12/28/2023 0 Comments Paulina cruz y nicky jam instagramEven the more severe aspects of his appearance - including the avian neck sleeve that required a three-and-a-half-hour session at the Real Deal Tattoo Studio in Medellín’s trendy Poblado district - he sees as symbols of recovery. He prayed for the strength to kick his other habits, to show the world that Nicky Jam wasn’t without talent - he had just squandered what talent he had. He shed both ego and weight, ultimately dropping more than 100 pounds (he stuck with his black-tee uniform, a look he’d originally embraced to conceal his girth). The humility of his adopted city in turn humbled him. There’s no excuses.” He still recalls visiting a restaurant and ordering sancocho, a savory island stew there was none, but the proprietor dashed out to gather the ingredients and whipped him up a bowl on the spot. “They’ll stop doing whatever they’re doing to make you happy,” he says. He found the people unfailingly hospitable, their Spanish full of pleasantries and honorifics. Needing any gig he could get, Nicky Jam discovered that his songs still resonated here - they had become “oldies” - and that to the Antioquia region’s paisas, familiar with the sting of judgment, his foibles mattered a lot less. When he made his way to Medellín in 2008, it was an act of desperation. El todopoderoso me hizo rápido y furioso.” (“Listen up, do not fear the envious. In his preternatural baritone, Diesel chants over the screen: “ Oye, no le tenga miedo a ningún envidioso. “I’m here for you.”ĭiesel was already a fan of Nicky Jam’s when he recommended the novice actor for the minor role of an island kingpin in the third xXx film. “ Dímelo, papi,” says the action star in easygoing Spanish. As his security detail fetches the drinks, he checks his phone and discovers a WhatsApp video message from Diesel. The chorus is his new anthem: “Because I already fell, I’m no longer afraid/Come what may, I feel like a winner.”ĭown the street from the mural, there’s an outpost of the Costa Rican juice-bar chain Cosecha, where Nicky Jam insists that we stop for a blueberry-coconut smoothie. In the video for his album’s first track, “El Ganador,” he re-creates the shame of his jailing, using latex prosthetics to return to his bloated self. The descent featured brawls, debts and arrests, including the spectacle of a 2008 high-speed police chase in a car flagged for repossession. He was like, ‘My own people don’t love me anymore.’” I used to be a king here.’ Obviously, he was wearing glasses, but I think he teared up. On a visit to Puerto Rico, “I saw these three dudes come up to him, like, ‘Yo, Nicky, what happened to you? You a loser, bro.’ And Nicky tells me, ‘Yo, Gio, I’m sorry for that. “He always wore these big, dark glasses, just to hide behind,” says longtime friend Giovanni Ortega, a Los Angeles producer and apparel designer who flew in for the wedding and has joined us at Nicky Jam’s condo. Broke and depressed, his weight ballooned, reaching an almost unrecognizable 300 pounds. In 2004, Yankee finally lost patience with Nicky Jam’s sloppiness, aiming a scalding lyric from “Santifica Tus Escapularios” at his protege: “ Your courage depends on a pill.” “I would fight with him so he wouldn’t go down the wrong road,” Yankee recalls, “but there comes a time when a human being has to learn from his own experiences.” Nicky Jam replied with an ill-advised diss track of his own, but Yankee was becoming a worldwide brand, and Nicky Jam had turned into a cliché. Nicky Jam and Daddy Yankee perform at Coliseo Jose M. “Everyone has been like, ‘Nicky Jam, el ave fénix, el ave fénix.’ You know what I’m saying?” Every comeback trades on the power of myth, but Nicky Jam’s is inseparable from that of Medellin, a city that itself has risen from the ashes. Still, if Nicky Jam wasn’t in on this, how could the artists have guessed the album’s title so perfectly? “People here have been calling me ‘The Phoenix’ for years,” he explains, just as a swarm of giggly workers from the dealership spots him. He was so taken, he pledged on his own Instagram account to feature the mural on Fénix’s cover. Nicky Jam learned of the mural only after a collective known as PeopWall posted it on Instagram last December and tagged him: “A gift,” they wrote. It turns out to be the other way around, however, a hat tip from the Medellín underground. Because the mural is identical to the cover of Nicky Jam’s new album, one could be forgiven for assuming that his marketing team commissioned it, a PR stunt masquerading as guerrilla art.
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