IX Chilean Musicology Congress: Music in Times of Crisis

Paper proposal: Chilean Hip-hop in the world: Creating

Transnational Counter Narratives and Solidarity networks

Key words: hip-hop, Sweden, Chile, memory work, solidarity.

Stream: history

My paper concerns itself with hip-hop culture as a platform to create

(transnational) counter narratives and solidarity networks aimed at
remembering historical trauma and crisis. Chile is specifically interesting in
this context, as it has been described in terms of a traumatic past in the
aftermath of the 1973 coup dtat, an event that generated a huge wave
of international solidarity during the 1970s and 1980s. The paper
advances and develops ideas that did not fit within the framework of my
doctoral thesis in which I trace the construction and negotiation of cultural
identities by focusing on the intersection of migration and hip-hop culture
in, and in-between Chile and Sweden. It specifically focuses on the work
and international networks created by Chilean artists Ana Tijoux and
Eduardo Lalo Meneses from the group Panteras Negras. Ana Tijoux, whose
song 1977 was part of the US-American TV series Breaking Bad, has
become the internationally most visible Chilean hip-hop artist. In her
songs, and through her social media accounts, she addresses (Chilean and
global) injustices from a feminist viewpoint while, at the same time,
creating continuity with the nueva cancin movement. Eduardo Lalo
Menses on the other hand was the co-founder of the Panteras Negras, one
of the first hip-hop groups in Chile. In 2014, he published his
autobiography Reyes de la Jungla in which he describes hip-hop as
resistance against the Pinochet regime. Both Ana and Lalo are actively
engaged in international networks within which they negotiate their own
experience of marginalization and historical crisis. By arguing that both
artists set out to remember a specific version of the past through their
music, my papers traces the way in which they become part of and create
international (solidarity) networks against the historical background of
international solidarity with Chile since the 1970s.