Colombian Kids Find Salvation in Hip Hop

Beyond the armed guards and metal gates of Medellín, Colombia, Adrienne Day found a thriving youth hip hop scene. “These kids are confined, for the most part, to urban areas, because the risk of kidnapping renders much of the countryside impassable,” she writes in a recent issue of the Village Voice. “And for many of the poorer ones, trapped within ghettos, living on the edge of society means dealing with the daily specter of death in the form of murder, bombings, and random gang violence, or the threat of being drafted as paid assassins, sicarios, by the outlawed paramilitary groups. For them, salvation can be found through sharing music-the kind brought back by artists like Ospina, and the kind they create using bare-bones equipment, often with no more than their bodies and a mic.”

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