Nuyorican music icon, activist, and retired law enforcement officer Willie Colón passed away in his native New York on Saturday at the age of 75, leaving an unfillable and quintessentially American void in Spanish-language music.
Colón was a pioneer of the tropical dance music genre known as “salsa” and inspired decades of Hispanic dance music around the world. In addition to singing and playing instruments, he was an accomplished producer, prominent civil rights activist, and entered the police academy when he was 64, fulfilling a lifelong dream to be a law enforcement officer. He developed a popular “gangster” image – including album covers depicting him as a killer on multiple occasions – about two decades before rap artists such as Tupac and NWA. He made the trombone look cool.
Many obituaries this week will rightfully focus on Colón’s musical legacy, the Bronx gangster archetype that sold records, and the way his songs reflected an America often invisible in mainstream media. Absent, or perhaps awkwardly shoehorned into these, will be the principles Colón proudly stood for his entire life, including in the days immediately before his passing: American contrarianism, anti-communism, patriotism, and a sharp streak of opposition to all forms of socialism.
Willie Colón was born in the South Bronx in 1950 and dedicated almost his entire life to music at an early age, signing onto Fania Records at age 15. His first album, El Malo (“The Bad Guy”), came out a year later.
The record label had a robust spirit of collaboration and Colón went on to help with songwriting, producing, playing trumpet and trombone, and background singing for many of his fellow artists, as they in turn appeared on his records. He is perhaps best known for his work with Héctor Lavoe, an iconic Puerto Rican-born singer, and Panamanian artist Rubén Blades, with which he produced the album Siembra, considered one of the pinnacles of musical achievement in salsa. Perhaps the most influential song on that album is “Pedro Navaja,” a narrative of a lowly criminal who attempts to rob an impoverished woman on the grimy streets of New York only for her to shoot him dead as she bleeds out on the street. Blades wrote the lyrics; Colón helped produce.
Colón’s time with Fania Records, the record label widely credited in the 1970s with developing salsa, cemented his status as a founding father of the genre. The sound – now recognizable by nearly every American with its rich trumpet arrangements, complex African drum rhythms, the iconic güiro, and thunderous vocals – originated in the son rhythms of the Caribbean, but only truly became salsa in New York City.
There, in the 1970s, Puerto Rican musicians like Colón began collaborating with peers from Cuba, such as the recently exiled Celia Cruz, and the Dominican Republic, such as Fania co-founder and fellow musician Johnny Pacheco. Not all Fania stars were from the “big three” Hispanic Caribbean island nations – Rubén Blades comes to mind – but that shared music heritage defined the genre’s sound. The marriage of that Caribbean sound with lyrics that reflected the brutal realities of being working-class Hispanic in the 1970s Bronx is what defined salsa music.
Beyond salsa, Colón established himself as a political voice – far from a cookie-cutter Republican one, but always one in support of freedom. He ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1994, was an early activist in support of HIV/AIDS victims, and one of his most famous songs is a widely considered today a transgender rights anthem, though it was released in 1989: “El Gran Varón,” the tale of a man who dies of a “strange disease” in 1986 after fleeing his family and living in the dress of a woman, never reconciling with his father. The song’s chorus translates roughly to, “you cannot correct nature/a tree growing twisted will never straighten its trunk.”
Even with a past as a Democrat, he stood for ideas that are unthinkable in that party today, such as support for law enforcement and opposition to Puerto Rican independence. Colón chose to enter the police academy at age 64, serving as a deputy sheriff, deputy sergeant, and deputy lieutenant before retiring in 2020.
“I always wanted to be a cop since I was a little boy. But I had to settle for being a musician,” he wrote in his retirement message in 2020.
His reverence for individual freedom, which marked all of his greatest personal achievements, drove him to loudly condemn left-wing politics for much of the past two decades. He refused to play in Venezuela – one of the countries that had most warmly received him at the peak of his career – so long as it was captured by socialism. He also used his social media profiles to condemn socialism around the world, including the United States and China.
