In the 1970s, Colombia began the transition from cultivating cannabis to growing the coca leaf on a large scale, previously grown predominantly in the Andean region. They rapidly seized control of the market. By 1997 they were the largest producer of coca plants in the world. Even when demand declined, Colombia remained dominant distributors, so that in 2008 they were still producing half of the world’s supply of cocaine.
The reputation of the country as the cocaine-fulcrum of the world would eventually filter down into popular music. Madonna is one of the most recent artists attempting to incite the worn-out musical trappings of Colombia’s drug notoriety. The first track off her album is called Medellin, the capital city of the Antioquia region of Colombia. It is, amongst many other things, Pablo Escobar’s city of birth.
The track, woozy and drugged-out in a monochrome pallet, has the bite of a baby snake. Madonna uses this association to employ ‘trip’ as a clumsy double entendre, as an insipid allusion to the narco-tourism that floods into the city every year. And Medellin is now also one ingredient in an album that is trying so hard to deliver some edge.
There’s a complacency here that is both blatant and hard to properly engage with. Colombia has been handed this global narrative of drug imperialism and it’s everywhere. It’s no longer a particularly interesting thing to talk about. Thank god that Medellin showed up another album this year, with a different story attached.
Crimeapple is a rapper, like Mach-Hommy, from New Jersey. He sports a raggedy beard and golden grills. His place of birth is Colombia. A lot of the beats Crimeapple raps in his distinctive loose way feel like stripped bones lying on the pavement. It’s dirty, unpleasant, and real. Nas bragged that he when he wrote rhymes, he saw ‘all the words past the margin.’ Crimeapple raps like it. On one of his most recent tracks ‘Dead Gringos,’ he sprints away when the drum beat hits. ‘To see my babies eating mandarin, speaking mandarin/I’m handling business..’ His rapping sounds like he wrote the words on reams of paper in a Kerouac-like lightening clap of inspiration.
In July, he released an album entitled Medallo, another word for Medellin. Crimeapple flew to his country of birth to record the album with torch-wielder of the underground production DJ Muggs in tow. This was accompanied by a musical shift for Crimeapple. On this album, he just as often raps on a swamp of strings, accompanied by soft clicks of drums. Musically, this sounds grandiose but ravaged.
Crimeapple uses his Spanish more on Medallo than on his other albums. When he raps in both languages, it sometimes feels like he’s snapping his head backwards and forwards, talking to a crowded room. There is a tension within the language, something that is reflected in the complex relationship he has with being bilingual. “I learned Spanish in Colombia….my parents always spoke it but I was bad at it. I couldn’t make the ‘r’ roll off my tongue until I went out there for like 3 months.” On the opening to one track on Medallo, he rolls them as a personal flex.. “Hit your drum like bee dee bombom, r-r-r-rum pum pompom.” It shows how although he’s conscious of the limitations of his spoken Spanish, Crimeapple’s found a way that he can meld the language into his mostly English raps.
This relates to larger complexities around Crimeapple’s identity, something he talks about candidly. He mentions being called a ‘gringo’ back in Colombia in an interview. ‘They smell it on you…I could be dressed in the same clothes as them, I could not have a haircut, I could be 10 shades darker and they would know.’ In a throwback to last week, Mach-Hommy has also talked about being called white on returning to Haiti. There is something deeply disconcerting to imagine being ‘othered’ by your country of origin.
I don’t speak Spanish, so listening to Crimeapple gives me that linguistic itch that comes with desperately wanting to understand something. I’ve been trying to tease out the pronunciation of things he’s saying so I can hammer them into Google Translate.[1] Because his punchlines are towering and left-field.
The track ‘En Vivo Desde Manrique’ drapes a response to the modern immigration vitriol over a blistered choir, murky-brown strings as if reflected in a puddle, drums barely visible: “Trump trying to build up a wall. No worries at all, los pajaros siguen volando.” The birds keep flying. Switching to Spanish here makes him feel like a diplomat for the more complete image of America as the melting pot. It’s inclusive but it also demonstrates the middling ground he occupies between the two countries. It’s a representation of his people. Couple this with the videos publicising the project, mostly shot on the street corners, ranches, chapels of Colombia, and it’s clear that Crimeapple wants to portray a different side of Colombia.
