos – but any bad-boy image that he might have had was undercut by his bouncy dance moves, fresh face and cheeky smile.

At the time, few could have predicted that Balvin would ensure Colombia claimed its space not just in the world of reggaeton, which has traditionally been dominated by Puerto Rico and Panama, but beyond Latin music, seeping into the bloodstream of music scenes across the globe.

Today, you don’t need to be anywhere near Colombia to hear Balvin’s music – he’s the fifth most streamed artist on Spotify internationally, with more than 53 million listeners a month. Ahead of him are Ed Sheeran, Post Malone, Camila Cabello and Khalid, all predominantly Anglophone artists. Puerto Rico’s Daddy Yankee sits at No 10, and although he is perhaps the most recognised face in Latin music, thanks to the enduring popularity of 2004’s Gasolina and the record-breaking success of Despacito in 2017, Balvin has arguably done more to shape the international music landscape of the past decade.

As well as being the charismatic go-to for the infectious fun and sensuality that makes Latin music so appealing, an impressive, tactical body of collaborations with international artists has helped maximise his reach in different markets. Safari, his 2016 single with Pharrell Williams cemented his international standing; in 2017 he collaborated with French artist Willy Williams for Mi Gente, generating 2.5bn views on YouTube, and when Beyoncé jumped on the remix a few months later she switched to singing in Spanish, a clear indicator of Balvin’s influence.

He is almost always the centrepiece of each collaboration he does, singing exclusively in Spanish – just like other popular Latin acts like Daddy Yankee and Bad Bunny, despite the fact that they all speak fluent English. But Balvin in particular has used the space that he has carved out in the Anglophone market to pull in other artists, including Brazilian pop icon Anitta, with whom he released two tracks – Downtown in 2017 and Machika in 2018 – both of which helped launch her international career.

In her Netflix series Vai Anitta, which documents her transition from the Brazilian scene into America, Anitta ends the recording session for Machika with Balvin and his producer Sky Rompiendo by humbly thanking them, saying: “In Brazil, I’m like huge, but here I’m like nobody … and you guys are doing something for me that nobody else has.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On the rise … J Balvin and Beyoncé. Photograph: Frank Micelotta/Rex/Shutterstock

In 2018, J Balvin had his first No 1 single on the US Billboard Hot 100 on Cardi B’s I Like It, alongside Puerto Rican trap star Bad Bunny. In spring 2018, I managed to scam my way into Coachella as a backing dancer (a long story) and my highlights were Beyoncé’s epic Homecoming and Cardi B’s set, where she twerked with abandon at five months pregnant. Both of these performances featured guest appearances by Balvin; Beyoncé’s only other guests were Jay-Z and Destiny’s Child.

Balvin, though, is merely the most successful figure to have leveraged the democratisation of music through streaming platforms and social media, maintained his mother tongue, and brought a unique identity to a young, curious, global audience: this globalisation of indigenous pop is one of the defining stories of the decade.

Elsewhere at Coachella that year there was a noticeable rise in the number of international acts performing, with France being particularly well represented. Afro-trap rapper MHD, French-Moroccan DJ Petit Biscuit, French-Cuban twins Ibeyi and even Jean-Michel Jarre made the lineup. These artists, like Balvin and his fellow Latinos, all perform predominantly in their own language, and yet were received warmly by the rainbow-glittered English speakers at Coachella.

France is an interesting case study, as it has always been very protective of its cultural identity. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron launched a campaign to make French the first language in Africa – a plan described by celebrated Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou as a form of linguistic colonisation – but efforts to protect the French language have bolstered the French music scene, and urban music has been an unlikely beneficiary of this drive.

Growing up, we had a pirate satellite box at home, programmed to watch French cable so that my dad could get all of the channels his family were watching in Algeria. This meant having access to French MTV – very exciting – but all the American shows were dubbed into French, including Keeping Up With the Kardashians. I later learned that this was down to French laws that enforced quotas for how much television and broadcast music had to be French-language: on radio until 2016, for example, it was 40% of all output.

