The 21st Century: Chilean Music that Speaks to the World (2000–today)

And in those streets, exactly the same songs that had played thirty years earlier were heard: "The Right to Live in Peace" by Víctor Jara, "The Dance of Those Left Out" by Los Prisioneros. But new songs were also heard — from artists who had spent the first part of the 21st century building a Chilean music scene completely different from anything that had existed before, more personal, more hybrid, more global and at the same time more deeply local than ever.

That is the musical Chile of the 21st century: the country that carries the weight of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara in every note it writes, and at the same time produces artists who fill Coachella and the Latin Grammys and Madison Square Garden without ceasing to be completely Chilean.

Mon Laferte: The Most Important Chilean Artist of the 21st Century

Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte was born on May 2, 1983, in Viña del Mar. Her childhood was difficult — marked by shortages, family instability, and the constant search for a place of her own — and music was from the beginning the space where that search made sense. At the age of twenty, she participated in the Chilean musical reality show Rojo and released her first album, which was a local success. But what Chile saw in her was not what she wanted to be.

In 2007, she made the decision that changed her career: she went to Mexico. In 2007, she decided to start a new chapter in her musical career and moved from Chile to Mexico City. What she found there was the space to completely reinvent herself: she left the name by which she was known, adopted Mon Laferte as her new identity, and began to build music that mixed bolero, ranchera, rock, Chilean folk, and alternative pop with an artistic personality that was unlike anything existing in the Latin scene at that time.

In 2015, Mon Laferte revolutionized Hispanic American music with the release of the single "Tu falta de querer." Since then, she has sold over 1.5 million records and has established herself as the best-selling Chilean artist of the 21st century.

Her album La Trenza (2017) was her masterpiece up to that point: with a new sound influenced by Mexican and Chilean folklore, her single "Amárrame" with Juanes debuted at the top of the Latin American charts and received five Latin Grammy nominations.

Norma (2018) — recorded at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles in a single take, with salsa, mambo, and bachata recorded live — earned her the Latin Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. And at the award ceremony, she did what no Chilean artist had done before on that stage: she uncovered her chest with the message written over her breasts in capital letters: "In Chile, they torture, rape, and kill" — in an image that went around the world during the social unrest of October 2019.

It is the gesture of Violeta Parra updated: the Chilean artist using the most global stage available to say what her country needs the world to hear. Tradition does not disappear — it is reinvented in each generation with the language that generation has available.

Gepe: Post-folklore as a Life Project

Daniel RiverosGepe — was born in Santiago in 1983 and since the early 2000s has built the most coherent project of synthesis between Chilean folklore and contemporary independent music that the Chilean scene has produced in the 21st century.

His songs take the cueca, the tonada, the Chilean bolero and process them through filters of indie pop, electronic, Brazilian tropicalia, and Latin American psychedelia — without any ingredient dominating the others, without the result sounding like an experiment. Gepe sounds natural because the synthesis is genuine: he is not a pop musician who adds folklore to sound authentic but someone who grew up with all those musics at the same time and combines them with the same naturalness with which one speaks mixing words from different traditions because they are all equally his own.

His albumsGP (2006), Hungría (2010), Audiovisión (2012), Frio (2016) — built a trajectory of patient and consistent musical craftsmanship that made him the central reference of the Chilean indie scene of the period. Musicologist Juan Pablo González described the trend of artists like Gepe as "post-folklore": roots as a personal rather than collective option, generating social networks of personal choices that find in music their most effective manifestation to weave community from the margin and divergence.

Camila Moreno: Rage Turned into Art

Camila Moreno emerged in 2009 with "Millones" — a song about economic injustice that was nominated for a Latin Grammy and established her as one of the most honest voices of the new Chilean song. But what she did with that foundation in the following years was more interesting than any initial success: a constant artistic evolution that took her from acoustic folk to experimental electronics, from singer-songwriter to cyberpunk, always with the most politically direct and artistically ambitious lyrics of her generation.

In 2016, her song "Fiera de Amor" became a feminist anthem, resonating in marches and demonstrations throughout Latin America. During the 2019 uprising, songs like "Hombre" and "Quememos el reino" reached levels of impact that her early compositions had not achieved.

Camila Moreno is proof that the tradition of Violeta Parra — the artist who uses folklore as a starting point and takes it where the urgency of the present requires — is still alive and still necessary in 21st-century Chile.

Alex Anwandter: Pop as a Political Act

Alex Anwandter built in the first half of the 2010s the most explicitly political project of contemporary Chilean pop: songs with a perfect synthesis between 80s synth-pop and social criticism, with an honesty about sexual identity — he is openly gay in a country where that is still an act of visibility with consequences — that directly connected with a generation that recognized itself in his music.

His album Rebeldes (2014) — entirely self-produced — is one of the most important albums of Chilean independent pop: songs that sound like brilliant pop on the first listen and on the second listen reveal a layer of political rage and personal pain that the first listen barely hinted at.

The Social Outburst and Music

October 18, 2019, was also a defining moment for contemporary Chilean music. 28 artists — including Francisca Valenzuela, Cami, Gepe, Camila Moreno, Mon Laferte, Denisse Malebrán, Pedropiedra, Nano Stern, Javiera Parra, and Manuel García — signed a collective statement condemning the militarization of the streets and the violation of human rights.

It was the same image that Chilean history had produced before — artists alongside the people in moments of greatest urgency — but with a new generation, with new instruments, and with the whole world watching through social networks. The line that connects Violeta Parra with Mon Laferte is not metaphorical: it is a living tradition that each generation of Chilean artists must decide whether to continue or not, and the 21st-century generation decided to continue with the same clarity as the previous ones.

Javiera Parra: Legacy as Conversation

Javiera Parra — granddaughter of Violeta, daughter of Ángel — is perhaps the most literal symbol of that continuity: an artist who carries the most loaded surname in Chilean musical history and has turned it not into a burden but into a conversation. Her songs speak of Violeta with the intimacy of someone who knows her grandmother through songs rather than memories, and with the freedom of someone who knows that the best tribute is not imitation but continuation.

The New Scene: Genderless Borders

21st-century Chilean music also produces artists who do not fit into any established category: Pedropiedra with his mix of hip-hop and singer-songwriter style, Nano Stern with his multi-rooted folk, Francisca Valenzuela with her artisanal precision pop, Princess Alba with her feminist urban pop, Manuel García with his Latin American-rooted singer-songwriter style.

What unites them is not the genre but the attitude: the conviction that Chile has something specific to say to the world and that this specificity is worth exactly the same as what comes from outside. A conviction first formulated by Violeta Parra, taken to its most radical consequences by Víctor Jara, and that each generation of Chilean artists has to demonstrate again with their own work.

Editorial note: Mon Laferte bared her chest at the 2019 Latin Grammys with the message "In Chile they torture, rape, and kill" while the world watched the ceremony on television. The next day she released "Plata ta tá". It was exactly what Violeta Parra would have done if she had access to that platform: using the biggest stage available to say what power would prefer not to be said, without asking for permission, without apologizing, with the conviction that art that does not take a stand in moments that matter is not art but decoration. The deepest tradition of Chilean music is not a musical style but an attitude towards the world: the refusal to sing as if nothing is happening when everything is happening. That attitude has seventy years of history in Chile and shows, in 2019 as in 1967 as in 1973, that it has not aged.

End of the Chile Series

Chile series complete. 6 out of 6 chapters.

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