Rap – a way to dance with words.

guest author La bruja21 met Sara Hebe in Buenos Aires, Argentina this fall (local time). Read the protocol:

>>> The first time I saw Sara Hebe was at a club concert in Buenos Aires and I loved what I heard: a strong voice and a powerful stage performance underlined by visuals, and supported by rapper La Negrah Liyah and bass guitarist and producer Ramiro Jota. I enjoyed a night dancing on various rhythms and beats. Dancing to Sara Hebe is an invitation to bounce, to jump, to raise the fists, to cumbia-shake hips and butts, to rock and to groove. You hear a lambada sample, you hear that catchy reggae tune, some melodic songs, many bouncing rap rhythms and last but not least you hear furious rhymes tearing along drum beats, keyboard and bass guitars. The next day I bought her two albums and with that I got my catchy, fierce and rocking Buenos Aires soundtrack for the coming months.

Some weeks later I met Sara Hebe for the interview at the autonomous left wing Buenos Aires community radio FM La Tribu. She is connected to that project since she weekly freestyled the news live on air in 2009. Sara Hebe found her first audiences at solidarity concerts against evictions, through mobilizations against social repression and police brutality, in campaigns for workers´ rights and movements for the resistance of the exploitation of natural resources for capitalist profit. Obviously, one thing she enjoys the most about making music is “to give opinions”. But when I address her as a political activist she rejects that label because of the risk to make a business out of radical political aesthetics. In order to not fall into that trap, as a person who besides her political commitment aims at being a successful artist, she sticks to the identity of a poet that accompanies the struggles by mobilization.

Sara was in her twenties when she abandoned law studies for theatre and dance and from there moved on to hip hop. She was seeking a way to express herself and she found it in rap, as “a way to dance with words”. What she brings with her is rage, rock, theatre, dancing and murga culture. And she creates profoundly poetical lyrics. The lines break before they turn into slogans. It’s all metaphors and hints to deeper thoughts, much stream of consciousness and associations, a variety of relations between narrator and author. You rarely hear references to hip hop history or other hip hop artist. The songs offer observations and examinations of the society and of personal experiences, “about the effects of capitalism that cause suffering, about the human immorality”. It’s about giving opinions and accusations and some pieces evoke the impression of sharing personal stories, for example when expressing how personal experiences form desire and identity and lead to gendered solidarity: “to the man who might like me, because of a man I am not gonna touch any man anymore, to all the women who like me, give me your hands”.

Asking Sara Hebe what she thinks about the growing hip hop trend in Argentina, she first points to Venezuela, Chile and Colombia, were the hip hop culture is a means of social transformation and popular education. She names El Tortu y Asterisco as artists who moves that tradition forward in Argentina. Chatting about social change, Sara Hebe states the need and obligation to be a feminist in these days. She is as happy to see many women at mics nowadays in Argentina, as she is happy to see women as presidents. This is not about hip hop, it’s about the society. One threat to emancipation: the many men who don’t understand that successful women aren’t exceptional but normal. Sara describes her own style of expression as crazy. She says that the messages aren’t pronounced as clear as in the rhymes of other feminist rappers. But differing styles can without any doubt share an attitude of consciousness and solidarity. Sara Hebe concludes that the society needs more women that perceive feminism as “radical social transformation in order to confront the tremendous everyday violence“.

The media’s attention increases in 2012 with the release of her second album Puentera. Argentinian newspaper Página 12 points to her strong social critique and calls her “the most notable Argentine rapper of the millennium and one of the most fundamental young artists of our times”. This quote is until now constantly recycled by other journalist. In 2013 an article in the same newspaper introduces her as the “rapper who mobilizes the biggest audiences” and points out to “girls with girls in the first row of the shows”. And another interview in 2015, that could have resulted as a crawling homestory is, by the interviewed Sara Hebe and Flor Linyera, turned into a talk about politics: “The couple doesn’t want to talk about love, they prefer to accuse capitalism“.

Sara’s discography starts in 2009 with her first album La Hija del Loco. The title refers to her nickname in her Patagonian hometown Trelew. She describes it as the purest rap-centred album she has made until now. It was produced in a soundsystem type of collaboration with friends who contributed the beats and recorded instrumental parts. The second album, Puentera released in 2012, gives more space to the fusion of styles and genres. Its production consolidated the trio that Sara Hebe forms together with Ramiro Jota y La Negrah Liyah. As the first two, the brand new third album Colectivo Vacío (2015) is produced independently, without the frame of a label and at their own cost and risk. It is promoted as an “unconventional rap album” including electronic punk, cumbia-rap and Brazilian drums.