The singer iLe in Bogotá after the interview.Juan Felipe Rubio
A sad bolero’s guitar begins to play and Puerto Rican singer iLe sits down for a drink with Chilean Mon Laferte. Or rather, Un Traguito, as they called their first collaboration for an album called Nacarile, which iLe is releasing today. In the song, one of them says that her role tonight is that of the long-suffering, the one who will enter the scene of the classic bolero that wants her drunk, wrecked and sad. But what is the sorrow of the night? A man, sings the refrain, “says I’m not easy / And how boring it would be. It’s not that I was difficult / It’s that I went as I wanted. The penalty is being a free woman and having someone by your side who doesn’t understand that freedom. ILe and Mon Laferte, sing and drink “to tear pains from our breasts that we must not endure”.
“I think it’s a satirical song,” he tells El PAÍS iLe (San Juan, 33 years old) on a cold afternoon in Bogotá. The Puerto Rican, whose name is Ileana Cabra, grew up in a family that listened to salsa and boleros and was known for a time as the younger sister of the famous group Calle 13 (that of René Pérez Residente and Eduardo Cabra Visitante). But since 2016, iLe became independent from his family when he started his solo career with the albums Ilevitable and Almadura. While their music shares their siblings’ combative, anti-colonial hip-hop, iLe isn’t afraid to flavor their songs with more feminism and satire within classic genres like the bolero and boogaloo. “I have to channel other emotions,” says the singer, who as a teenager sang classics like Puro Teatro de La Lupe while her brothers celebrated the success of Atrevete-te-te.
Nacarile, in Puerto Rico, is a way of saying absolutely no, not at all, a total no. On his new album iLe, he says no to patriarchy in different ways, but also with new voices: In addition to Mon Laferte, there are songs with the female mariachi group Flor de Toloache, the Mexican Natalia Lafourcade or the Puerto Rican reggaeton queen Ivy Queen, under other. “I think we open spaces together, but of course the patriarchy is so strong and complex that there are many more spaces that can be opened up,” says iLe. “In these collaborations, each voice has its own particular femininity, expressing it in its own way, but we’re looking at how we can combine them.”
The Puerto Rican singer releases her new album that experiments with classic genres from Latin America.Juan Felipe Rubio
Going back to the song with Mon Laferte, “a super determined woman in that bolero sings in this film of decadence. I liked the challenge of making a bolero with the rhythms that we know, but I wanted to update it.” ILe says that musically she likes heartbreak and drama, but this bolero can also be a field to highlight “micro-machismos , ones that are super classy, like when a woman is told she’s the difficult one, she’s the complicated one. And when we hear that so many times, well, we believe it, we please the patriarchy, we live by the standards that society expects of us. On his new album, iLe experiments with those genres that gave a microphone to patriarchy – from bolero to reggaeton – but to poke fun at them a little and transform them.
One of the video clips of the new album, with an equally satirical tone, features a song made with Natalia Lafourcade entitled En Cantos. The two singers appear in a hair salon sharpening their razors to serve a man who suddenly turns into a Virgin of Guadalupe. “I want to put you on my bedside table / that you love me without blaming me,” says the chorus. “Don’t call me crazy for loving you so much.”
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iLe explains that this song is also part of a feminist take on the album, but one that focuses on criticism of idealization. “Idolizing a character seems very human to me, but I wanted to see it from a feminine, feminist point of view. I thought the idea of ’virginizing’ the man in the video was cool, to see how that idealization affects us,” he says.
Other collaborations are less satirical and more akin to overtly feminist anthems. “I never thought I looked quiet prettier,” iLe sings with reggaeton pioneer Ivy Queen on Algo Bonito, a song in which the two artists offer men’s guidance on how to be nice to women: maybe not say, that they should be compassionate instead of subversive; maybe don’t tell them they’re uncomfortable with their anger.
“Ivy Queen is THE female reggaeton character, many of us learned from her without knowing it,” says iLe. “When I started Calle 13 and my brothers wanted me to play Avocado so I could have a wave, I didn’t know what I was doing and my only female reference was Ivy Queen. That song of ours has a lot of attitude, it’s fun, but it also has this more angry side and I like that there’s also these spaces for us, these to say ‘this pisses me off’ and me want you to know it”.
On his new album iLe he says no to patriarchy in different ways.Juan Felipe Rubio
There is another kind of idealization that troubles iLe towards the end of the album, “that of deifying the oppressor”. The idealization that does not speak of a specific man, but of a state government understood as a patriarch. Or more specifically, this United States colonial power in Puerto Rico. “They looked into the distance / with the expression of saviors / they dressed up as gods / and we gave them flowers,” says the song “Where No One Else Breathes”. The song was written in 2020, in the middle of the United States election, which “obviously as a colony, what’s happening there affects us.” Not only the patriarchy is internalized or culturally idealized, but also the colonial power that iLe and her family have been denouncing for several years.
“Those in power end up convincing those who humiliate themselves,” says the singer. “As a Puerto Rican and as a woman, it tires me, so this is a song that tries to portray colonialism, but also seeks a way of dealing with it, to realize that we are subject to something. Unfortunately, the colonized syndrome cannot end overnight, but it is work, a process.” iLe’s protest song is direct but also much more subtle than his brothers’ and tries not only to call for civil disobedience on the street, but on one much more complex place: emotions. Many of these were learned from Boleros, many of which sometimes need a musical laboratory like iLe’s.
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