Peso Pluma can’t decide which tattoo—his second of the day, after an image of the Virgin Mary—he wants emblazoned on his shin. Initially, the wiry 24-year-old Mexican singer, rapper, and record label CEO settles on the cosmic Vivienne Westwood “Love” insignia, with Saturn (the planet) in place of the o. He eagerly pulls up the logo on his phone and shows it to Ganga, one of several tattoo artists who’ve joined him at his recording studio in California’s Orange County. The location, wedged into a strip mall a stone’s throw from Disneyland, belies the unconventional things he’s been up to here for the past few years.
Furrowing his brow, Peso asks a member of his team for a second opinion. “Está perro,” his friend concludes. It’s cool.
But Peso isn’t convinced. Seconds later he’s moved on from the designer logo, deciding instead on a tattoo of the Super Star icon from the Mario franchise. Ganga suggests that the star would look better somewhere else. Peso wordlessly drops his Celine sweats so Ganga can trace an outline of the symbol on his right thigh. Before he’s done, Peso has moved on to yet another idea: the Parental Advisory label. Seconds later, he throws out a spider as a fourth option. He already has an arachnid inked on his right hip bone, a nod to his boyhood love of the Tobey Maguire–era Spider-Man flicks. “What if they’re running up and down my leg?” he asks the room.
This quality—an ambition verging on itchiness—has guided Peso, born Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, through an extraordinary ascent that has kicked into overdrive this past year. He was YouTube’s most viewed artist of 2023 in the US, beating out pop behemoths like Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift. His song with Eslabon Armado, “Ella Baila Sola,” became the first regional Mexican tune ever to crack the Billboard Top 10; blending traditional forms and modern sounds, he has helped música mexicana go global. He’s been criticized in some quarters for valorizing narco culture—but he’s also received death threats from drug cartels. Somewhere in there, too, he won a Grammy.
Today, Peso is deep into refining his forthcoming album Éxodo, as well as a reworked live show to accompany its release. “It’s going to be very raw. Real,” Peso says of his upcoming tour. “Sin pelos en la lengua,” he adds, a saying that roughly translates to: He will not be mincing words.
Given his brief but startling track record, both are more likely than not to be global smashes—but they’re also table-setters for his next era. He’s interested in being more than just the guy who makes the music: Double P Records, the independent label he co-owns with industry veteran George Prajin, is humming with new signings and upcoming releases. Peso believes there’s a wealth of rising talent within música mexicana, and he wants to serve as an alternative to what he sees as a too often predatory system. (To that end, he serves as both CEO and head of A&R.) Double P will also function as an umbrella for other, less-music-focused pursuits—including potential Hollywood projects. The offices are under construction the day I visit, progress being made on a proper HQ: two new studios, a gym, conference rooms, the whole record-label deal.
His ambitions, in music and in life, surprise even those closest to him. “Sometimes I’m kind of at a loss at the knowledge that he possesses at such a young age, and also, he didn’t have that much experience in the business, right?” says Prajin. “Sometimes I wonder if he’s like an old soul,” he adds, with the reverence of an awed parent. “Like if a former rock star got reincarnated in this kid.”
Initially, Peso hit the scene as a buzzy new voice singing música mexicana—from one angle, a participant in the global pop diaspora that has minted superstars like his peers Junior H and Natanael Cano. But almost instantly, he seemed to strike an even deeper nerve. “We’re a new generation who grew up listening to a lot of music—not just música mexicana,” Peso tells me at the Double P offices, speaking primarily in Spanish. “And I think those of us Mexican artists who are at a good moment are all young, and I think that influences things a lot. Because more than anything, we have very mixed cultures,” adding that his generation’s “blend of tastes” contributes to the appeal.
In some respects, it was only a matter of time before someone like him rose to superstardom. Back when Prajin worked as a record buyer throughout Southern California in the ’90s, he was impressed by kids who “were coming in and buying Chalino Sánchez but also buying Notorious B.I.G.” when they shopped for music. That spurred Prajin to try and merge the two musical traditions together, setting up collaborations between rappers and banda groups. “But everything I did, as cool as it was, there was really not much success around it,” he says. That changed when he met Peso. “He told me he could rap, he told me he wanted to do reggaeton, he told me he wanted to do all these different genres. And I asked him, ‘Well, how do you want to do it?’ ” Prajin remembers. “He’s like, ‘Well, I definitely don’t want to do a beat that has a tuba, or anything like that.’ He’s like, ‘I want to do a rap song that’s a real rap song. And then I’ll do a regional song that’s a regional track, and I’ll do a reggaeton. I want to do each one in its own lane.’ And, honestly, he answered my 25-year puzzle.”
