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Late on the final night of Coachella’s first weekend, after more than a dozen songs, several glorious costume changes and some of the most luscious choreography ever seen in a headliner set, the Colombian superstar Karol G finally introduced herself in English: “I am Carolina Giraldo from Medellín, Colombia, and today, I am the first Latina woman to headline Coachella,” she said to deafening cheers from a crowd dotted with the flags of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and other Latin nations. “I’m very happy and very proud,” she added, but “at the same time, it feels late. There has been 27 years of this festival.” Both sincere and pointed, her remarks recalled Beyoncé in 2018, thanking the festival for allowing her to be the first Black woman to headline: “Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?”
Beyoncé is quite the name to invoke – we may never again see a set as virtuosic and culturally significant as Beychella – but on Sunday night, Karol G sure made the case for her inclusion in the festival’s hall of fame. Seeming at once years in the making and effortless, her 90-minute set was, like Bad Bunny’s landmark headliner slot three years earlier, an exuberant statement of Latin pride and pan-American unity as well as the joys of absolutely lethal, ass-shaking music so relentlessly danceable I broke a sweat on the coldest night of the festival. From the minute she first appeared, luminous in a glittering gold bikini and flanked by an army of sinuous background dancers, her hip undulations visible to the naked eye from the back rows – “not even Nascar has these curves,” she boasts in saucy opener Latina Foreva – the fireworks literal and physical barely ceased. If it’s going to take 27 years, well, best throw an undeniable fiesta.
More than most other major artists this year, Karol G put on a show that felt just as tailored to the live experience as the live stream. Perhaps it was the scale of her proto-cave rave set (the loose theme being the inherent, primordial wildness of women), which lofted her nearly two stories off the ground, or the maximal sensuality of her many, many backup dancers, but she was the only artist I saw this weekend who did not seem dwarfed by the main stage, able to play both to the fan halfway down the lawn and the precisely wielded cameras whirring about her many dance shakedowns. Any frustration with her appearing half an hour late – it seems there was a lot of lighting to secure in that cave – was immediately melted by a steamy opening set that blended the hardest tracks from her 2025 album/Latin music thesis statement Tropicoqueta with hits from 2023’s stardom-cementing Mañana Será Bonito.
Not to be outdone, La Bichota – a title she coined, meaning “boss bitch” – reappeared after a thankfully brief interlude in a show-stopping Carnival-style feathered headdress for the mambo-inflected track Tropicoqueta, the first of several nods to the broad swath of Latin music history. Speaking almost entirely in Spanish, the 35-year-old singer seamlessly blended a tour of regional Latin styles with her own hard-charging, sex-positive reggaeton pop. Tropicoqueta gave way to an all-female Mexican mariachi band, their sound on Ese Hombre Es Malo gorgeously layered, and then a duet with the Mexican-American pop star Becky G, who offered more direct remarks on the current US political climate than Karol G could or probably should say: “¡Que viva Mexico! ¡Que viva Colombia! And to all our immigrants, we love you very much,” she said in Spanish, before switching to English: “You heard what I said.” A grief-stricken ballad with Cigarettes After Sex’s Greg Gonzalez transitioned to some of the choreography in ankle-deep water so nasty I glimpsed the feminine divine, filmed as if in a trippy, libidinous club; then to a solo interlude by Puerto Rican reggaeton legend Wisin for a string of hits – Saoco, Mayor Que Yo, Rakata – that received some of the loudest sing-alongs of a very loud show.
It goes perhaps without saying that celebrating Latin pride on a giant stage, at this moment in the US, is both symbolically meaningful and tricky: say nothing on the government’s immigration crackdown targeting Spanish-speaking Latinos and risk appearing timid, aloof; say something and risk charges of fecklessness, let alone the wrath of the country’s leadership. Karol G, no stranger to controversy over what she does and does not say, threaded a very fine needle. “This is not just about me, this is about the Latina community, the love of my people,” she said with 10 minutes left in her show. “And at the same time, this is for my Latinos who have been struggling in this country lately. We stand for them.”
She hammered home the point of “unity, resilience and strength” – “I just want everyone to be proud of where you come from,” she added – with an ebullient cover of Mi Tierra, by the trailblazing Cuban-American artist Gloria Estefan, then a finale, to an EDM-ified Provenza, that utilized the full power of the main stage. With rainbow lasers, strobe lights, pyrotechnics, fireworks and confetti all at once, not one but three false ending beat drops and a megawatt smile that outshone the stage lights, there was no mistaking the message: this may have been Karol G’s moment, but the victory belongs to many more.
