Leslie Grace: I'm Dominican, so we love Bacardi rum
and mojitos. We're very, very involved with keeping the integrity of what this song means
for the world.
As we all know, "Conga" is a classic. I was so excited when the initial idea came to us
through a partnership that we were doing with Bacardi. They had an amazing plan to basically
recreate the song with three creatives that have never worked together before
and bring a fresh vibe to the track while creating a global campaign that made everybody want to
dance around the world. I heard that and I was just like, "I'm in, I'm in." And then
my second thought was, "Wait, hold up. You guys are recreating 'Conga'? This is allowed?"
Boi-1da was on board. We kept the original hook, obviously. I feel that Meek and Boi-1da
really, really made it new, brand new. I was just so honored and happy to work with them
and collaborate with them on this, on the track, on the video, which is incredible.
Leslie Grace: I feel like life is
worth celebrating every day. And we might not always be in the best position to remember that
every day, but I feel like when we can and when we can have songs that encourage that, it's
amazing. And so "Conga" has always been that for us, especially as a Latin community, but now bringing
it back and bringing it back after a really hard year, I really wanted that to be wherever you are,
dance, celebrate life, get your body on the dance floor. Your dance floor could be the living room,
it could be your bedroom, it could be the roof, wherever you're at. But if you're listening to
this song, you got to get moving.
I have one really, really vivid memory that I talk about all the time. My house was the house
that all the family members would come to party at. And so prior to the party, my parents will
put on the playlist, and Gloria was the first in that CD order. And I remember that I would just
be spinning around in the living room. I remember this one night just spinning under the lights in
the living room and imagining that I was on a stage and just doing my little kid salsa away
to the track. The history of the record for me, it just brings back so many memories of my childhood,
and also just reminds me of how impactful the track itself was for our culture and
for someone like Gloria. She was one of the first artists that I remember really looking
up to because she was so successful at being exactly who she was, where she was from, and also
reaching a general market audience. The fact that I can come full circle to be a part of a
song that was so important for us and for me and my inspiration to be an artist is so, so cool.
So going into the first verse, we're back to do the conga. So we got to get there first.
There has to be a DJ at the party, you know what I mean? And that's Boi-1da. When you
get to the club or when you get to the spot, you already want to put in your request for a track,
like, "Oh, I hope ..." or even just, "I hope they play this song. If they play this song,
I'm about to go off," you know? So that's definitely what I was thinking about. My favorite
tropical destination to get away with my ladies or anyone really, just give me a chance
is going back to the homeland, to the DR. I mean, I think anybody, even if you're not from DR,
can agree that it's the best place to vacation.
It's just such a good time.
And so when I wrote this lyric, I was thinking about how can I transport myself to a place that
feels like conga? And conga feels tropical, it feels sweaty, it feels dewy, it feels
like, "Ah, today's going to ... I'm trying to get out and party and feel good about myself." And so
I know when I'm stepping out with my ladies, you got to make sure the drip is nice. We all like
to believe when we step into a place that we're show stopping and that somebody's looking at you.
So I had to create that story to create the tension that would drive me and my girls to
the dance floor, eventually.
Before even starting the lyric, I wanted to put in a little bit of Spanish and create that Spanglish
back and forth that I usually do in a lot of my songs, because that's reflective of me and it's
also reflective of the new generation of Latinx people in this country and also abroad that speak
both languages and are bilingual. And I wanted to reflect that. The original actually has no
words in Spanish at all, other than conga. So I was like, "This would be great if we can throw
some Spanglish in there." We got all of those elements, we're feeling wavy, we got the drip,
we got the DJ. Now we got Bacardi. It's a party, everybody move your body now. There's no way
that you're not going to be able to move. So it incorporated all the things that I think about
when you're getting ready to dance at a party.
Dance has always been a huge part of my love for just performance in general. And that's what first
made me fall in love, along with the singing, obviously, since I was a kid. But there was always
music in my household and my parents loved to dance. They may not be the best singers. They love
to sing too, but they're better dancers than they are singers. So they really took pride in teaching
us a lot of tropical music and dance styles, like bachata, merengue, salsa.
All of those styles, my parents were placing my feet from when I was five and them showing me
how to do it. And now I'm so grateful for it, because it allowed me from such a young age
to enjoy dance, and specifically Latin dance for my entire life and have so much
respect for it.
Leslie Grace: We didn't think that we were going to have
a bridge section, and then when Meek hopped on, a lot of the Bacardi team and Boi-1da and I were
thinking, "Man, we need another part." And we knew that we wanted to make the song feel like we all
recorded together, even though we didn't. But we also wanted to pay homage to the original lyric,
aside from the hook. The original exudes all of the tropical musicality
along with adding some supersonic sounds that you would think aren't tropical, and that's
what made the song so revolutionary. And so I felt like we were trying to do the same thing,
but just in a different way. For this music video, I think I danced the most I've ever danced ever.
Ian Eastwood was the choreographer for the video,
and he is obviously someone who I love, but also cracked the whip on me to make sure that I was
doing all of the moves to exude all of the conga that we needed to for this video.
Anytime you're hearing Meek, you're getting ready to get pumped up. Meek is who you want
to listen to when you getting pumped up for the party, you getting pumped up for the workout,
you're getting ... and I feel like "Conga" for so long for all of us has been like, "Okay,
it's party time."
Once we got onto set, he was rushing to go because he had a private jet. Like the lyrics said,
"I got shorty with me making plans on a jet," literally leaving at 12:00
AM that night. And I don't know, it was already 10:45 or something like that and we had a certain
amount of time to get this shot. My boy Meek, he lives true to his lyrics. He lives this life.