‘Being a billionaire is so tacky!’ Musical firebrand Lido Pimienta on exploitation, class struggle – and going ‘Enya mode’

After beating Leonard Cohen to Canada’s biggest music prize and splicing dembow with classical, the cross-cultural artist is now confronting Colombia’s new president

When I speak to the Colombian Canadian musician Lido Pimienta, it’s in the run-up to Colombia’s presidential election, and she is worried. One of the two remaining candidates, Abelardo de la Espriella, “is so rightwing he wants to open up our beautiful country to fracking and the influence of the US,” she says – and at one point in his campaign, De la Espriella said he wanted to “disembowel” the left. He later waved that away as a mere figure of speech, but Pimienta fears that leftwing artists like her “would be target number one” for a De la Espriella presidency. He ended up winning in a narrow victory that brought praise from Donald Trump and a promise of “a new era, a change of order”.

Despite the potential risks, the singer-songwriter has never shied away from speaking her mind. Since the release of her breakthrough second album, 2016’s La Papessa – which beat Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, the last album released during his lifetime, to win Canada’s prestigious Polaris prize – 39-year-old Pimienta has made ebullient, genre-defying records that hiss with indignation at racism, colonialism, misogyny and music industry expectations.

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