He’s done so in unique fashion. His outré music, floppy Edgar mullet, haute couture proclivities, and voice—somewhere between Tom Waits’s dive-bar croak and Kurt Cobain’s gravelly yelps—make him look like, and sound like, the future.
To that end, I tell Peso that I’d been struck by his regular use, in his songs, of the word Rubicon—that it seems like a compelling metaphor for the way he’s crossed boundaries. My take is a little much, it turns out: Those specific references gesture toward the Jeep Rubicon, he explains. 4x4s aside, though, an undeniable transformation has played out in recent months. These days, Peso Pluma isn’t just a megastar of música mexicana. He’s a global pop--culture juggernaut, occupying the über-rarefied echelon of multi-hyphenate fame that brings with it top-tier billing at Coachella, a flurry of TikTok explainers unpacking his every utterance, partnerships with the same icons who may have been plastered on his own teenage bedroom walls. His everyday outings prompt sensationalist tabloid headlines. It’s a lot.
“On two sides of the coin, I’m going to tell you, when there are bad moments I say, What the fuck did I do?” he admits, his Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra bracelet jingling beside a custom number featuring a series of broken hearts. “But when there are good moments, I say, Thank God.”
Early at the studio, splayed face down on a fold-out bed, he scrolls absentmindedly through his Instagram DMs as Ganga inks him with the Virgin Mary. He keeps a steady playlist of Éxodo cuts and hip-hop bumping. At one point, he peels his face off the pillow and looks at me. “This is my life,” he says, wincing a bit as the tattoo gun whirs against his skin.
If some of Peso’s tattoos are celebrations, others appear prophetic. He had “All Eyez on Me” inked across his chest years before he blew up—a tribute to Tupac but also a manifestation. Peso firmly believes in the law of attraction. It’s not so much that he sensed this was going to happen as he willed it into existence.
Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, a restless young Peso relished going to family parties and quinceañeras, where he’d get to watch talented musicians shred on bajo sextos and accordions. Back then he wanted to work in music in whatever capacity the business would have him. “If I get to do music, great. If I get to be a vocalist, great. If I have to be the one carrying around instruments, that’s also great,” he remembers thinking. “I just wanted to be involved in music.” One early job found him carting around instruments for his cousin’s band.
We’re sitting on the lone couch in the mostly empty label offices. He’s a little bleary-eyed, having stayed up until 6 a.m. vibing with a “very famous rapper” in the studio (he won’t say who), and his voice is strained from a cold he hasn’t quite shaken yet. A member of his team brings his lunch: takeout chicken Alfredo pasta, paired with a choice of orange Fanta or Mountain Dew Code Red. Peso picks up the Mountain Dew and examines it. “Does this have caffeine?” he asks out loud. He steers clear of stimulants, preferring a mellow weed high to carry him throughout the day.
At home, Peso’s family often played corridos, narrative folk songs that celebrated cowboys, criminals, and folk heroes. They were partial to Chalino Sánchez, a near-mythic singer whose music had a profound effect on Peso. “Chalino Sánchez was a legend,” he says between bites of pasta. Sánchez famously stoked controversy with both his creaky voice and the content of his songs: hair-raising tales of antiheroes, often operating outside the law. Once, when a dissatisfied fan shot at Sánchez during a gig, he fired back—and lived, despite sustaining a number of gunshot wounds. A few months later he died under mysterious circumstances following a show in Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa; it’s thought that a note that Sánchez was passed and read to himself onstage that night promised his imminent murder.
These were some of the songs—the myths—Peso was raised on. “The significance of corridos in history is the story of a valiant man,” Peso explains. “That’s changed. These days it’s not like that.” Indeed, these days the most popular, and most contentious, songs in the genre are so-called narco corridos, songs written about, and sometimes commissioned by, drug traffickers, which gained popularity around the 1980s. Peso’s modern-day corridos have made him immensely popular, but they’ve also had an isolating effect: Officials from the Chilean government denounced him ahead of a scheduled concert there, stating that his performance would aid in the “normalization of narco culture in our country.” He canceled that show—and another in Tijuana, after receiving death threats from a drug cartel thought to be upset about lyrics praising the rival trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán.
