In 2022, right after he signed to Interscope, Mexican American singer Xavi was feeling on top of the world. He was 17 years old and his songs were getting some buzz, so to celebrate, he bought a Dodge SRT with his label advance. He’d been speeding down a small road in California when he suddenly lost control of the wheel and crashed, fracturing his skull and falling into a coma for days.
Xavi spent months in the hospital. “It’s a miracle to be here, man,” he says now, looking down at his hands. In addition to facial-reconstruction surgery, he had to heal from extensive injuries. A TikTok video he’s shared from that time shows him lying in a hospital bed, battered and struggling to sing with bandages all over his face and arm.
Now, at 20, Xavi feels like he got a second chance — and he’s putting everything into his music. “Sometimes I think about it and I’m like, ‘Damn, if I didn’t wake up that day, none of this would’ve happened.’ Now I fully commit, and I can’t fail.”
With his raspy vocals and slight lisp, he’s become one of the most promising artists in música mexicana over the past year. Xavi, whose real name is Joshua Xavier Gutiérrez, kicked off 2024 with a bang: His viral hit “La Diabla” soared to the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart and Spotify’s Global chart, beating out Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift. In March, he launched a 26-date tour, his first, which had him crisscross the United States. “I was not used to that shit,” he says. “Imagine waking up and going straight to soundcheck every day. You’re like, ‘Buenos días!’ ”
And this whole time, he’s been finishing his debut album, due out later this year. On his phone, he has more than 3,900 Voice Memo recordings, all early demos and ideas he’s been working on. He’s planning to include some of those on the LP, which he says is almost done. There’s “Filsofia,” where he sings to a lover he’s decided to leave: “I don’t know if it was me who caused this to die. But it wasn’t my intention,” he sings on the corrido-ballad. Another track, the aspirational “Un Toque en Particular,” features Xavi boasting about how he’s “building his empire” and “making stupid amounts of money” over the sound of tubas and trombones.
After he plays me a few songs, he says, “I’m not even capping, man: This is going to be the best, the best. It’s going to be straight corridos, respecting our style. I let go of my fucking life just to focus on this, to make the best album dedicated to one genre, and to not betray my culture.”
The music also reflects Xavi’s roots. Xavi was born in Phoenix but spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in the Mexican city of Nogales in Sonora. His grandfather, a trained saxophonist and church-choir leader, used to take Xavi and his older brother, Fabio, on long road trips and encourage them to sing church hymns while pretending they were traveling somewhere else. Xavi would always imagine he was going to Disneyland. “We’d start singing and I felt like I was there.”
Outside of music, Xavi was a “niño de la calle” who always worked hard. As a 12-year-old, he got his first job, laying cement, and remembers being paid 200 pesos (or $12) for a day of work. Then, at 15, he moved to Phoenix with his dad, an electrician who Xavi would accompany on jobs. Xavi started playing guitar, and he’d bring it with him. During breaks, he’d ask his dad to record videos of him performing. “I even had my clothes on from work [while singing] covers,” he says. “When I was questioning what the fuck I was going to do with my life, I’d be playing guitar.”
Xavi’s covers started to get attention online and caught the ears of Interscope. Eventually, the label scooped him up, impressed with his talent. After Xavi healed from the car crash, he started releasing more songs, like “Zero Sentimientos” and “Kilómetros.”
Everything fully took off in 2023, when “La Víctima” and “La Diabla” took TikTok by storm. Xavi even won the respect of Mexican superstar Peso Pluma, who actually visited him in the studio. “I was shitting bricks,” Xavi says with a laugh. After someone at the studio leaked a video of them together, fans speculated that they made music together, but Xavi shares that they only hung out. “He’s very genuine and a super cool person,” he says.
The Peso encounter is just one example of how Xavi’s young fans are constantly watching and weighing in on everything the singer does. Xavi, who prefers to stay off social media completely, is still navigating fame and the way people are constantly making up stories about his love life, with rumors even floating around that he has a secret son. He’s too focused to care. “I feel like some people post their lives and they try to fake this happiness. I don’t want to post, like, ‘Oh, guys, I’m living my best life.’ I’m not. I’m making sacrifices and trying to work on a better version of myself.”
In fact, he avoids using his phone as much as he can. “This shit is such a distraction,” he says, pointing at his phone as it buzzes. “Somebody just texted me right now, ‘How you been?’ I’m not going to open that because I don’t know who that is. That looks like a girl. I have not seen her in what, 10 years? Why the fuck am I going to answer?”
There’s tons more he wants to do. First, he wants to drop the album. He’s hoping to feature his brother, Fabio, who’s built a devoted following on TikTok and is also signed to Interscope. And there’s another collaboration he’s been dreaming about, too: He wants to work with Natanael Cano, the corridos tumbados pioneer. “He’s the reason that I make corridos tumbados today,” Xavi says. “I owe the guy a lot. It’s crazy. I have songs for him. I don’t think he knows it, but he’s literally my fucking inspiration.”
But more importantly, Xavi isn’t taking a single moment for granted. He just moved into a new house, which is adorned only with a futbolito table in the kitchen and a carne asada grill in the backyard. He’s going to try to soak it all in, because he knows what it means to feel like you can lose it all: “A near-death experience is all it takes to be like, ‘I’m going to value life more.’”
Production Credits
Photographic Assistance by Yasara Gunawardena
Ken Casey stuck around after the show in San Diego, California, talking to members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Some of the challenge-coin haul.
The band started as a bet. “My band has a show in three weeks,” Casey’s coworker told him in 1996. “I dare you to open for us.”John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Dropkick Murphys (from left): Casey, DaRosa, Webster, Kelly, Rheault, Brennan, and Lynch John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Casey is largely the voice of the band, but the other members back him up. “We’re so lucky he’s the mouthpiece,” says Brennan, left. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Only the Irish can take a song about death and destruction, famine, alcoholism, and raise a glass like it’s an anthem,” says Casey. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Anytime it feels like things are about to plateau for us, something gives us a little bump,” says guitarist Lynch. “It feels exciting. It feels dangerous. It feels like doing something.” John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.