Karol G Called Eminem One of Her “First Loves in Music.” She Didn't Understand a Word of “Lose Yourself” the First Time She Heard It.

Salma Hayek asked Karol G about her first loves in music for Interview's Fall cover story. The answer wasn't a reggaeton legend, it was Eminem, and the way Karol G got there is the most interesting part.

Interview magazine published its Fall 2026 cover story on Tuesday, October 20: Salma Hayek sitting down with Karol G to talk about her year, her love life, and, for about ninety seconds, Eminem. The conversation itself happened earlier, on Sunday, September 13, in New York, while Karol G was in the city for the North American leg of her Tropitour.

Here is the exchange as it runs in the piece, in order, with one aside from Hayek trimmed (more on that below):

Karol G: "One of my first loves in music was Eminem."

Salma Hayek: "Me too. My husband's going to kill me. My song for when I need to go fierce is 'Lose Yourself.'"

Karol G: "I love how unapologetic he is in that song. I didn't even know what he was saying. For me, it was all about the vibe."

Karol G: "When I learned what he was saying, I was like, 'Okay, now I understand why I like him so much.'"

Hayek's own line in between is worth keeping, because it explains why she asked the question at all: she says people laugh at her for singing along, off-key, to the music of her generation on movie sets with Adam Sandler, because she didn't speak English when she first heard those songs. "It didn't matter," as she puts it. Karol G's answer is a version of the same story, told by someone born in Medellín in February 1991, eleven years old when "Lose Yourself" came out.

The song Karol G says hooked her on vibe alone, years before she understood the lyrics.

Not a one-time quote

What makes this worth more than a cute cover-story aside is that Karol G has been saying some version of it for years, not just when a reporter brings up Eminem. Outlets covering her press rounds have reported her naming Eminem as the first rapper she was obsessed with, both in an older XXL interview and again in a 2025 Complex "GOAT Talk" segment where she was asked to name her all-time favorite rappers. We weren't able to independently verify the exact wording of those two appearances, since neither is the piece we're covering here, so treat them as consistent background rather than direct quotes. What is consistent across the reporting is the throughline: Karol G keeps reaching for Eminem specifically, not a reggaeton forebear or a Latin pop influence, when she's asked where her love of music started.

That tracks with something 50 Cent said in this same magazine less than two weeks earlier, when he sat down with Interview for a different conversation entirely and still ended up talking about Eminem's pull. Two Eminem-adjacent moments in one outlet, in the same month, is a coincidence of scheduling. The fact that artists outside hip-hop keep bringing him up unprompted is not.

Why a reggaeton star citing Eminem isn't actually surprising

Karol G is, by any commercial measure, one of the two or three biggest Spanish-language artists on the planet right now, and her audience skews toward a generation that grew up with YouTube, not radio formats that separate genres by language. "Lose Yourself" is one of the handful of English-language rap songs that crossed fully into non-English-speaking markets on sound alone, an Oscar winner that plays in gyms and locker rooms on every continent regardless of whether anyone in the room understands "mom's spaghetti." Eminem's own certification numbers outside the U.S. and UK back that up: this is not a catalogue that only resonates with English speakers, and Karol G's answer is a first-person account of exactly how that happens. You feel the song before you know what it says.

It also lines up with something Eminem has leaned on for more than two decades: closing nearly every live set, festival or stadium, with that same song, a habit we've tracked show by show. The song that works as a set closer in Detroit and the song an eleven-year-old in Medellín latched onto without translation are the same recording. That's not a coincidence either; it's the reason it's the closer.

Hayek's own Eminem moment

Hayek's "Me too" isn't new either. At the 2020 Oscars, she was walking on just as Eminem walked off from his surprise "Lose Yourself" performance, and she told the story herself afterward:

"I was so shocked to see him that I spilled water all over him." Salma Hayek on meeting Eminem backstage at the 2020 Oscars.

What we couldn't verify

We could not independently confirm the exact phrasing Karol G used in the 2021 XXL piece or the 2025 Complex "GOAT Talk" appearance referenced by other outlets covering her press history. Those are mentioned here as consistent context, not as quotes we checked against the original footage. Everything inside the blockquote above comes directly from Interview's published transcript.

Nobody has suggested Karol G and Eminem have ever met or collaborated; this is, as far as the record shows, a fan talking about the music that shaped her, to another fan who happens to have an Oscar-night story about the same song. That's a smaller story than a collaboration tease, and a truer one.