“Respirar para sacar la voz / Despegar tan lejos como un águila veloz / Respirar un futuro esplendor cobra más sentido si lo creamos los dos.”
“Breathe in to bring out the voice / Take off so far like a fast eagle / Breathing in a splendid future makes more sense if we create it together.”
Ana Tijoux’s lyrics reverberate into her mic, out speakers and into my ears in the Crescent Ballroom Tuesday night. When I first became a fan of this French-Chilean rapper, I didn’t understand most of the words in her songs. It didn’t matter; they still felt powerful to me. As I learned more Spanish over the years, I would return to Tijoux’s music again and again to discover new meaning.
And now, seeing her for the second time in concert and after years of blasting her in my room, I was still discovering new meaning in her music.
“I would like to dedicate this song to Puente, con mucho carino,” she says to preface the above-mentioned song, titled “Sacar la Voz” (Raise Your Voice). Puente Arizona is a migrant justice group that Tijoux said she met with during her last visit to Phoenix. When you listen to and understand Tijoux’s lyrics, you begin to understand why her songs feel so powerful — she sings of empowerment of the self and demands an end to war and violence.
The daughter of Chilean refugees who escaped to France during Chile’s repressive regime in the ’70s, Tijoux was separated from the Latin American culture that she now embraces as a rapper. Just as she crosses borders personally, so she encourages her audience to tear down their own borders.
Tijoux released her latest album in March of this year. The tracks on “Vengo” are familiar to fans of Tijoux’s first two albums, with the same measured but passionate voice guiding the listener through quick, drum and horn-heavy rhythms, but many tracks focus lyrically on a broad call to action and a sense of “enough is enough.” In “Somos Sur” (We are South), Tijoux follows the words “Todos los callados, todos los sometidos, todos los invisibles (All silent, all subject, all invisible)” with a long list of African and Latin American nations, a global appeal for human rights that reaches broader than her earlier work.
At a Tijoux concert, you don’t just sing along. You share a belief and a passion with the small but dynamic woman on stage. People are cheering and pumping fists and insulting certain Arizona sheriffs. And that’s because Tijoux doesn’t just sing, either. She lives what she raps — from her French upbringing, to her Chilean roots, to the henna tattoos she wore Tuesday night, Tijoux is an enigmatic border-crosser who brings a rare call for peace to the rap world.
And she does this so well by connecting with people and communities beyond rapping. Part of the proceeds from Tuesday’s show will go to support 102.9 FM, a new community radio station in Phoenix set to launch in summer of 2015. On top of that, Tijoux’s concert opener was Mujeres del Sol. Never heard of them? That’s because they’re not a band — they’re actually a collective of women artists in the Valley. How many concerts have you been to that opened with four women reciting poetry while dancing to the sound of bongo drums?
If that’s not enough to convince you that Tijoux walks her talk, she just gave a TED Talk in Rio de Janeiro last week as part of the TEDGlobal 2014 conference. And speaking of talks, she’ll be on ASU’s Tempe campus today at noon for a Q&A on politics, feminism and the power of music to inspire political shift. That’s in the Memorial Union (Apache 248), so if you missed her last night, now’s your chance to get up close and personal with the energetic force that is Ana Tijoux.
Contact the author at Annika.Cline@asu.edu. Contact the columnists at Emily.Liu@asu.edu and Oren.Simchy-Gross@asu.edu.
