"I'm telling you things nobody wants to hear": Pablo Chill-E, Chilean trap & música urbana between material excess and urban realism.

Abstract

This article explores how Pablo Chill-E’s career as a trap and música urbana artist creates a poetics of contradiction that is profoundly linked to the contemporary Chilean experience. This contradiction addresses the tension between, on one hand, the artist’s articulation of a fierce critique of a Chilean neoliberal present as one increasingly characterized by inequality and corruption, and on the other, the appeal to materialistic discourses which are centred on the glorification of individual entrepreneurship as an expression of hip-hop’s "capitalist realism" (Fisher 2009, 16-20). This article focusses on a selection of songs arguing that Chill-E’s seemingly contradictory materialist aesthetic of excess combines with a visceral urban realism that reveals the fault-lines of Chile’s neoliberal experiment and gives voice to those marginalised by it.