Pitbull is adding a motivational tour to his résumé.
The iconic rapper talked about having a back-to-basics approach when it comes to music, but it’s his love for inspiring audiences that he declared on Wednesday (April 25), announcing that his childhood hero, Tony Robbins, will be part of his motivational tour in 2019.
“My mother looked at him as a hero [when I was about 10 years old],” Pitbull said during an interview with Billboard‘s Leila Cobo, adding that later, as he became a recording artist, he got to meet Robbins and they became friends.
Pitbull is eyeing a 2019 tour with Robbins in an effort to motivate fans from all over the world. Just how close is the rapper to Robbins? In the summer of 2016, Robbins was on hand to pay tribute to the Miami-born entertainer when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce honored him with the 2,584th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
During the ceremony, Robbins spoke about Pitbull’s rise in music and what it means. “His life could’ve been completely different, should’ve been based on the law of averages,” Robbins said, according to published reports. “He’s a man where somewhere inside he’s got so much love for people that he couldn’t hurt anyone. At 17, he did the most important thing that any of us could do … he decided what life was going to be about. He decided to leave the idea of selling drugs and see how he could light people up with something much more powerful: his music, his heart, his soul.”
During the interview Wednesday, Pitbull said that his new music (“The Roof Is on Fire”) is being released as if it was before the days of the internet. It’s that kind of back-to-basics philosophy that gets audiences motivated, he said.
In fact, he told his business partners not to take the track to platforms like Spotify as a way to let the track be discovered by audiences. “I even told [my] team not to register it,” Pitbull said, adding that as an artist who’s embracing an independent approach, he wants to connect directly to their business partners bypassing the traditional channels.
“I’m just being a revolutionary to wake everybody else,” said Pitbull, who is also opening up schools for youth. “Music brings everybody together.”
