This is how the movement that is changing music was born in Argentina

The number 247 of Antezana street, a two-story house, like most of those that populate the middle-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, is the house in which Alejandro Farache spent his childhood.

For thousands of teenagers who pass by every day and leave graffiti on its façade, who meet at the door to take photos at any time, it is the mecca of the musical movement of their lives.

The Argentine trap exploded so quickly that it already has a monument.

In five years it went from a group of kids who got together to improvise hip hop in a plaza to the ears of an entire Spanish-speaking generation.

Farache, a 51-year-old merchant, says that his parents bought the house in the mid-seventies, that they moved there when he was five years old, and that, after his mother's death, it was put up for rent.

First a family moved there.

Then, in mid-2017, it was rented by a group of twenty-somethings.

They were some of the founders of El Quinto Escalón, the improvised hip hop competition that began on the steps of a park, a few streets south of the house, and ended up filling warehouses with thousands of teenagers.

Alejo Nahuel Costa (known as Ysy A), one of its creators, and Mauro Ezequiel Lombardo (known as Duki), its great champion, moved to Antezana 247 as the competition announced its end.

“I thought they were

I had no idea what trap was

remembers Farache, who returned to live in the house with his family to discover that its door was a museum.

“Now I am the number one fan, but I remember that the boys' representative told me about his future, Duki's more than anything.

He said that he was going to be the Luis Miguel of the trap.

So it seemed like an exaggeration."

Duki (Buenos Aires, 26 years old) ended up proving the opposite.

And she did it like lightning: she won El Quinto Escalón in August 2016 and in November of that year she published her first single, which reached two million views on YouTube in two weeks.

Four albums and more than a hundred songs later, he is now disembarking in Spain for his two presentations this weekend in Madrid (this Friday and Saturday at the WiZink Center), with all the tickets already sold out.

For the following, in Barcelona (March 3 and 4 at the Palau Saint Jordi), only a few remain.

Between October and November of last year, he filled the José Amalfitani stadium in Buenos Aires four times and became the fastest Argentine artist to sell out tickets: 180,000 tickets.

they flew in hours.

Nicki Nicole, in her performance at the Boombastic festival, in Madrid on June 10, 2022.Aldara ZN (Redferns)

“I just realized where I'm standing and I can't believe it.

Listening to my music changed my life, ”she recalled on the verge of tears at the first of those concerts, on October 6.

He had just sung three songs and the stadium was already collapsing.

voice processor

of the microphone, while sweat glistened between the tattoos on his face, he harangued the people from the most remote stalls, the cheapest ones.

“How are the kids in the background?

That sector is very special to me, ”he recalled.

The first concert he saw live was from there, when she was 10 years old.

She told it on stage: it was in 2009, a night of torrential rain.

A national rock legend, Charly García, played.

The reference was not accidental.

In 2018, before the Argentine trap broke borders, before the millions of views on YouTube and world tours, a 22-year-old Duki who had not yet released an album was invited to sing at the Gardel Awards, the awards of the National Music.

It was an exotic choice, and he took advantage of it in his own style: in addition to the voice processor, he was accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra.

"You have to ban

said Charly García (Buenos Aires, 71 years old) ironically that night, who received the most important award, the Gardel de Oro, after the presentation of the ragpicker

The industry sided with one of its biggest heroes, and criticism rained down for weeks.

"I love him," Duki released a month later, in an interview for the cover of the Argentine edition of

.

"Charly can tell me that I'm a son of a thousand bitches and he's going to be all right," he added.

Time, once again, ended up agreeing with him.

Duki has not yet won any Gardel award, but since his presentation until today, the urban music of which he was the spearhead has won the awards.

Last year, Wos (Valentín Oliva, another champion of El Quinto Escalón) became the first rapper to lift the Gardel de Oro. He was accompanied on the podium by his battle partner, Trueno, with the award for best live album;

hit

by María Becerra and Tini Stoessel,

, as song of the year.

Urban music has experienced an explosion in Argentina.

The country, proud of its national rock and whose popular identity has always been linked to cumbia, had never made a place for hip hop in its industry.

street battles

.

"Everything starts there

That is the particularity that Argentina has over other countries.

A good part of the current urban music singers are born in battles”, analyzes Sebastián Muñoz, a doctor in Anthropology who studied the incursion of hip hop in the country since the eighties.

And he explains: “The people who did rap, fundamentally since the nineties, did not identify with the popular sectors, contrary to what happened in Chile, in Spain, perhaps in Mexico.

In Argentina there were figures like Ilya Kuryaki & the Valderramas or the Argentine Hip Hop Union, but they were not very close.

Rap was not popular because it did not identify with the people.

He was criticized as something gringo ”.

