Bilal Qureshi

But I do think that, you know, this sounds really basic, but sometimes I feel like in America we do forget that, like,

Spanish is a European language as well.

And I think she has sort of said that growing up in Spain, what's cool music in Spanish is Latin American music.

What's considered cool in Spain among youth culture, I'm not an

expert on Barcelona or Madrid youth culture, but they listen to what people are making in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean as influence.

And so I think in America, we have a particular relationship with Spanish as a language, which may also affect how she was marketed and branded and promoted and also what she herself was doing.

So yeah, I do think it speaks to kind of when international artists or people who have more of a global background come to America.

you do have to like fit in in a certain way that is legible to us.

It's true of African artists.

It's true of like South Asian artists.

You know, it's like, who do you feature with?

Who are you shown with?

And in some ways we're in this big global Spotify moment, but I still think there are like limitations to what people can read and understand.

Coming up.

It's not an ethnic group to be a Spanish speaker, but it's a way of being connected to people around an identity, around a language.

Yeah, I mean, she's a South African artist and kind of identifies as being colored, which is a mixed race background of South Asian and African heritage, which is an actual racial group in South Africa.

And she has, I think, struggled with being understood sometimes because she used that term, which is, of course, a very particular and loaded term in America to throw into it.

I don't think she's really become a star of like the R&B world in the way that she may have anticipated she could have been because I think some of her interviews have not been received well.

And, you know, let's be honest, the American market is the market that you want to be in if you want to make money.

Like tours, marketing, American audiences are the most hyped audiences anywhere in the world.