Karol G was listening to Eminem long before she could understand his lyrics. In a conversation with Salma Hayek published on October 20, 2026, the Colombian singer recalled how the delivery on “Lose Yourself” made an impression on her as a child in Medellín. Learning English eventually gave her a second way to hear a song she already knew well.
Karol G and Salma Hayek were talking about songs for particular moods when Eminem came up. The singer had just named Cigarettes After Sex as the band she reaches for when she is missing someone. Her next confession took the conversation in a different musical direction. Eminem had been one of her earliest favourites, and “Lose Yourself” had caught her attention before she knew enough English to follow it.
Hayek knew exactly which song she meant. She told the singer she puts it on when she wants to feel ready to take something on. For Karol G, the appeal had been in the rapper’s refusal to soften his delivery. She could hear a person who meant what he was saying. The frustration and resolve carried in the voice were things she could recognise without being able to translate a line.
The recollection came during a conversation held in New York on September 13 and published the following month. It moved from relationships and listening habits to childhood ambitions. Karol G brought up Eminem as an answer she thought might surprise Hayek. The actress’s quick response made it sound like a much less unlikely point of connection than the singer had expected.
“Lose Yourself” came out in 2002 in connection with “8 Mile,” the film in which Eminem plays a young Detroit rapper trying to make his way through the local battle scene. The song gives that character a problem he can understand even when his nerve is failing him. An opportunity has arrived, and he has only a short time to decide what he is going to do with it.
The recording makes those stakes audible well before the full story has unfolded. A repeating guitar figure holds its place while the voice presses against the beat. The opening has an inward quality, as if the rapper is trying to get his breathing under control. As the performance gathers force, the feeling of having to move before the chance disappears becomes harder to miss.
Karol G grew up speaking Spanish in Medellín. She recalled the song first as a physical and emotional experience, driven by what came through the speakers. When she learned what the words meant, the discovery helped her make sense of the attachment she already had. She described recognition arriving after years in which the record had communicated on other terms.
Hayek remembered singing English-language records phonetically when she was younger. She said the habit still surfaces when songs from her generation play on the set of a film she is making with Adam Sandler. The remembered shape of the words sometimes comes back before their meaning. Her answer caught a detail anyone who learned a chorus by ear might recognise: a sound can stay familiar even when the words attached to it have changed in your head.
“Lose Yourself” went on to win the Academy Award for original song. Its place in a film helped bring Eminem’s music to audiences who might have encountered him outside the context of battle rap. The impression he left on Karol G was more personal. She remembered a particular performance and the sense that the person delivering it had no interest in asking permission for how he sounded.
Another part of the conversation gives that memory some context. The singer brought up Selena Quintanilla, whose film biography spoke to her own desire to perform. There was room in her childhood for a Spanish-speaking star whose path felt recognisable and for a rapper whose words initially arrived as sounds. She recalled each for something specific she could hear or see in the work.
Her later collaborations brought her into contact with American hip-hop from the other side of the studio glass. “Tusa” paired her with Nicki Minaj in 2019. She appeared on Pop Smoke’s “Enjoy Yourself,” released in 2020, and later recorded “Ahí” with Drake, who performs in Spanish on the track. Those collaborations are part of her own recording history. The Eminem story is about what she heard when she was still deciding what music could be to her.
Karol G also told Hayek that she wanted listeners to meet her first as a Colombian artist. Singing more in English came with time, and she hears a difference in the way her voice sounds when she changes languages. Years earlier she had been on the other side of that exchange. She could hear Eminem’s conviction in a voice whose words she had yet to learn. When she finally understood them, her first impression still held.
