A handsome Camilo brings down Oviedo and talks face to face with the best, facing the dilemma of continuing to be a teenage phenomenon or growing up.

If you take the Thermomix (or a common and honest turmix, I don't care) and put in a good handful of Latin rhythms and colors for all audiences (focusing on the first division of what we call popular music , stitching from the traditional to the urban), in addition to a lively and unnatural charisma, romanticism in abundance (it is true that a bit one-dimensional, but we will get to that later), and a sincerely overwhelming musical talent, probably in two minutes of blender you will get out of the glass, walking so dapper, as if nothing were happening, the Colombian Camilo Echeverri with his fine Austro-Hungarian mustache .

And there's another ingredient you may have forgotten, but the guy brings with him: bomb-proof professionalism . Because only with it, and backed by a literally brutal band (from the tremendous percussion to the keys, strings, and a thunderous slide trombone), can one pull off a killer concert like the one Echeverri put on this Saturday at the La Ería venue in Oviedo .

Oviedo? Yes, Oviedo. After winning I don't know how many Latin Grammys (what does it matter), first as a shadow writer for Bad Bunny, Juanes, and Bomba Estéreo , and then, above all, with his album Mis Manos (2021), and after traveling halfway around the world riding a growing and family-friendly fan phenomenon that's deliberately targeted (girls, mothers, and even the occasional grandmother in the audience), you have to be very professional and really believe in your own stuff to go on stage in Oviedo in front of no more than 3,000 people (a likely failure) and, as if it were New York, finish the concert for an hour and three-quarters like the guy finished it.

That seemed like the last concert of his life. In a small town in northern Spain, but as if he were playing for the prize of stardom at the Oscars ceremony before the eyes of the planet , Camilo scored all of the pop idol's checks in that time. Second by second. Frame by frame . As is customary, he sang to the crowd as one sings to a single person: no more and no less than the most beloved . Not a single second went by without his wink, not a lyric without his caress, not a single fan without being singled out, a separate mention of a vocal ability as nuanced as it was at times overwhelming (even jumping in front of the microphone, the man projected like a beast).

Whether embracing the tumbao of cumbia ( Vida de rico ), stirring light salsa or bachatita ( Bebé ), perreando close to the most commercial reggaeton ( Tutu ), or more inclined to urban and kleenex ( Kesi ), in the end, for Echeverri, everything is the clothing to put together a pop of a lifetime, with lyrics that go from discovery to discovery - the sublime Vida de rico has more pinch and classicism than a bolero by Machín -, and rhythms that, apart from a few passages of conventional pop, drip flow .

So, mainstream pop, that sometimes irritating world in which the determination and designs of marketing carry as much weight as the favor of the muses, can also harbor a guy as incredibly talented as he is nice (you'd want to take him to the bar as a colleague). Although he sells a solid fandom phenomenon to 11-year-old girls ( like yours truly's daughter: hello, beautiful ), wrapped in all that horrible paraphernalia, enamoring the masses, in reality, in plain sight but secretly, he's conversing, in creative and interpretive potential, with the best of the best. Well, it feels good to know .

The thing is, Camilo has to decide what he wants to be when he grows up . Whether he wants to remain hooked on the idea that "our revolution is love, no matter how innocent it may seem," as he said before playing the guitar solo, virtuosically, the effective (he's incapable of doing anything that isn't effective) Damn ChatGPT , or whether he wants to let real life, the one that takes no prisoners and isn't exactly going through its best moments, get tangled up in that excellent brain of his.

And the dichotomy isn't Juan Luis Guerra or Rubén Blades, commercial or committed (musically and charismatically, I could look them both in the eye, no excuse for the joke ). The dilemma is whether to be Peter Pan in Neverland forever, or finally an adult author in a world, like the one we unfortunately have, for adults.