The title of Lido Pimienta’s 2020 album Miss Colombia points to the 2015 Miss Universe mistake in which the wrong contestant was briefly announced as winner. Pimienta’s record label says the incident prompted her to consider the anti-Blackness she experienced and the demands placed on her appearance. A pageant error is a strange starting point for a record about belonging. That strangeness is useful: it locates national pride in a spectacle that decides who can stand before cameras as the country’s acceptable face.
Pimienta wrote and arranged all eleven songs, co-producing them with Matt Smith, also known as Prince Nifty, according to Anti. She recorded in her home studio and also in San Basilio de Palenque, the Colombian town central to Afro-Colombian cultural history. Those locations matter because this is neither a detached critique made entirely from Canada nor a return home that dissolves conflict. The album’s production places the singer’s own room and a historically Black Colombian town in one creative map.
A track-by-track Apple Music conversation gives another point of entry. Pimienta describes “Para Transcribir (Sol)” as a question about who she is after living outside Colombia and returning to it. In the same account, she discusses “Nada” with Li Saumet in relation to women’s bodily experiences, while a later song joins her voice to Sexteto Tabalá from Palenque. The sequence does not offer a single anthem of uncomplicated national identification. It puts bodily life, friendship, memory and communal music alongside the discomfort of being made an outsider.
That collaboration should be credited precisely. Sexteto Tabalá is not an anonymous “traditional sound” recruited to authenticate a pop singer. Apple names the group and locates its heritage work in Palenque; Anti credits Pimienta’s writing, arranging and co-production. Both facts can be true. The named credits make a stronger account than dividing the record into modern electronics and an old folkloric source. The album’s argument unfolds in how these different practices meet without one being made invisible.
Museum London identifies Pimienta’s Afro-Colombian and Wayuu heritage, while Anti’s release note links the title to anti-Blackness. Those statements establish the stakes; they do not require every track to become a lesson in identity. Miss Colombia can hold pleasure and grievance in the same project. Its deeper challenge to the pageant is not to crown another ideal representative. It is to insist that the country also belongs to people its ideal picture has repeatedly failed to show.