Featherweight, floating between success and controversy

Featherweight during an event in Mexico City, in February 2023. OFFICIAL FEATHERWEIGHT

His name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija and Lebanese and Sinaloan blood runs through his veins.

They call her Featherweight or La Doble P. She comes from a prosperous family, she was born in Zapopan, Jalisco, she is 23 years old, and, with her songs, she has unseated pop monsters like Miley Cirus or Bad Bunny from number one singles.

Not only that, but it has six pieces among the hundred most listened to in the United States right now.

He confirmed his stardom by appearing on the Coachella festival bill and, last week, on

Jimmy Fallon's famous and almost consecratory

You'd think that sudden rise would spark unquestionable admiration for Featherweight in his home country.

Finally, with less gasoline than that, many "success stories" are sold to us Mexicans and there are not so many young people among us (of their age, at least) who are world figures on the same scale.

Wow: other Jalisco people who monopolize headlines and reflectors in the world are already older: Canelo Álvarez is 32 years old, the same as Sergio

Pérez;

Chicharito Hernandez, 34;

Film director Guillermo del Toro, winner of two Oscars, has already turned 58.

Except that this story has nothing of unconditional bows and, as we have seen in other cases, success is not usually synonymous with unanimity.

Because La Doble P is not, at least if we have to deduce it from his lyrics and his aesthetics, a romantic balladeer or a reggaeton singer who sings about love and sex with more or less self-confidence.

His (and that of his accompanying group, in which some of his cousins ​​were involved from the beginning) are the "corridos tumbados", a genre of recent appearance, which combines the so-called "regional Mexican music" with production, resources and sounds that are not at all traditional, but rather come from "urban music": trap, reggaeton and even hip-hop.

And this is where the controversy occurs, because the lyrics of the genre (and, of course, those of Featherweight) are full of references to drug trafficking, drugs, cartels and bosses.

Also your image.

And in their videos, in addition to the well-known jewelry, cars and curvaceous models, they also overflow with assault weapons, ski masks and armored vests.

There is not an ounce of irony in this thematic and visual choice: it is completely organic and sincere.

Featherweight sings about what interests him and his millions of listeners celebrate it.

If to his critics that seems like an apology for the crime, it doesn't matter exactly the same to him.

The fundamental difference between La Doble P and the hundreds or thousands of "regional music" singers who do the same may only be that, because of their image or whatever,

Perhaps, at this point, it is not so difficult to explain that drug trafficking is the issue around which the lives of millions of young people revolve in a country where more than one hundred and fifty thousand people have been murdered and thousands more "disappeared" in the six-year term for crimes related to the activity of the cartels, which, in turn, employ multitudes of kids in their chain of operations.

Artistic quality aside, in a country where drug trafficking is one of the few means of social ascent, Featherweight has taken the pulse of today better than any of his colleagues.

And, perhaps, also that many of his critics.

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