Dillom, the punk angel of Argentine music: "There is nothing more comforting than revenge"

– I did not want to die and have everything remain unfinished.

For the first time I was doing well at something.

Dylan León Masa has just arrived in a taxi and after a while he realizes that he has lost his wallet.

It rained all night in Buenos Aires and this morning, when he has to run around with the press, photos, meetings and preparing for a tour, he has run out of his documents.

He doesn't care that much.

"I have everything there and I'm traveling next week... but it's going to show up," he says, sitting in one of the rooms of an old house in the center of the city that his group of friends turned into a producer.

Then he recounted the real fear, that of Dillom: “At one point, in the middle of the quarantine, things had started to go well for me and I was seized by a panic that I didn't want to die now and that this was left unfinished.

Dying into oblivion would have been the saddest thing.

My first idea was to make a posthumous record while still alive”.

Dillom was born on December 5, 2000 and they say he died on November 30, 2021. The false funeral announcement that fired him in the newspapers that day announced the end of the obsession that had hammered him for two years, but in reality it was a Beginning:

, that posthumous record, came out the next day.

By then he already had twenty songs published, including a session with Bizarrap in the most important studio for music in Spanish, but something was missing.

For someone who knew that he wanted to be a musician since he picked up a bass at the age of nine, that he worked putting together rap events since he was a teenager, a work was missing.

In the era of the songs spit out weekly on Spotify, of the success counted in Youtube visits, his bet was a concept album.

postmortem

He had his great baptism at Lollapalooza last March, when the unexpected absence of C. Tangana gave him prime time in front of 30,000 people.

The official presentation was at the end of April, and it sold out four theaters in Buenos Aires in less than five minutes.

On October 12, it happened again: tickets for his debut at Luna Park stadium were sold in 10 minutes.

His commitment to narrating a concrete world, where the unexpected success and tragedies of his childhood coexist with references to cartoons from the early 2000s, adolescent readings by Herman Hesse, Stanley Kubrick films and the serial killer of the moment promoted by Netflix, with the addiction to pills, the scourge of the dollar in Argentina, and money that comes fast and burns easy, hit with the force of a second wave.

the fifth step,

those rap battles that turned Buenos Aires into a capital of urban music, has just turned a decade old.

Dillom was never part of that scene, it was the counterculture of artists like Duki, Paulo Londra or Nicki Nicole, who launched into the world from that square and today head all the charts

Dillom poses for a portrait in front of the original painting of the cover of his first album, 'Post Mortem', released in December 2021.Silvina Frydlewsky

He is not a trapper.- “I think gender is irrelevant, it sucks because it pigeonholes you and suddenly you don't fit in at all.

I understand it anyway, the human being itself tends to name everything to make communication easier, ”he says now, as he prepares his first tour abroad, five cities in Spain in just one week.

“For me the style of a song is more a consequence of what I want to do at the moment.

I never say that I am going to do rap, house, punk.

It also depends on the narrative, on the theatrical element: the story I want to tell”.

The whole story was sung, and almost any Argentine who has not yet turned 30 and has internet access knows it: Dylan León was a teenager and was about to play his first concert when the police raided his home and his mother was arrested for drug problems and “bad joint”.

His father, who had started a family again embracing Judaism, did not respond to the first calls from the police to come look for him: it was a Saturday off, Shabbat.

The 15-year-old boy who was not yet Dillom, but who composed musical bases for another group and organized small concerts where he took the opportunity to sing his first compositions, ended up living in his father's new house until no one could stand it.

And when they opened the door for him, he didn't come back.

“Maybe it's half a cliché, but there were many people who at the time did not trust me, who believed that I could not achieve anything, that I was on the wrong path.

But, even though I was lost many times, I always knew what I was going to do”, says Dillom, who when he was left on the street he was taken in by a friend's family, with whom he lives to this day.

“I am not a spiteful person.

I am very forgiving and fixing myself, but there is something nice about being in the position where everything went well.

There is nothing I like more, there is nothing more comforting than being able to have revenge, have a revenge.

In his music, the rogue rapper always flies over, who sleeps badly, spends in dollars and discovers power and sex without limits.

Herman Hesse 's

, that adolescent who experiments with the possibility of evil, is especially unleashed in the song with the same name on the album, with which he opens all his concerts walking through a cemetery: "My friends are dead I accidentally killed them / I didn't know that she was your girlfriend, I accidentally drenched her.”

And he ends with a more fragile Dillom in the confessional: "I don't talk about my life, that shit is very sad / and now that I have money, my jokes are funnier."

