The 2020s File Feature
Chanel
Chanel — Becky G, Peso Pluma, and the Bilingual Summer Anthem Two Trajectories Intersecting By the spring of 2023, both Becky G and Peso Pluma were at signif…
01 The Story
Chanel — Becky G, Peso Pluma, and the Bilingual Summer Anthem
Two Trajectories Intersecting
By the spring of 2023, both Becky G and Peso Pluma were at significant inflection points in their respective careers. Becky G, born Rebbeca Marie Gomez in Inglewood, California, had built her career across more than a decade of navigating between English-language pop and Latin styles, and was in the process of deepening her engagement with corridos and norteño sounds in a way that felt like genuine creative evolution rather than genre-tourist experimentation. Peso Pluma, born Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija in Guadalajara, was in the early months of what would become one of the most dramatic commercial rises in recent Latin music history. When they appeared together on Chanel, the collaboration felt like the natural convergence of two artists moving through the same cultural space at the same accelerated speed.
The Sound of the Collaboration
Chanel occupies the corrido-pop intersection that had become one of 2023's most commercially fertile territories, the zone where regional Mexican traditions and urban pop sensibilities overlap to produce something that the genre purists might question but that audiences embraced immediately. The production fuses the rhythmic energy of norteño and corrido styles with a contemporary pop sheen that keeps it accessible to listeners outside the genre's traditional base. Becky G contributes the bilingual agility that has always been one of her most distinctive artistic qualities, moving between Spanish and English with the ease of someone for whom code-switching is a lived reality rather than a studied stylistic technique. Peso Pluma brings the corridero textures that had already made him one of the most discussed new voices in Latin music by the time the track appeared.
The Billboard Chart Run
Chanel debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 29, 2023, at number 88. Over the following weeks it climbed steadily toward its peak position of number 55, reached on May 20, 2023. The song spent 10 weeks on the chart, a run that reflected the sustained engagement characteristic of tracks that build through streaming and community sharing rather than through radio saturation alone. The 230 million YouTube views accumulated across a global audience that the song's bilingual construction made unusually accessible; a Spanish-dominant listener and an English-dominant listener could both find a foothold in the same track without either compromising their relationship to it.
Peso Pluma's Year of Breakthroughs
2023 would prove to be a landmark year for Peso Pluma across the board, and Chanel was one of several collaborations that helped establish him as a genuine crossover force before the year was out. His distinctive vocal style, combining the traditional corridero cadence with a looser, more contemporary inflection, gave every track he appeared on an immediately recognizable texture. For Becky G, the collaboration reinforced a creative direction that was moving her closer to her cultural roots and further from the mainstream pop framework that had defined her earlier commercial work, a shift that resonated authentically with listeners who had watched that evolution with genuine interest.
Luxury, Aspiration, and Style
The track's title nods to the language of luxury and aspiration that runs through contemporary Latin pop with growing confidence, a subject the song explores with the kind of ease that comes from artists who have worked hard, arrived somewhere worth celebrating, and have no interest in pretending otherwise. For listeners watching both careers in real time, Chanel was one of those collaborations that feels inevitable in retrospect and surprising in the moment: two artists who needed a song exactly like this one and found each other at precisely the right time to make it. The momentum that Peso Pluma built through 2023 and into 2024 had this track as one of its early building blocks, and Becky G's evolving artistic identity found clear, confident expression in it. Press play and hear two artists finding exactly the right register together at an exciting moment in both their careers.
“Chanel” — Becky G & Peso Pluma's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Chanel — Status, Confidence, and the Language of Luxury
The Name as Symbol
Luxury brand names have functioned as lyrical shorthand in popular music for decades, across genres as different as hip-hop, reggaeton, and the corrido-pop hybrid that Chanel inhabits. They carry compressed, instantly legible meaning: aspiration achieved, taste demonstrated, status signaled without explanation. Using the name Chanel in both the title and the lyrics is not merely an act of brand association; it is a cultural code that communicates something specific about where the narrators see themselves and where they understand themselves to be headed. In the context of corrido-influenced music, which has long celebrated material success alongside emotional storytelling as equally valid subjects, this language fits naturally and without apology.
Confidence as an Emotional Stance
What distinguishes Chanel from simpler status-display tracks is the interpersonal confidence at the song's emotional center. The narrators are addressing someone they find compelling, and the entire delivery is celebratory and generous rather than boastful or competitive. There is no detectable insecurity lurking under the surface here, no need to establish dominance over anyone other than the space itself. The narrators are offering their attention as a gift, presenting it with the assurance of people who know the value of what they are giving. That particular emotional register, generosity from a position of genuine self-possession, gives the track a buoyancy that pure bravado songs sometimes fail to achieve.
Bilingual Identity and Its Authenticity
Becky G's movement between Spanish and English throughout Chanel is one of the song's most genuinely meaningful qualities. For listeners who grew up navigating two linguistic worlds, that fluidity is not a marketing feature or a crossover strategy; it is a document of daily lived experience, a way of occupying both languages without owing complete allegiance to either. The bilingual construction makes the song accessible to a broader range of listeners while simultaneously honoring a very specific cultural reality that many people in its audience recognize as their own. Peso Pluma's presence, deeply rooted in the Spanish-language corridero tradition, grounds that bilingual energy in a particular geographic and cultural origin without constraining it.
Femininity, Empowerment, and the Corrido Space
Becky G occupies an interesting position in a genre where female perspectives have historically been underrepresented in the artist's chair rather than the subject position. Her participation in Chanel signals both genuine belonging and gradual transformation: belonging to a musical tradition she clearly loves and respects, and contributing a feminine confidence and authority that enriches the tradition rather than merely decorating it. The song does not make a speech about any of this; it simply performs it, which is the more durable and effective artistic choice. The statement is in the voice itself.
What the Song Leaves You With
The lasting impression of Chanel is less about its luxury brand references and more about the quality of energy those references carry into the room: the particular warmth of people who have worked hard, arrived somewhere worth celebrating, and are inviting you to celebrate alongside them. That feeling of earned pleasure, shared between two artists operating in full command of their craft and offered generously to the listener, is what gives the track its warmth beneath the gloss.
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