– I didn’t want to die and leave everything unfinished. For the first time I was good at something.
Dylan León Masa has just arrived in a taxi and after a while realizes that he has lost his wallet. It rained all night in Buenos Aires and this morning, when he has to rush around with press, photos, appointments and tour preparations, he also ran out of documents. He doesn’t care that much. “I’ve got everything here and I’m traveling next week… but time will tell,” he says, sitting in one of the rooms of an old house in the center of town that his group of friends have turned into a production company. Then he tells of the real fear, that of Dillom: “At some point, in the middle of the quarantine, I had started to develop well and a panic gripped me that I didn’t want to die now and that this remains unfinished . To be forgotten would have been the saddest thing. My first idea was to make a posthumous record while I was still alive.”
Dillom was born on December 5, 2000 and is said to have died on November 30, 2021. The fake funeral notice that had fired him in the papers that day heralded the end of the obsession that had plagued him for two years, but in reality it was such a beginning: Post Mortem, that posthumous album, came out the next day . By then he had already released twenty songs, including a session with bizarre rap in the most important studio for music in Spanish, but something was missing. A job was missing for someone who knew he wanted to be a musician since he played bass when he was nine, who has been putting together rap events since he was a teenager. In times of songs spit out weekly on Spotify and success counted on Youtube visits, he relied on a concept album.
Post Mortem had his big debut at Lollapalooza last March when the unexpected absence of C. Tangana gave him the best time in front of a crowd of 30,000. The official presentation took place at the end of April and sold out in four theaters in Buenos Aires in less than five minutes. On October 12, it happened again: tickets for his debut at Luna Park Stadium sold out in 10 minutes. His commitment to telling a concrete world where the unexpected successes and tragedies of his childhood coexist with references to early 2000s cartoons, teenage readings of Herman Hesse, Stanley Kubrick films and the Netflix-sponsored contemporary serial killer, with the Seek pills, the scourge of the dollar in Argentina, and money that comes fast and burns easily is hit by the brunt of a second wave. El Quinto Escalón, the rap battles that turned Buenos Aires into an urban music capital, just turned a decade old. Dillom was never part of this scene, it was the counterculture of artists like Duki, Paulo Londra or Nicki Nicole, who threw themselves into the world from this place and are now topping all the charts.
Dillom poses for a portrait in front of the original painting of the cover of his first album Post Mortem, released in December 2021.Silvina Frydlewsky
He’s not a trapper.- “I think gender is irrelevant, it sucks because it puts you in a box and suddenly you don’t fit in at all. I get it anyway, man himself tends to name everything to facilitate communication,” he says now while preparing his first foreign tour, five cities in Spain in just one week. “For me, the style of a song is more a consequence of what I want to do at the moment. I never say I’m going to do rap, house or punk. It also depends on the narrative, on the theatrical element: the story I want to tell.”
The whole story was sung, and almost every Argentinian under 30 with internet access knows it: Dylan León was a teenager and was about to play his first concert when the police searched his house and his mother for drug problems was arrested and “bad joint”. His father, who had again started a family that embraced Judaism, did not respond to the first calls from the police looking for him: it was a Saturday off, Shabbat. The 15-year-old boy, not yet Dillom, but composing musical foundations for another group and organizing small concerts where he took the opportunity to sing his first compositions, ended up living in his father’s new house until there was no one left could bear . And when they opened the door for him, he never came back.
“Maybe it’s half a cliché, but there were many people who didn’t trust me at the time, who believed that I couldn’t achieve anything, that I was on the wrong track. But even though I got lost a lot, I always knew what I was going to do,” says Dillom, who, after being abandoned on the street, was taken in by a friend’s family, with whom he lives to this day. “I’m not a spiteful person. I’m very forgiving and fixing myself, but it’s nice to be in the position where everything went well. Nothing pleases me more, nothing is more comforting than being able to take revenge, to take revenge.
In his music, the renegade rapper keeps flying over who sleeps badly, spends dollars and discovers power and sex without borders. Herman Hesse’s Demian, the adolescent who experiments with the possibility of evil, unleashes himself particularly in the song of the same name on the album, with which he opens all his concerts by walking through a cemetery: “My friends are dead, I have them accidentally killed / I didn’t know she was your girlfriend, I accidentally drenched her.” And it ends with a more fragile dillom in the confessional: “I don’t talk about my life, this shit is very sad / and now that I money, my jokes are funnier.”
