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.
2014: “Odio,” Romeo Santos feat. Drake
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.
2018: “Mía,” Bad Bunny feat. Drake
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.”
2023: “Gently,” Drake feat. Bad Bunny
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.
July 2024: “Healing,” and “Sideways,” Gordo, Drake
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.
October 2024: “Modo Capone,” Chino Pacas, Fuerza Regida, Drake
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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.”
2025: “Meet Your Padre,” Drake, PartyNextDoor feat. Chino Pacas
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.
Olivia Rodrigo wears a baby doll dress during her performance for Spotify's Billions Club Live
The Olivia Rodrigo Dress Outrage Feels Like Bot Behavior
Olivia Rodrigo wasn’t wrong — it is quite brutal out here, especially if “here” is the desecrated place that is the internet and its ridiculous outrage over a pop star’s preference for babydoll dresses. The internet melted down this week because Rodrigo chose to have a sense of fashion. (Honestly, that place is really only good for stalking crushes).
As Rodrigo gears up to release her third LP, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love, she’s been twirling around in the loose, fluttering silhouette, a signature of her preppy-meets-edgy style. She donned a bubblegum-pink, floral collared dress for the album’s artwork; a blue, ruffled one for the “Drop Dead” music video; and most recently, rocked out at Barcelona’s Teatro Greco for Spotify’s Billions Club Live while wearing a floral babydoll dress and matching bloomer shorts underneath.
Apparently, this was all too much for users on X and Instagram, who have been losing it, claiming that the frilly silhouette both infantilizes and sexualizes the 23-year-old star. “She is wearing pink dresses that are similar to what toddlers wear with frilly underwear beneath it,” wrote one X user, referencing Rodrigo’s Barcelona outfit. “This is giving child clothes and with all the sexy moves she tries to pull, it kinda looks weird,” wrote another X user. One post that refers back to the same outfit racked up 21 million views and simply reads, “Maybe I’m too woke.”
These looks are nothing new for the singer, who has been pairing feminine dresses with combat boots since she kicked off her musical career in 2021. Rodrigo’s style has also always been referential; it’s a hallmark that’s helped her gain fans across generations. Back in 2023, she told Rolling Stone that her mom used to wake her up by putting on Babes in Toyland’s Fontanelle. “Rock in that feminine way, that’s just the coolest thing in the world to me,” the pop star said at the time.
It’s no wonder the singer has taken a page from Babes lead singer Kat Bjelland’s book when it comes to clothes, too. Bjelland was one of the icons of the riot grrrl scene in the Nineties, and along with Courtney Love and Bratmobile’s Allison Wolfe, she was known for sporting hyper-feminine, girly dresses. This harmless, doll-like look juxtaposed with the anger running through their punk discographies and unruly performances and was meant to subvert the expectations of women as docile objects in the patriarchy.
It’s not that shocking that folks aren’t picking up on Rodrigo’s blatant references. What is surprising is the insistence that she must be supporting something nefarious by dressing this way. If anything, that all feels contrived and brings to mind the manufactured outrage online bots are so great at. Could it be yet another example of a bot-coordinated attack? It’s possible.
In the past year, GUDEA, a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks viral, reputation-harming claims on the internet, flagged two separate bot smear campaigns against Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan. These attacks happen when fake profiles create incendiary echo chambers by continuously posting about something, giving the appearance that there was viral consensus amongst internet users, the last place one would expect it. So far, there hasn’t been a confirmed bot attack to explain away the anger at Rodrigo and her fashion. But the weirder the outrage, the more likely it is all totally baseless.
It may all be as simple as good ol’ misogyny, something Rodrigo knows all too well. “Putting out music in the age of social media can be really daunting,” Rodrigo told Alanis Morissette back in 2021 for Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians. “I think people hold young women to an incredibly unrealistic standard.”