It was thirteen years ago that Ivy Queen first fell in love with the music she now makes, back when it was called underground in her native island of Puerto Rico. The reason she loved hip hop and reggaeton was because it is “the only type of music that talks straight up to your face and says how you feel.”
That is exactly what Ivy Queen is kwon for, telling it how it is. When she is heartbroken, she writes about it and shows her true feelings. If she likes another artists’ work, she will let him or her know. And if she is not happy with the outcome at an awards ceremony, she lets the world know and backs it up.
With her latest album out,
Sentimiento (which means feelings, grief), she lets the guys have it with tracks like “Que lloren” which says that it is their turn to cry now. In this album Ivy Queen speaks about her feelings towards men and relationships. At the time of production she had went through a divorce from an 11-year marriage and then fell in love with DJ Urba but they ended up slitting up.
“I was in constant pain, and then I went to the studio and it was better than being with a therapist that would charge for me to talk with them,” said Ivy Queen with a laugh.
With this album she was able to overcome the difficulties in her personal relationships, but by doing so she has also helped many of her fans – guys and girls – by being an example of a strong person. To be in better contact with her fans, she decided to create a MySpace site but found that there was a bunch of other Ivy Queen MySpace accounts and even found one that was pretending to be her and was giving advice to her fans.
“I was like ‘yo I have to do my own [my]space’ because I don’t know if they might hurt somebody by the comments they might say,” said Ivy Queen, who admits being addicted to MySpace. Her official account is MySpace.com/ladivaiq. She says it was amazing how many fans have reached out with issues and how she feels like it is a second job for her, “I’m like a social worker,” added La Diva.
In her new album she collaborated with Naldo, Divino, Baby Rasta, and Don Omar, who actually came to her after the album was done and said that he wanted to be in her album and would not take ‘no’ for an answer.
“I love William Landron, Don Omar is so bright. Sometimes I look at him and he reminds me so much of me, because I always wanted to be updated and doing things that they haven’t done in this genre,” she said.
In her genre of reggaeton and Latin hip hop, Ivy Queen has had her share of ups and downs. Her biggest moment came when she was invited to the Premios Juventud awards show and Luny Tunes came on stage and talked about “someone’s career being so big, I thought they were talking about someone else but they were talking about me,” she said. “I cried so much because I didn’t expect that, you know. They gave me that respect that I deserved. All those years that I went to the awards and nothing happened, I felt disrespected at times. But that night, it was magic.”
She also stirred a bit of controversy when she spoke out after the Latin Grammy’s when Caller 13 took the award for best Urban Music Album, after they claimed to make alternative music on just about all the interviews she saw. She managed to get a hold of Rene, the lead singer of the group, and the two agreed that she was speaking the truth, because the awards shows tend to put all the urban artists together in one category as opposed to subcategories like many other awards shows.
Ivy Queen in now launching her own label called Drama Records and she plans on shining light on new artists. Other future plans for “La Diva” include creating a clothing line and writing a book about her struggles.