From the banlieues of Paris to the townships of Cape Town, young rappers have found a voice through hip hop, freestyling over beats inflected by their own rhythmic traditions. But no foreign hip hop artist has created a sound as poetic and personal as Ana Tijoux, the French-born Chilean rapper who gained international prominence with her 2009 album 1977 (which was released in the US by Nacional Records in 2010).

Tijoux, who performs Tuesday at San Francisco’s Brick & Mortar Music Hall and Wednesday at La Peña in Berkeley, has lived mostly in Santiago for the past two decades. She sees hip hop as an ideal form of expression that fits neatly with folkloric Chilean music.

“For me it represents a style of music where you’ve got a lot of leeway,” Tijoux said in a recent phone conversation from Santiago. “You can write a lot in one piece. In a pop song lyrics aren’t so extensive. Now that I’m older and I’ve lived in Chile, we have a lot of décimas made from the folklore from the campos. They tell a story, rhyming with the guitar. We’re a country with a lot of people rhyming in a very natural way.”  … Continue reading »