Bizarrap is leading the next generation through his music…
The 24-year-old Argentine DJ, producer and hitmaker has been named to Time magazine’s 2023 “Next Generation Leaders” list this week, which spotlights 10 global trendsetters and trailblazers.
Bizarrap can usually be spotted in the background of his videos, back to the camera, shades obscuring his eyes, giving the floor—or, more accurately, the mic—to the artists he invites on the mega-popular YouTube music video series he started four years ago.
In an article titled “Viral Hitmaker Bizarrap Wants His Music to Speak for Itself,” Bizarrap—known for his fiery “BZRP Music Sessions” with Shakira, Nicky Jam, Quevedo and Nathy Peluso, to name a few—opened up to about the importance of people getting to know his music.
“I make music every day,” he told TIME. “I like thinking about ideas for my videos, making teasers. I’m always thinking about the next step.”
His numbers are impressive: 7.2 billion views on YouTube, 41.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Several of his videos and songs have hundreds of millions of views and streams. And Bizarrap, real name Gonzalo Julián Conde, has done it all without releasing an album.
But Bizarrap isn’t the only Latinx artist to be named to the list…
Rene Silva, a Brazilian journalist, is highlighted for launching his own newspaper covering the entire favela, as Brazil’s informal neighborhoods are known, at the age of 11.In 2005,
Silva persuaded teachers at his school in the Complexo de Alemão district to let him join the student newspaper—despite protests from older kids who thought he was too young. Within months he outgrew that gig, recruiting four other children to help him launch his own newspaper.
“I used to look through papers and I didn’t see the favela I knew represented,” he says. “The media only ever talked about drug trafficking, violence, death—so people from outside thought that’s all there is here.”
Eighteen years later, Voz das Comunidades continues to chip away at those stereotypes. Now formally recognized as an NGO, it has 35 staff members who cover stories on culture, politics, sports, education, and problems of state neglect.
Click here to see the complete list.