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A post shared by Fito Paez (@fitopaezmusica)

Andrés Calamaro calls him the great rockstar of Buenos Aires.

For Fito Páez, his staging is “unappealable”.

Another old glory of national rock, the singer of Turf, Joaquín Levinton, quoted him from memory in Master Chef: "

I don't even give you a hug."

Dillom builds on basic hip-hop, but the band that accompanies him live follows him on the paths of trash, punk, a bit of new cumbia and more commercial pop.

That eclecticism that took him from singing for 10 people in basements of the old pedestrian streets of Buenos Aires to the largest theater on Corrientes Avenue is well defined by Ale Sergi, singer of another Argentine glory of this century, Miranda: “He is an unclassifiable artist.

A bit of a punk, a bit of a rapper and a sensitive soul, but weathered, ”he said in an interview a few months ago.

“For much of my life I didn't listen to them.

National rock was playing in my house, but I didn't see its value”, confesses Dillom, who sees his influences in the rap of the nineties and in Marshall Mathers, another blond teenager who renamed himself and conquered the world singing his misfortunes with the name of Eminem, in the Ramones and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

"Now I can understand the greatness of these figures and it is an honor," he says about the love he receives from the fathers of the national industry, but he does not leave them on the pedestal: "That 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."

The weekend before this interview, Dillom was due to perform in Paraguay and the festival was canceled due to storms.

A group of boys waited for him at the doors of his hotel.

When he arrived, they put him up in a flower pot and, although he offered to sing a song, they were the ones who chanted it at his feet.

Dillom created his own scene and has a production company that takes care of each of the ideas that end up in videos and a group of artists, his Rip Gang, with whom he collaborates and who have created their own label, Bohemian Grooves.

But the great success was achieved by his pop side.

His most listened to songs are the ones that can be sung: the almost disco rhythm of

, the piano ballad of

, the reggaeton hit of

, which was accompanied by an autobiographical video to open

: “I don't want to see you, I don't want to go back / Your face makes me want to eat / Baby, hell I saw it alive / I don't need your welcome”.

“I love those moments.

I think I connect a lot and people love me.

We have a huge audience, I'm spoiled, ”she says.

“These are universal things that can happen to a lot of people.

And he goes hand in hand with the fact that there are many sad people, especially in our generation.

All depressed, heh.”

You have to sing for a generation used to living everything through their phone, who approaches an artist in the street with the camera in front of them.

“Fame is a bit dehumanizing, I go out and cover myself up so they're not filming me,” says Dillom.

"I understand huh.

I am not a hippie who says not to take photos, that we take advantage of the moment to be together.

But if there is something that breaks my balls, it is when I approach people and they are all with their cell phones to film a video.

I don't want your cell phone, I want to shake your hand.

On October 12, when he finally sang for that Luna Park that he filled in 10 minutes, the phones went down in the middle of the show.

Dillom, in the middle of a catwalk, climbed into an inflatable boat and was carried back to the stage by the people in their arms.

“I don't like to always be in the middle, I think exposure is the most difficult part of success,” he says, but he admits: “Yes, on the same side.

If I told you that I don't like being the center of attention, I wouldn't make music."

Dillom, after the interview with EL PAÍS.Silvina Frydlewsky

Argentina is already at your feet.

The

tour has finished across the country with thousands of kids painting white shirts with blood red to flock to watch him jump out of his grave.

Dillom is aware that it is a privilege to be able to live what he likes in a country that annihilates salaries at the rate of inflation and the International Monetary Fund.

“I am not even going to live elsewhere.

I couldn't live in another country.

Here I understand myself, with humor, with people.

Telling a joke and that someone understands you is the most valuable thing there is for me," he says in the interview, but he had already sung it before on

: "Don't worry, I'll pay the vulture fund / I'm going to die in Argentina like Hitler."

– How do you continue after surviving a posthumous album?

- Lose weight.

This weekend I listened to the record again for the first time since it came out.

My voice has changed, I discover good things in it, I notice mistakes.

It was a long process and I was left empty.

I am very ritual, methodical.

I need time to sit down and write, but I'm fine with not thinking of anything right now.

I can also think of a thousand things and I don't know which one to choose.

As the interview ends, her manager approaches, waving her wallet in the air.

The taxi driver returned and left her at the door with everything inside her.

“He had recognized me, we talked a lot and we took a picture.

This is also what fame gives you, huh”, says Dillom with a smile, and then asks: “Did he leave a number?

I'd like to send him a message."

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