Champagne Papi
The Canadian rapper has been fusing hip-hop with Latin genres for more than a decade
Drake‘s Iceman is right around the corner, which means speculation about the highly anticipated album has reached a fever pitch. Charlamagne tha God added to that frenzy on The Breakfast Club on Monday, when he claimed Karol G makes an appearance on the album. This would mark her first-ever collaboration with the rapper.
Neither Drake nor Karol has not confirmed the rumors. Representatives for both Karol G and Drake did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. But given Drake’s history of collaborating with Latin music artists, a Karol G feature is not out of the realm of possibilities.
Over the course of his career, Drake has often embodied his Champagne Papi persona and dabbled with Latin music, working with some of the genre’s biggest stars. He’s hopped on tracks for Romeo Santos, Bad Bunny, and rising música mexicana artist Chino Pacas, and even tapped these artists for his own songs. Below, we look back at all of the times the rap superstar expanded the boundaries of his sound to include Latin music.
On 2011 hit “The Motto,” Drake famously sang about how “Spanish girls love [him] like [he’s] Aventura.” Three years later, life imitated art when the rapper hopped on a song with Romeo Santos, lead singer of the New York bachata group he name-checked. The melancholic, bachata-flavored track is Drake’s first-ever attempt at singing in Spanish, and he gives it his best: “Celo sus besos / Sobre tu cuerpo / La envidia se apodera así de mí,” he sings, which translates to “I’m jealous of kisses / On your body / Envy takes hold of me.” It’s proof that even in another language, the moody rapper still can’t shake his loverlorn disposition.
In 2018, Bad Bunny and Drake teamed up for a collaboration that shifted the conversation between hip-hop and Latin trap. The song perfectly fused signature elements from both genres, creating a club hit that peaked at Number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and gave Bad Bunny, a then-rising star, his first top ten on the chart as a lead artist. “Mía,” which was featured on the the Puerto Rican musician’s debut LP X 100pre, also marked the first time Drake rapped entirely in Spanish for a song, which Bad Bunny insisted on. “It was a great moment for both [of us],” Benito told Billboard Canada recently. “He really believed in Latin music at that time. It was the very beginning.”
Five years later, Drake tapped Bad Bunny for a track on his For All the Dogs LP. This time the Canadian rapper went into Spanish-accented Drizzy mode but only for a couple of lines before continuing to spit over a classic dembow beat. True to his roots, Bad Bunny delivered his verses in Spanish with a uniquely Boricua flow. “Gently” didn’t come with a music video filmed in Miami like “Mía” did, but it still charted at Number 12 on the Hot 100.
Drake and Gordo have been longtime collaborators; Gordo is known for a bunch of tracks on Drake’s 2022 album Honestly, Nevermind. So it made sense that in 2024, Drake hopped on artist/DJ/producer Gordo’s third LP Diamantes, working as an unofficial consultant on the entire album. “He rides for me that heavy and he’s letting the world know that,” Gordo told Rolling Stone at the time. On both “Healing” and “Sideways,” Drake sings about love lost, his R&B-inflected vocals contrasting Gordo’s electronic beats for a hypnotic effect.
Drake further explored the world of Latin music when he worked with música mexicana artist Chino Pacas on a corrido. The Toronto rapper sings “Cubanas me gusta portarlas, dinero es poder” over a flurry of guitarrón, accordion, and saxophone notes.
“Modo Capone” came together after Drake saw Pacas perform at the Houston Rodeo. Later, he hit up the música mexicana artist over Instagram DM, asking him to write a song for him. Pacas sent him “3 Letras (OVO),” a corrido dedicated to the rapper’s success. It was impressive enough that Drake hopped on a song with Pacas, gifting the young artist with a major collaboration for his debut LP. “You can tell his professionalism and his years in the industry,” Pacas told Rolling Stone at the time. “It’s something else. We have a lot of chemistry and that’s why we ended up working together.”
The chemistry between Pacas and Drake remained strong a few months later when Pacas jumped on Drake and PartyNextDoor’s joint album $ome $exy $ongs 4 U for “Meet Your Padre.” The track is heavy on the Toronto influence, filtering any Mexican notes through an icy OVO sheen as Pacas delivers lines in Spanish with his signature throaty timbre. Meanwhile, Drake sticks to English and briefly confuses his Latin references, rapping about a Brazilian city, the Dominican genre “bachata,” and Mexican girls in the same verse.
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