Duki, in a performance.

He is the artist who has sold out the fastest concert tickets in a stadium in Argentine music.GUIDO ADLER

For Muñoz, urban music was "in the eye of the storm" of a process of change in the cultural industries towards digitization.

Making hip hop was easier than forming a band: with a computer at home, a singer could experiment and record himself.

"From 2015 onwards, worldwide, all that music that was made in a self-managed way collided with the reorganization that streaming produced

the possibility that the industry, the big labels, see a business there," he says.

“The growth was autonomous with respect to the market, it had nothing to do with the industry.

the

it generated its own market and, due to the numbers it has, it began to be profitable for the labels.

Spotify was starting to be super important.

Musicians also find that they can start monetizing their songs from there.

It is music appropriate to the production rate of an algorithm: one can constantly produce and publish.

But the movement is about more than just singles every week on Spotify.

The great sensation of late 2022 was not one of the hundreds of songs from the constellation of artists born in the heat of El Quinto Escalón, but a concept album produced by one of its outcasts.

, by Dillom, sold out theaters in minutes throughout the country and ended up being one of the highlights of last year's Lollapalooza Argentina, where he alternated the stage with Wos and Duki in front of 30,000 people.

He had an intention to narrate a specific world: unexpected success, childhood tragedies, anime cartoons, the adolescent vision of readings by Herman Hesse, Stanley Kubrick movies, addiction to pills, the scourge of the dollar in Argentina ... While the impromptu battles were already brewing in the neighborhood next door, Dylan León Masa (Dillom's real name, Balvanera, Argentina, 22 years old)

He produced his own events.

“I started putting them together at the age of 15.

Before the boom of all this, nobody wanted to give you a place for a rap event ”, he tells EL PAÍS.

"Now everyone is desperate to put them together because they move a lot of people, but at the time we were 10 crazy cats."

Last weekend, Dillom was one of the most anticipated artists at Cosquín Rock, one of the most purist festivals of Argentine rock.

A friend of Andrés Calamaro and praised by Fito Páez, Dillom admits that a lot of national rock was heard at home, but that he “didn't see the value in it”.

"Now I can understand the greatness of these figures and it is an honor," he points out about the affection he receives from the fathers of the national industry, but does not leave them on the pedestal: "This endorsement is heavy and it helps me a lot because its public He is very critical of my generation, but I think we have a mutual exchange.

There are also a lot of people who listen to me, who didn't grow up with them, and are now interested in their music.

They don't need my validation, obviously, but it's a way to show them respect."

Bizarrap concert at the Coca Cola Music Festival in Madrid on September 2, 2022. Álvaro García

This generation of Argentine musicians broke that barrier with rock and eliminated the prejudice that hip hop was music "for gringos."

And he did it hugging the most popular artist from his childhood: Eminem.

The movie

, where the rapper recounts his success through street battles, is a constant reference among the first rappers.

This lack of prejudice converged with an accelerated digitization, in which the Government also played its role: artists like Neo Pistea, another illustrious resident of Antezana 247, or the rapper L-Gante, one of the exponents of the new Argentine cumbia, produced his first songs on the laptops of the Conectar Igualdad program, which between 2010 and 2015 distributed almost five million computers to public school children throughout the country.

Perhaps the best example of how curiosity and access to technology launched this generation to stardom is in Gonzalo Julián Conde, Bizarrap for the world.

Before being the most sought-after music producer of the moment, who takes Nathy Peluso, Residente or Shakira to his home studio, Bizarrap, now 24 years old, was almost a chronicler of street battles.

The world knows Bizarrap for his more than 50 studio sessions with the cream of urban music, but teenagers in Argentina still remember his first YouTube channel, now closed, where he prepared the Combos Locos: edited summaries with the best battles, editions with jokes about other not so good ones and some of their first songs.

“Thanks to you, many of us are where we are.

You are number one ”, Bizarrap dedicated to Duki at the closing of one of his concerts in Buenos Aires last October.

It was one of the most emotional moments of the night: the most popular of the class and the boy who watched everything from afar, consecrated almost five years later.

A large part of the Argentine music industry has been cemented behind these two young men from the Buenos Aires middle class: now, one of the flagship troubadours in the fight against the dictatorship of the seventies, Víctor Heredia, sings along with the rapper Trueno;

Gustavo Santaolalla, flagship producer of Latin American rock of the nineties, collaborates on the records of Ysy A;

Fito Páez announced that he wants to reissue his top album,

with contemporary artists.

Even pop figures, like the Disney girl Tini Stoessel or Emilia Mernes, who led a fleeting moment of nueva cumbia with her group Rombai de ella, have turned towards urban music.

Argentina has a musical treasure.

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