NEED TO KNOW
Kali Uchis revealed that she’s received pushback from the music industry for singing in Spanish.
In a Billboard cover story published on Thursday, Oct. 16, the Colombian-American singer spoke about how she was told to conform to one language or style for the sake of her career.
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“People kept telling me to stick to English, that it was easier to sell music that way,” Uchis, 31, recalls. “I’m not going to just keep making music in one language because it’s easier to sell. I’m going to do both because I can do both.”
She continued: “I always felt that [not] utilizing everything that God gave me into my art is the same as spitting in God’s face. Why would God have made me bilingual? Why would God have made me with this duality if I wasn’t meant to project it into my art and use it to inspire other people and to create with all of this that I have?”
Uchis also noted that she “had a lot of doors closed in my face” on the way to finding success.
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“I had a lot of opportunities missed because I feel like nobody ever thought that this would get to this point,” she told the publication. “A word that people used a lot was ‘unique.’ At the time, those aesthetics weren’t really popular. … I don’t think that people were ready for what I was doing.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Uchis opened up about how music was a constant for her growing up.
“It was just part of my life from the beginning,” she said. “Even when there was silence, I would hear music in my head.”
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Uchis continued: “I think that’s why I started writing songs when I was really little. I was always inspired to try things, whether it was learning instruments, making clothes or performing for the kids in the neighborhood. I was just a very creative little girl.”
Uchis released her fifth studio album Sincerely in May, which peaked at No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard chart.