Possibly most revealing, Pablo Escobar only comes up once on this album. It’s on mandible-side-burned guest rapper Primo Profit’s verse, also of Colombian descent. This exclusion on Crimeapple’s part is a conscious effort to offer something different. A lot of rappers mention the drug-baron in their music without any connection to Colombia. This fixation on Pablo Escobar only acts to highlight a wider fascination with the excesses of the ‘drug capital’.
Each year narcoturistas travel to Medellin to sample the faded glamour of Escobar’s grip on the city and the product put him there. Ex-hitmen and family members of Escobar host tours of Medellin’s infrastructure, hollow but still haunted still by the ex-drug-lord’s reign. In the same breath, tourists will often sample the cocaine, producing a deep irony between gasping at the exploits of a all-consuming drug trade and breathing further life into it.
Crimeapple’s positioning of Medellin floats in the midst of all of this. In the world of rap branding, being Colombian comes as both a blessing and a curse. The authenticity of an Excobar-like persona will cling a little tighter to you but it comes too with the knowledge that drugs and violence have wider ramifications in Medellin than as musical exports. They are one of many realities for paisas, the name given to its residents. Crimeapple is viscerally aware of what comes with wearing a reputation cheaply. ‘I treat it with a lot of respect because they are counting on me,’ he murmurs in one interview.
A lot of Colombia is fighting to move on from its violent past. Reggaeton mega-star J Balvin condemned pop music’s romanticism of Escobar, stating that the people of Colombia are trying to ‘make people believe in dreams again.’ Last year, acting mayor of Medellin Federico Gutiérrez stood outside The Monaco, famed residence of Escobar, clutching a sledgehammer. He made a promise outside the desolate cement block that ‘this symbol, which is a symbol of illegality, of evil, will be brought to the ground’. When the New York Times inquired after his motives, he stated that he wished to ‘to show that the city had been reborn…and that the law had triumphed over chaos.’
The ‘chaos’ that the mayor is referring to is groups operating outside of the law, and Medellin’s fight against ‘chaos’ is part of a wider struggle across Colombia. In 2012, the Colombian president initiated peace talks with the guerrilla group FARC, the fourth summit since 1984. These climaxed in an October 2016 referendum, in which it was asked if they accepted the Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC. The question posed was ‘Do you support the final agreement for the termination of the conflict and the construction of a stable and durable peace?’ The response, by the slimmest of margins, was ‘no.’
What is ‘law’ and what is ‘chaos’ can seem opaque, and Colombia is no exception. This referendum sought, amongst other things, to broach and potentially reconcile Colombian society with its fractured past, a lot of which emanated from governmental rupture. ‘La Violencia’ is one of the defining periods of internal chaos in Colombian history, splitting the country into numerous fronts. Sparked by a lone gunman that left socialist leader Gaitan dead in the street in 1948, it saw the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the birth of numerous extra-judicial factions.
‘Los Pajaros’ (The Birds) was a conservative assassins syndicate that bled into the infrastructure of Colombia. In time, funding ‘Los Pajaros’ for profit would be known amongst the richer fragments of Colombian society as ‘feeding the birds.’ Structures like this augmented inequality throughout Colombia.
The ‘transitional justice’ aspects of the referendum proved the most controversial. This involved, amongst other things, offering reduced sentences for members of the FARC that confessed of their crimes. A truth-and-reconciliation-esque attempt to create a national movement of empathy.
But distrust in governmental structures runs deep. Conversations of forgiveness around the referendum were obstructed by Colombia’s so-called “false positives” scandal. This was the name given to instances of soldiers dressing murdered civilians as guerrillas to claim them combat kills. Reports have pointed to the military incentives given for the killing of guerrillas, including bonuses. Medellin’s Antioquia region saw 881 “false positive” killings, by far the largest number in the country.
