La bruja21 – the Berlin homegrown witch from Moabit finally put her pens together and spelled some impressions on the West Coast (South) MC Zita Zoe. As this is bruja’s debut on noboysbutrap, I want you to clap your hands and minds together and welcome our future head of resort of Spanish written rap who will open your ears for – or just keep you up to date with the South American variety and state of the art.
During her recent stay in Buenos Aires (Argentina), bruja21 got the chance to talk to Sara Hebe and enjoy her performing live – an experience pushing hard enough and on the right spot to spark that passion again… Soon we’ll get to read about the encounter, right here. And while Miss Bolivia missed out on the opportunity for a personal interview la bruja21 opens her legacy on noboysbutrap with the portrait of another castellano MC, hailing from 1111 kilometers west, Santiago the Chile: the independent artist Zita Zoe.
>> Over the years, little by little, L sent me a collection of hinds and links to Spanish speaking artists with the invitation to write some notes for this blog. I am a Hip Hop fan. But a time of mourning had estranged me from the joy of listening to music and being a supportive audience. And from dancing, which to me has always been an important element of my love for Hip Hop. It’s since some months now that music touches me again – the rhymes and the beats, the stories and the personalities, the criticism. It was Sara Hebe who made me remember that when you move your ass – your mind will follow. So eventually I got back to that link collection and saw a punchline that L had chosen for a profile: „Hay resistencia en mi corazón“. It grabbed me. And then it was Zitazoe on my earphones for days… And although Zitazoes notion of resistance does not correspond very much with my own current sense of life, I find her impressingly powerful, a struggeling but self-confident artist.
“Zitazoe is the worst of me, the perfect symphony of head and heart. Zitazoe is the worst of myself on a paper. Zitazoe is me, my writing, my everyday life, my friends, my eyes, feet, hands, my nose, my tits, my fringe, my hard work. Zitazoe is that.”
For Zitazoe rap is “the formula, my passion and my crisis” (You tell me). Rap is her journey through life, a way of struggeling with herself, of growing and learning. She chose rap as a “profession” and as her “life line” (Daría mi pela). Her songs and lyrics rise from particular experiences, and much of it is the living in a hostile world. About the process of creating songs and albums she states: I live, I feel, I write and I record. Zitazoe raps about self-assertion against injustice, but also about self-destruction and constantly about the relief to be found in alcohol.
Zitazoe is present in the Chilean hip hop underground and on the world wide web stage since 2010, tirelessly uploading videos and albums. Her audiovisual work ranges from freestyle shootings at home to well edited video clips. Much of it is produced together with the Dead Jonkies crew, formed by Marea, Piwi, Loko Way and her. Between 2011 and 2014 she released five solo albums and one collective EP with Eskape, Stefancan and Biorek, named Soul Violent.
Zitazoe’s style is puristic and hard, with much focus on her rhymes. She performs a devotion to the old school, states it without any doubts and from the very beginning, as well as her belonging to the south of Santiago de Chile. To her being an old schooler means to love “the competition, I do it without any purpose“ (Mala Dama). And the old school represents the viewpoint from which she manifests scepticism about the current hip hop boom in Latinamerica: too much fashion and too little realness.
Interviewers almost always ask her to position herself as a female rapper. Zitazoe refuses the notion of hip hop as a masculine culture and the idea of a female counter culture. “I am not very feminist. Rap isn’t masculine, it’s rap, as it always was, we don´t have to create a feminine rap.” To the contrary she reclaims a masculine style, a male-associated roughness, stating “I don´t sully the name and I do it like a man, rough and indifferent” (Mi demencia). That this is not to be understood as a rejection of solidarity among women and girls shows her participation in the Femme Rap Fest Chile in 2014. Since pushing that event she positions herself in favor of organized female visibility in hiphop culture in order to resist the stereotypes of women lacking rap skills. She does not refuse to be a role model, but prefers not to be that as a woman but as an individual old school and competitive rap artist.
bruja21, May 2015