Latina Hip Hop

While you're all tracking economic and wartime news, I'm diligently following the global hip hop beat.
Check out this story about La Mala, Mala Rodriguez.

From the associated article: "Latin America had been tuned into Chicano hip-hop artists like Cypress Hill and Kid Frost. "People were trying to emulate the flow of groups like Cypress Hill," says Data, "but a lot of those rappers in the U.S., they had only a very basic control of the Spanish language, because they didn't grow up speaking Spanish, or they didn't go to school in Spanish. They picked it up listening to their immigrant parents." So their rhymes were simple, short and slow-paced in the style of West Coast rap.

Everything changed once hip-hop got big in Spain. "After the explosion of hip-hop in Spain in the late '90s, there was a huge mutation in how people rapped in Latin America," says Data. All of a sudden, rappers in Spain were incorporating a lot more syllables into shorter verses. "When kids in Latin America heard that, they were like 'Whoa.' It was something no one had ever thought of before."

There are a bunch of links here, in case you want to know about others like Arianna Puello and Ana Tijoux.