Kinto Sol, It’s All About Familia

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kintosolIn the 90’s the Chicago music scene was dominated by house music which eventually spread all over through clubs, parties, and mixtapes and made international stars out of DJs like Bad Boy Bill and DJ Bam Bam.  Many Latinos enjoyed this genre and also got involved in the DJ side of it.  It was in the late 90s when Javier “DJ Payback” Garcia got into rocking parties and clubs with house music along with his two brothers Manuel or “Skribe” and Eduardo “El Chivo”.  They moved to Milwaukee, Wis. to concentrate more on music and business. The three brothers who came originally from Iramuco, Guanajuato, Mexico, loved their heritage and hip hop and found a way to mix the two long before many of the popular Latin rap artists that you hear today got into the business.
“A lot of people are doing it for the business side of it, not us.  We’ve been doing this since nobody cared for Latin hop hop, nobody cared about Latinos in hip hop, but even as DJs we did,” Skribe said of their beginnings.  “We’ve been doing this for a while, mixtapes from the beginning, and even hip hop, regular hip hop, wasn’t even popular, it was mostly house [music] if you remember.  House, even in New York, house was big, Latin house, but then we always knew it was Latin hip hop.  It was Latinos doing hip hop and we always had love for our culture and we started making the mix CDs.”
Those mixes were the “Hecho en Aztlan” series that came as white cassette tapes with the Mexican flag on both sides.  They featured artists like Crooked Stylo, Delinquent Habits, Psycho Realm, Conejo, Los Marijuanos, El Chivo and of course Kinto Sol. These tapes helped spread Latin hip hop throughout the Midwest and introduced the brothers to many fans of Latin hip hop.
When they started, the group rapped mainly in English and featured other friends on the albums, but as Skribe says they felt more comfortable rapping in Spanish since it was their first language. Some of those friends would get in trouble and eventually lost patience in the art form but the brothers continued making music even more determined.  Today they can be credited as one of the first groups  in this genre to blend the traditional Mexican/Latin sounds into their hip hop, something they still do to this day. This blending has led them to collaborate with Mexican Regional group K-Paz de La Sierra on the Duranguense track “Jambalaya”.  Doing these types of collaborations has helped them get exposed to fans of K-Paz and duranguense music as well as bridged a gap for many younger Latinos who like both genres.
“A lot of the regional Mexican artists know that the new generation of mexicanos, they’re into hip hop,” Skribe says.
Skribe hopes to do a song in the future with an established group in the banda genre and says that they might do another duranguense track with Alacranes Musicales.
Kinto Sol has been steadily selling units independently and has now secured a large fan base all over the world.  Because of this they really have not needed a major label to support them but now the labels have come to them.  Their newest album is called “Los Hijos del Maiz” which is being released under the Univision Records label.  Nothing will change musically explains Skribe, but their music will be more readily available for fans to pick up just about anywhere.
“We do music from the heart, we do music with concepts not just to do songs,” Skribe says.
DJ Payback is also working on the next “Hecho en Aztlan” mixtape.  For more information about Kinto Sol log on to KintoSol.com or MySpace.com/queondakintosol.

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