He insisted that his benefactors understand he’s simply looking out for himself, as they need to do as well during these violent times. “You gonna be right there in front of me when they’re shooting me? No, motherfucker. So he has to hedge his bets and his words whenever it comes to his subjects and their enemies. So I never do it, I only do it for the same group.” Like the others, he says threats like “they’re gonna cut out my tongue” are common.īig Los also said tensions rise when the cartel members want more “heavy shit” out of the rappers who rhyme about them - mostly threats toward contrarios. “If I did anything for another group, the people here would fuck me up. He knows one producer of his has at least 900 of his tracks he estimates he’s done at least 1,000. With a price so low and a velvety flow, he has no problem staying busy, claiming he doesn’t know how many songs he’s written. I can write a song in 15 minutes,” said Lirik Dog, smiling. Lirik Dog, a Reynosa-based narco rapero, told me, “I’m one of the cheap ones,” charging $200 per dedication. Rapper 5050 (pronounced in the Spanish Cincuenta Cincuenta) charges $500.

He receives messages through social media or text message explaining what the people want him to say about them he checks that the songs have been approved by cartel bosses then he makes the tracks for a fee.Īnd as one of the biggest-name narco rappers in the biz, Big Los makes the most money per song: around $3,000, and another $3,000 per video. It’s also cropped up in Spanish-speaking communities in the US with narco rap songs delivered in English for the Latin Kings in Chicago and the Sureños in Los Angeles.īig Los made it clear he isn’t a member of the Gulf Cartel, nor does he actually know the majority of the people he makes songs about. And now narco rap is spreading rapidly to other criminal groups throughout Mexico, like the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel, and the MS-13 in El Salvador. However, in the last decade, a modernization of the practice has flourished in rap music, specifically concerning the Gulf Cartel along the Texas-Tamaulipas border, in tandem with cartel infighting and the Mexican government’s crackdown on gang violence and drugs. Starting in the ’80s and ’90s, artists combined the accordion-filled traditional corrido genre with this practice of telling boastful tales of drug traffickers in Mexico, and narcocorridos are still wildly popular today. Big Los, one of the pioneers of narco rap, admits he regularly gets death threats via social media from people claiming to be contrarios - members of enemy cartels. The primary feature of the Spanish-language hip-hop subgenre is that drug cartel members pay rappers to make songs about their lives, called “dedications,” thus actually inviting hardship in. While many rap artists look at the money and fame that comes from their music as an escape from the hardships of their lives, narco rap is an exception. (He was deported to Mexico in 2015 after he tried to apply for US citizenship.) After release, he found rap music, and used it as a way to leave the streets. As a teenager, growing up in a rough part of Brownsville, he sold drugs and eventually ended up in jail.

The rapper was no stranger to Matamoros: He’d actually been born there before his family illegally migrated across the border to Brownsville, Texas, when he was a child. And there’s an internal war between you guys.’” “‘I don’t want to get picked up because I did a song for a certain guy over there. “I told him, ‘I don’t feel comfortable in the streets, man, everyone seems to know me,’” said Big Los in February. After arriving in Matamoros, Big Los immediately felt he’d be a target for the rival clique who controlled the city, so he said he called someone connected to the cartel, “a friend of a friend.” Big Los is a recognizable figure, known as much for his gruff voice and gun-toting music videos as his massive physique, reminiscent of Big Pun or the Notorious B.I.G.

Canciones de calibre 50 2011