Record labels and DJs had to make sure there were enough French speaking artists to play, so throughout the 1990s and the 00s when the United States dominated the international music scene,young rappers were needed in France to fulfil the quotas, as well as the insatiable appetite of young people in France for hip-hop. This is arguably why France now has the second-biggest hip-hop market in the world after the US.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riding high … PNL on the Eiffel Tower. Photograph: QLF Records

Although there was a pushback from French radio to reduce the quotas – now 35% – the rise of streaming sites and the decline of radio means that the issue of quotas doesn’t really matter. The massive success of rap duo PNL, who were the first French group to have a single in Spotify’s Top 30 global streams, is an example of how French artists no longer rely on traditional radio plays to ensure their records reach an increasingly international audience. These brooding brothers refuse to do interviews with journalists or collaborations with other artists, which gives them an air of mystery in a world saturated with noise from social media and self-promotion; the video for Au DD was the first ever to be shot at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

French electronic duo the Blaze also know that music videos are an essential tool: they have racked up millions of views for their cinematic, poetic videos which address themes of youth, displacement and identity. Shot in Algeria, my country of heritage, the video for 2017 track Territory documents the homecoming of a young Algerian man with sensitivity, beauty and accuracy. There has never been a music video of that quality shot in Algeria before, and it was emotional to see English friends of mine sharing it on social media – something that I might have thought of as niche and personal was resonating with other people. The Blaze’s Jonathan Alric explained the video: “We all have a place we call home, and we often live far from it.” This tension is central to any immigrant experience, and is now a central tension in pop music, too.

Balvin, PNL and the Blaze’s kind of music – rooted in one place but dispersed across the world – can help build connections between communities at a time when younger generations are more mixed than ever. More than 18% of Americans (about 40 million) identify as Hispanic or Latino, the nation’s second-largest racial or ethnic group. African Americans and a global black diaspora similarly play a huge part in the global rise of African artists. When Nigerian star Burna Boy won a BET award this year, his mum went viral on Twitter when she said: “Every black person should please remember that you were Africans before you were anything else.”

While my dad’s generation grappled with satellite dishes and cassette tapes, mine is more smoothly connected, sonically and visually to whichever international community it wants, especially through curated playlists on streaming services. For this essay I totted up how many playlists I follow: around 70, including 10 dedicated to different African music alone. I can time-travel through my playlists to my uni days when D’Banj was representing Afrobeats globally and Wizkid was breaking out, or tap into the most recent music that will be playing at the Afro Nation festival in Ghana at the end of the year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Keeping the language … a BTS fan gazes up at her idols. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

I have playlists of K-pop artists – like Balvin, Korean groups such as BTS have made themselves more palatable to English speakers by tacking on guests such as Nicki Minaj and Halsey, while themselves continuing to sing and rap in their own language. I have European playlists, and ones dedicated to fusions, including Arab X, which features Arab artists collaborating with others across the world. Global X has an even broader remit, “the sound of a new era”, featuring tracks like Human Lost, a collaboration between Balvin and Japanese rap trio M-Flo that has an anime video.

Artists such as J Balvin are representative of a multilingual, globally dispersed but interconnected generation, and they use every tool at their disposal to appeal to proximate identities – look at how Brazilian MC Fioti’s hit Bum Bum Tam Tam had Colombia’s Balvin alongside Future (US), Stefflon Don (UK) and Juan Magán (Spain), to ease its passage into different playlists and cultural identities. When I spoke to Roccio Guerrero, one-time architect of the Latin playlists on Spotify, she said: “The success of a song at a local level allows it to graduate.” The aim for artists wanting to be the next J Balvin was to move up through genre playlists to reach the most popular Latin playlist on Spotify, Viva Latino – which has 7.5 million followers and is effectively the biggest Latin music radio station in the world. It would then stand a greater chance of being picked up by local playlists in different countries, such as Hot Hits UK. “After that: game over!”, Guerrero said.

The secret is to balance these blunt approaches with authenticity, maintaining a strong idea of who and what they represent. Unlike many of today’s would-be immigrants, pop has total freedom of movement, but still needs to remain rooted in its home culture to retain its potency.

Last year, I was working in Balvin’s hometown, Medellín, during the week of the city’s annual flower festival. Medellin in particular has struggled to shake off its association with drugs and cartels and the festival is one of the annual highlights with two weeks of events celebrating Colombian culture. As part of that celebration, Balvin headlined an event at the Atanasio Girardot Stadium (where football teams Atlético Nacional and Independiente Medellín play home games) in front of 40,000 people, including me. He bounded across the stage in snazzy gold dungarees with the same youthful energy that I remember from Tranquila.

Now arguably Colombia’s biggest cultural export, he had been around the world but was welcomed home by fans waving Colombian flags, knocking back aguardiente and singing along to every word of the spectacular show. He later posted on Instagram: “Soy profeta en mi tierra … Los amo Medellin”: I’m a prophet in my land … I love you Medellín. As the world increasingly feels less tolerant, J Balvin and artists like him are a model for expressing positive, inclusive national pride, and making it resonate across borders. His music, incidentally, also remains perfect for dancing with cute guys.