Bogotá: The New Boom Bap Capital

Spend some time digging through rap coming out of Bogotá and boom bap is hard to miss.

M.A.D. Fellaz work with a sound Hip Hop al Parque itself connects to classic boom bap and '90s rap. H-ico El Señor del Funk still builds with samples, funk, soul, machines and live loops. Spektra de la Rima came up listening to rap on cassettes before eventually pushing into different structures and sounds.

But Bogotá isn't a city stuck trying to recreate the '90s.

Hip-hop has simply been here long enough to develop its own memory.

The music spread however it could

One of the better-documented early moments came in 1984, when members of what would become La Etnnia recalled seeing Beat Street at Teatro Embajador. They started as breakdancers. By the late '80s and early '90s, that influence was turning into something local: writing about Las Cruces and Bogotá, improvising over instrumentals and eventually recording with their own equipment.

By the mid-'90s, Bogotá's public youth frequency 99.1 had become another route into the culture. Reino Clandestino was active by 1996, broadcasting hip-hop to listeners across the city. Juan Pablo Barragán has recalled recording the program onto cassettes in Usme and listening to those tapes with other young people. Bogotá rapper Mulato has said hearing the show as a teenager helped inspire him and his cousins to form their first group.

Radio wasn't just introducing people to records. In documented cases, it was helping turn listeners into participants.

Other routes were developing at the same time.

The first Rap a la Torta brought 23 selected Bogotá groups to La Media Torta in July 1996. Over the following years, that festival developed into what Bogotá now knows as Hip Hop al Parque.

Golpe Directo was operating as a hip-hop formation project in Las Cruces by the late '90s, teaching MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti. Muestras Para No Delinkir later gave young artists coming through that training somewhere to perform.

DJ Fonxz took another route. After working with Reino Clandestino, he opened Universo Zu, built a studio at home and began teaching DJing and production to younger people looking for instruction.

None of those programs or institutions carried Bogotá hip-hop forward on their own. Some disappeared. Others changed. Public support was uneven. But the same basic process kept appearing in different places: somebody encountered the culture, found other people practicing it, learned something and eventually made something of their own.

Bogotá now

You can hear different results of that history across the city today.

The sound stays available

Contemporary Bogotá producer and MC Ruzto has described sampling Latin music, soul, jazz and older records as a process of turning existing material into something new—something that can participate in what Bogotá sounds like.

That's probably the better way to understand why boom bap still feels natural in parts of the city's rap scene.

Bogotá didn't preserve one version of hip-hop untouched. Over decades, different parts of the city developed ways for people to encounter the culture, learn its practices, find collaborators and make their own work. That kept older hip-hop languages available without requiring every generation to use them the same way.

Some artists still build with boom bap. Others stretch it, combine it with something else or leave parts of it behind.