Colón was initially a lukewarm convert to voting for President Donald Trump, telling Univisión in 2016 that he was choosing “the least bad” option between Trump, former First Lady Hillary Clinton, and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
“I prefer not to vote than to vote for Hillary,” he lamented, adding that he would consider voting for Trump but had bristled with some of his language towards Latin Americans.
“He will modify his politics with Latinos,” Colón predicted of Trump. “He will have to do it and I am waiting for him to do that.”
Colón declared himself “very happy” with Trump by 2020 and, by November 2024, Colón was enthusiastically celebrating a second Trump term and mocking left-wing artists who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris, including Rubén Blades. Colón continued to support Trump after a brief campaign controversy in which a comedian invited to a Trump event mocked Puerto Rico’s persistent power grid and sanitation failures, which prompted widespread outrage among leftist Latin Americans.
On January 3, the day that President Trump approved an Colón referred to Trump as “the best president the United States ever had!”
During his final days, Colón spent much of his time on social media criticizing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, performed by fellow Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny. Colón was against Puerto Rican independence and a proud American, in his commentary generously offering that Bad Bunny’s alleged “handlers … managed to save his performance” by “getting him not to dress as a woman,” a rumored possibility.
The Bad Bunny controversy is perhaps a fitting last chapter for an artist who burst on the scene with album covers pretending to dump bodies into the Hudson River – an individualist unapologetic about the edge that being brought up poor in 1970s New York gave him, but one who allowed himself to have complicated opinions. Every American heard Willie Colón’s name at the Super Bowl – not because of his criticism, but because Bad Bunny himself saw Colón’s name as the only one big enough for a boast to match his astronomical pop music success.
“Willie Colón/they call me the bad one [el malo, the title of Colón first album],” Bad Bunny raps in his song “NuevaYol,” “because the years pass and I keep making hits.”
Colón had initially praised Bad Bunny for the shoutout and congratulated him on his success and elevation of Puerto Rico to the mainstream in America – a view he did not show any indication that he found contradictory to his condemnation of “anti-Americanism” at the halftime show.
Bad Bunny issued a personal statement of condolences during a concert in Brazil on Saturday night, devoid of any bitterness or resentment over Colón criticisms. He was far from the last in a long parade of musical artists to honor Colón’s gargantuan legacy. Blades, who later developed a public leftist identity and differed with Colón publicly, offered a brief note of condolence and a promise he would, with him, reflect deeply on their relationship. Puerto Rican Broadway icon and fixture in Democratic circles Lin-Manuel Miranda did the same, offering, “Grateful for his music, on a loop in this house always.”
Marc Anthony – perhaps the last great salsa star, who portrayed Colón’s close collaborator Héctor Lavoe in the film El Cantante – issued a message reading, “master, thank you for your legacy. Your music will live forever.” Like Miranda, Marc Anthony has worked to promote Democrat causes and abstained from any political commentary about Colón’s public support for Trump.
It is difficult to imagine a legendary American musician of Colón’s status in the Anglosphere – a Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen type – openly embracing right-wing politics, celebrating President Trump, and going on to inspire a host of tributes offering apolitical condolences and gestures of respect. In many ways, this is a reflection of Hispanic America, so deeply impacted by the disasters in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, failing to reach the depths of bitter polarization to which our Anglophone peers have fallen. It is also a testament, however, to how much the Spanish-language music world owes Colón: a legacy so undeniable that mentioning his politics, or anything but his foundational work in building an entire genre of music, feels unthinkable even for celebrity ideologues.
Willie Colón leaves a legacy of humble and dogged collaboration with peers to create a powerful hybrid sound, paired with artistic ferocity and political fearlessness. From posing as a thug to defending the downtrodden to supporting Trump, Colón never feared being “canceled.” Willie Colón never did the “cool” thing: he was the cool thing, and the world adapted around him.
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