Turrobaby - MUSICA EN SERIO: Album Review

Argentina is going through its own explosion of underground music scenes. There is all kinds of exploration, from reggaeton and EDM to, especially, trap. Popularized by artists like Paulo Londra and Duki in the late 2010s, traperos have become a natural fit for a lot of Argentinians. The cadences and the bluntness of their slang seem like a perfect fit for rapping. Londra’s Homerun, with unique blends of reggaeton melodies over really sleek and commercial trap beats, created an entire movement in Argentina. Now, turrobaby, a member of P.I.LF. along with Zell and other members, has dropped his new project MUSICA EN SERIO, or “Serious Music” in English—which I think is a misleading title. 

Unlike his peer Zell, whose album I also reviewed, the Argentinian culture throughout this album is lacking in the bloated 23-song track list. The only modicum of cultural originality is turrobaby using the sheísmo, where “ll” and “y” are pronounced as a soft “sh” or “zh” sound. Unlike his fellow collective member Zell however, turrobaby is even further away from the cultural uniqueness that makes traperos from Argentina interesting. The tape is basically a trip down memory lane to things more interesting artists out of ATL and Chicago were doing back in the late 2010s. Every song carries a sense of familiarity, where each track so blatantly “takes inspiration”—I am using that term loosely—that it feels like I have heard it before.

This tape feels like cloud rap cosplay at its worst, as it directly rips beats, flows, and tropes from the 2015–2018 cloud rap era. It seems turro is a big fan of Playboi Carti, especially the song “Broke Boi,” as he almost raps over a cheaper rendition of the beat on “Emotes,” which is much less catchy and has less charisma as he continues to say the word “emotes” with the feature Little Boogie. “Vivienne” is another stab in this lane, with money counter sounds and fake “PLUG!” tags in the mix, as turro drools through the chorus and verse in sloppy autotune.

“Lora,” “Yo,” and “Trae Un Sky” all sound like bad attempts at a Duwap Kaine impersonation, with wavy trap beats that sound straight out of Pi’erre Bourne’s computer, with these clanging synth leads and lush chords. The flows are constant and punched in, just like you hear on Kaine’s “Santa,” produced by Pi’erre, and additionally, the songs are clearly peaking and are not mixed. However, at the time, Duwap Kaine was actually pioneering being a bedroom rapper, so the vocals were unmixed at a time when plugins and studio-level equipment at home were either expensive or not widely available. Here, turro does his best to replicate the sound, but it comes off as trying too hard to sound like a more organic artist.

In some cases, the lack of mixing on a track like “Un Re Bondi” is so bad that you cannot even hear the words of the track, as the beat is not distorted, it is just not mixed, to the point that even in headphones it sounds like an instrumental. The “creative choice” to use this kind of sonic character feels performative and lazy, as mixing and mastering on a platform like BandLab has become as easy as the click of a button.

“La Refe” is a visit to the lane of Chief Keef, with aspects of drill and glo, with a grand beat, eerie synths, and snare rolls. Once again, it feels like a bad impression, as even Chief Keef has a vocal presence and actually mixes his vocals on early songs like “Faneto” or “Love Sosa.”

The lyrical content of most of these songs is not interesting, other than turro name-dropping Gucci Mane on the appropriately named “Trap Simulator,” which is exactly what this album feels like. It feels like a rapper trying to simulate the 2016 SoundCloud era with no innovation whatsoever. The craziest part is that all these different artists are mostly still alive, making far more interesting music, and have evolved well beyond the cloud rap era’s musical tropes. 

This sounds like a time capsule back to a formula that was visionary and unique for its time, but now we are in an era where 2Slimey and OsamaSon exist, and the scene has progressed leagues beyond. We do not need to rehash something and replicate it when it has already been innovated by pioneers like Playboi Carti or carried forward by the next in that lineage, like Yeat or Xaviersobased.