But, he says, to assign corridos this sort of power is to misunderstand their appeal. “I feel that the art of this, of corridos, is that—and this is delicate subject to talk about, but you have to touch on it with transparency—because it’s the reality of things,” he says, drawing a distinction between the literal words he sings and how a listener interprets them. “There’s a lot of things that aren’t shown on TV, a lot of things that people don’t know about. A corrido isn’t just for a narco trafficker, or a delinquent, or a criminal. A corrido can be for a doctor, for a lawyer, for a student, for a friend.” The tradition is so central to his self-conception, in fact, that during his blockbuster Coachella show this spring he displayed images and clips of corrido musicians like Sánchez behind him onstage. He closed the set with a big-screen slideshow of his corrido forebears—ending with an image of himself.
As a kid, Peso also felt drawn to rappers like Drake, Ice Cube, and Travis Scott, riveted by how they told stories within their songs. “I didn’t learn English in books and with teachers and in school,” he says. “A lot of [rap] albums when I was a young kid were my way of wanting to understand English. To know what they were saying, what they were referring to with their vocabulary, the lingo they used.”
Eventually, Peso says his friends nudged him to go onstage during those family parties, where full bands would jam to norteño songs and corridos live. “Uno ya pedo pues uno se sube [al escenario], me entiendes?” he says, grinning. Meaning that after a drink or two, you don’t sweat the otherwise stomach-churning prospect of belting songs in front of friends and strangers. For these small but lively crowds, he sang popular Mexican songs. In Culiacán, Peso also happened to link up with his cousin, Tito Double P, a fellow burgeoning musician and songwriter. Tito then wrote what became Peso’s first hit single, a collaboration with fellow vocalist Raúl Vega: “El Belicón,” full of references to bazookas and sports cars. Accompanied by a full band, he and Vega boast about having a fleet of sports cars and going nowhere without a convoy. This provocative first jab telegraphed that he was going to do things a little differently.
For Peso, the disparate-seeming worlds of rap and corridos are psychically entwined. “Obviously, we see that they’re two different styles and genres that come from different cultures and different countries and different languages,” Peso says. “But at the end of the day, in hip-hop, in rap, just like in corridos, and other urbano music like reggaeton, it talks about reality. We’re not promoting delinquency at all. We’re only talking about things that happen in real life…. It’s about projecting that to people. That’s why people identify so much with rap and hip-hop, and corridos: The originality, and the authenticity, that we’re not lying to them. They know that it’s real.”
Peso’s entrance couldn’t have been better timed. Starting in the 2010s, corridos began splintering into distinct subgenres and picking up steam. It helped that Peso also possessed that innate Gen Z ability to continuously reinvent the wheel, which is necessary to hold people’s fractured attention spans. Peso capitalized on his early success with a slew of collaborations while also riffing on corridos tumbados—songs that interspersed elements of urbano, trap, and other genres into the musical form—that had emerged in the zeitgeist from artists like Junior H and Natanael Cano. Everything happened at warp speed after that.
“There was already a movement happening,” says Prajin, who, in addition to helping run Double P, serves as Peso’s manager. “The difference is that here comes Peso Pluma, with his charisma and also his willingness to take the music outside of the box and take it to different regions, to different countries. Basically, he took what was happening with the corridos tumbados that everybody else started. But he connected that highway to the international highway.”
Later, in the studio, with Ganga working away at Peso’s new tattoo, the singer joins his producer Jesus Ivan Leal Reyes (a.k.a. Parka) in singing corridos from generations past. Parka plays a twangy guitar as the two croon “Señor Talento” and “Nuestro Olvido.” Parka then noodles the chords to “Descansa General,” a song (famously covered by Sánchez) that describes the revolutionary general Pancho Villa’s rise to power and eventual assassination. Peso introduces this one. “These are corridos, man, that they played during the Mexican Revolution, 1910,” he announces to everyone in the studio. “This is a corrido about Pancho Villa. He was a Mexican revolutionary…. He was a pimp, a mafioso. He would walk down the street with his guns, and with three girls by his side.”