Nobody could fit the weight of Colombia troubled history into this album. And Crimeapple is mediating a lot of different themes on this record that don’t gel into a single album-long arc. It’s just as often set in New Jersey as it is in Colombia and much of it is dominated by Crimeapple just rapping with typical surrealist flare. However, simply by contextualising an album around Medellin and yet refusing to follow the narrative associated with it allows the listener to focus on other more subtle connections. In this way, Crimeapple channels the tortured city through his own life.
For example, drugs. ‘Just Because’ features “this shit is drugs” as the hook. But the song opens with a mutter from Crimeapple ‘la tension.’ The stress.[1] The verses go on to talk a lot about childhood. “Momma always had an ink and used to hide the b-b guns from us.” It feels like a distorted vision of Crimeapple reflecting on how he got to where he is now. “My parents straight now and I don’t have babies/If you want to get wavy.” On another track he says describes throwing up when he smells a batch of crack. Drugs are cruel and ruinous but in turn they brought him opportunity, grew him up. It’s a contradictory story.
The album is immediately contextualised within this grimy reality. It opens with a quote from the 1998 film ‘La vendedora de rosas’, set in Medellin. It follows the life of a rose-vender, heavily inspired by the life of its main actor. That film has a fascinating folklore of its own and is a document to the violence and struggle that subsumes the lives of people in the city. By 2003, 9 of the cast of 17 had died. Another was paralysed for life after being shot inthe head. Combine that with the statistics that the state was responsible for 75% of violence in the early 2000s and a dark alternative narrative builds up around why Colombia is so deeply mired in violence. It’s a film built around hidden existences and experiences, buried in brutality.
Most crucially, ‘Medallo’ stretches itself towards hope. Another narrative emerged from Medallin’s history, one that remains obscured. Medellin was the site of a theological thought revolution in 1968. The Conference of Latin American Bishops congregated at the declared that the church had lost sight of the poor, attempting to accelerate the Liberation Theology movement throughout South America.
In a series of writings Gustavo Gutiérrez explored this radical repositioning of the church in order to better serve the destitute, attaching the end of ‘institutionalised violence’ currently directed towards the poor to Catholic values. After ten years and many objections within the Catholic community, ‘Liberation Theology’ was ingested into the functioning practises of the Catholic Church in South America. This came with its own controversies. Nevertheless, reading Gutiérrez’s writing is a real pleasure. Here, he describes his comprehension of liberation:
‘Achieving the liberation of the continent means more than just overcoming economic, social, and political dependence. It also means seeing that humanity is marching toward a society in which man will be free of every servitude and master of his own destiny.’
Crimeapple orients religion in a similar way. It’s unifying, a way of rising above poverty, of asserting freedom. On the song Villa Hermosa, he proffers what could be the crux of Liberation Theology: ‘What if God made me in his image? There couldn’t be a limit.’ And once again, engaging with religion loops back around to that vision of drugs as venal. Crimeapple rises above it: ‘like Jesus walked on water, I walked on needles, came out regal.’
There is a strong drive for change in Colombia. One of the current political protagonists of the country is the ex-Mayor of Medellin, Sergio Fajardo. He points to Colombia’s incredible biodiversity, which would be valued highly in a world sympathetic to stalling climate change. His YouTube talks seem to be concentrated around presenting Colombia as experiencing the same problems as much of the ‘developed’ Western World, attempting to bracket his country within the discussions that exist outside of those commonly thrust upon it.
To listen to ‘Medallo’ is to experience a new perspective on Medellin. It is storytelling wrapped in duel-identities and sickening detail. Most importantly it is one that reminds you that Colombia does not have one singular narrative. They are populous.
[1] Special thanks to Adriana in the office who helped me translate this song.
NON-ENGLISH RAP SHOUT_OUT:
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