Andrés Calamaro calls him the great rock star of Buenos Aires. For Fito Páez, his production is “irresistible”. Another old star of national rock, the singer of Turf, Joaquín Levinton, quoted him from the memory in Master Chef: “I don’t hug you for nothing”. Dillom builds on basic hip-hop, but the band that accompanies him live follows him down the paths of trash, punk, a bit of new cumbia and more commercial pop. This eclecticism, which took him from singing for 10 people in the basements of the old pedestrian streets of Buenos Aires to the largest theater on Corrientes Avenue, is well defined by Ale Sergi, singer of another Argentine star of this century, Miranda: “He is a Unclassifiable artist. A little bit punk, a little bit rapper and a sensitive soul, but weathered,” he said in an interview a few months ago.
“I didn’t listen to them for most of my life. I had national rock at my house, but I didn’t see its value,” admits Dillom, who sees his influences in ’90s rap and Marshall Mathers, another blonde teenager who changed his name and went around the world singing his misfortunes the name Eminem, in the Ramones and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Now I can understand the magnitude of these numbers and it’s an honor,” he says of the love he receives from the fathers of national industry, but he doesn’t leave them on the pedestal: “This affirmation is hard and it helps me.” much because it is public. He’s very critical of my generation, but I think we have a mutual exchange. There are also many people who listen to me who didn’t grow up listening to them and are now interested in their music. They don’t need my validation, of course, but it’s a way of showing them respect.”
The weekend before this interview, Dillom was due to perform in Paraguay and the festival was canceled due to bad weather. A group of boys were waiting for him outside the doors of his hotel. When he arrived they put him in a flower pot and although he offered to sing a song, it was they who sang it at their feet. Dillom has created his own scene and has a production company that handles each of the ideas that end up in videos and a group of artists he works with, his Rip Gang, who have started their own label, Bohemian Grooves. But the big hit came from his pop side. His most listened to songs are the ones that can be sung out loud: the almost disco rhythm of Sauce, the piano ballad of 220, the reggaeton hit of La Primera, which was accompanied by an autobiographical video to open Post Mortem: “I don I don’t love you See I don’t want to go back / Your face makes me want to eat / Baby I’ve seen the hell in life / I don’t need your welcome”.
“I love these moments. I think I connect a lot and people love me. We have a huge audience, I’m spoiled,” he says. “These are universal things that can happen to many people. And it goes hand in hand with the fact that there are many sad people in our generation. Everyone depressed heh.”
You have to sing for a generation used to living everything through their phone, who, with the camera in front of them, addresses an artist on the street. “Fame is a bit dehumanizing, I go out and cover myself up so they don’t film me,” says Dillom. “I see hmm. I’m not a hippie who says don’t take pictures, let’s use the moment to be together. But if something breaks my balls, it’s when I approach people and they’re all there with their cell phones to shoot a video. I don’t want your phone, I want to shake your hand.
When he finally sang for this Luna Park on October 12, which he filled in 10 minutes, the phones went off mid-show. Dillom got into a rubber dinghy in the middle of a catwalk and was carried back to the stage by the people in her arms. “I don’t like always being in the middle, I think the hardest thing about success is showing yourself,” he says, but admits, “Yeah, on the same page. If I told you I didn’t like being the center of attention, I wouldn’t be making music.”
Dillom, after the interview with EL PAÍS. Silvina Frydlewsky
Argentina is already at your feet. The post mortem tour ended in the country with thousands of boys painting white shirts blood red to gather to see him leap from his grave. Dillom knows it’s a privilege to be able to live what he pleases in a country that crushes wages with inflation and the International Monetary Fund. “I’m not even going to live anywhere else. I couldn’t live in another country. Here I get along, with humor, with people. Telling a joke and that someone understands you is the most valuable thing for me,” he says in the interview, but he had already sung about it in Side: “Don’t worry, I’ll pay the Geierkasse / I’ll be like Hitler die in Argentina.”
– What happens after surviving a posthumous album?
– Lose weight. This weekend I listened to the record again for the first time since it came out. My voice has changed, I see good things in it, I notice flaws. It was a long process and I was empty. I’m very ritualistic, methodical. I need time to sit down and write, but I’m fine when I’m not thinking. I can think of a thousand things and I don’t know which one to choose.
As the interview ends, her manager approaches and waves her wallet in the air. The taxi driver returned and left her in front of the door with everything inside. “He recognized me, we talked a lot and took a picture. That’s also what fame gives you, huh,” says Dillom, smiling, then asks, “Did he leave a number? I want to send him a message.”
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