In late-January 2023, Peso, bundled up in a Burberry hoodie, filmed a brief POV-style clip in Times Square. He was up on the big screens there for the first time, his song “PRC,” with Natanael Cano, buzzing across the universe. While basking in it, Peso asked someone off camera: “Is Peter Parker from here?” Told that, yes, Spider-Man is from New York City, he bobbed his head with a contented nod, a colossal smile growing across his face. The video promptly went viral, and since then his fans have taken to calling him Spider-Man. (He’s also got the requisite chain depicting the Marvel character.)
The video is wild to watch a year later. For one thing, it’s impossible to imagine Peso roaming casually around Times Square now without getting mobbed. It’s also striking how wide-eyed he appeared in the TikTok snippet. Even now, Peso still seems like he’s getting used to being a celebrity. But his brash Peso Pluma persona provides relief—not unlike the way bashful Peter Parker becomes the Amazing Spider-Man. When his Peso Pluma mask is on, Peso says, he “doesn’t give a fuck.”
When he’s not in Peso mode, he keeps things fairly low-key, with room for exceptions. “When I’m not working, I’m at the gym. When I’m not at the gym, I’m playing PlayStation,” he says. “When I’m not playing PlayStation…maybe I’ll go to fucking Louis Vuitton and spend 50 racks.”
I ask Prajin how he sees Peso adjusting to fame. “It’s a contract: You become famous, you lose your privacy,” he says. “You can be prepared for the cheers and sometimes even the money, but not with all the other collateral things that come with it. I think he always was confident that he was going to make it, but I don’t think he ever expected it to be as hard in terms of your life.”
By Peso’s own admission, the past few months have been rough. He and his girlfriend, the Argentine musician Nicki Nicole, broke up squarely in the public eye. Shortly afterward, he canceled a string of shows in South America—including the one that drew criticism from the Chilean government. He says he canceled those dates because he needed vocal rest, and that the brief break has been restorative. “I had the opportunity to be calm, to give myself time, to give myself time to work on my album,” he says. “To work on myself, to be well physically and emotionally.” But in the next breath, Peso adds that “not stopping work is the healthiest thing for me, as an artist and as a person. Because my therapy and my catharsis, and how I vent, is through music.”
Peso’s real ambitions seem grander than merely chasing virality. He’ll keep releasing music independently, and building out the record label. Prajin singles out his partner’s ability to find artists who push música mexicana forward—and have global potential. Peso insists that interest in the music is durable—not an accident of the algorithm. “I think we’re living through a golden age of música mexicana,” Peso says. “We have to take advantage and support new talents that are emerging.” But he’s also batting around the prospect of a TV series about his life, and Prajin says Peso wants to start a fashion line too.
It’s enough to make a young man think great thoughts. These days, Peso practices Catholicism, and his faith is plainly visible: in his iPhone background (an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe), in the biblical undercurrents in his album titles, in his tattoos. Éxodo, of course, name-checks the story of Moses parting the Red Sea. “I think that’s what’s happening with Peso Pluma and the project,” he tells me. “I think we managed to open this barrier that was impenetrable. They thought it would be impossible to do, no? And I think we did it.”
“Impenetrable, how?” I ask.
“A lot of people, I think, didn’t believe in our talent,” he says. “I think they didn’t believe in what we do…in that Mexicans are chingones, and we can compete with anyone they put alongside us,” he says, using a phrase that translates roughly to “badasses.”
When I leave the studio that night, Peso is still mulling over which tattoo will follow his Virgin Mary. But a few days later, he posts a snapshot of himself performing at Pa’l Norte, a festival in Monterrey, Mexico, and I notice the fresh black ink on his leg. He’d opted, it turns out, for the star: the power that allows Super Mario to surge through obstacles, rendering him immune to anything that hurtles into his path.
Paula Mejía is a writer and an editor living in Los Angeles. She wrote about Karol G’s reggaeton disruptions in the April/May 2023 issue of GQ.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of GQ with the title “The Outlaw Tales of Peso Pluma”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Michael Schmelling
Styled by Brandon Tan
Barbering by David Thomas using Babylisspro
Skin by Hee Soo Kwon using Dior Backstage Face & Body Foundation
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by James Rene
Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production