The Future of Reggaeton Is Chilean Neoperreo

"From sex workers to drug dealers. Where the conflict and the dirt is. That's where neoperreo was born."

DJ Lizz casually puts an eyelash into place while defining neoperreo: "It began as a community, but evolved into a sub-genre of reggaeton," she says backstage at her Chismoteka party. "We wanted to create safe spaces for alternative people. The freakys, the weirdos, the queers. Just to be themselves."

The music, she says, is how reggaeton sounds "at the end of the world,", referring to Chile's position at the southernmost tip of the Americas, far from reggaeton's Caribbean birth place. Neoperreo is a dark version, industrial-sounding and heavy. "It's reggaeton of the future," Lizz smiles.

Taking place eight times a month, Chismoteka is one of Santiago's most important underground parties, a sweaty, sexually-liberal event soundtracked by the throb of neoperreo. The party rotates venues, but mostly takes place in small clubs in the city's Bellavista party district, with a couple of offshoot nights in cities across the country.

Lizz founded Chismoteka out of the need to create a safe space where she, and her neoperreo community, could feel represented. She was born in Concepcion, southern Chile in the early 90s, a time of stifling conservatism, in a dawning democracy still shaped by Catholic values upheld by the Pinochet dictatorship. You couldn't be queer, you couldn't be sexual, you couldn't (and still can't) get an abortion—you couldn't even legally get a divorce (Chile was one of the last country's in the world to legalise divorce in 2004).

"We spent our adolescence online, looking at what was going on outside of Chile, always with the desire to get out of here" she said. "Chile is a country without identity, that came from a dictatorship, false democracy. We didn't know who we were."

Stifled and outed by this oppressive socio-political environment, Lizz moved to Santiago and mingled with other outcasts in the 2010s. She met Tomasa del Real, a tattoo artist and singer from northern Chile, and the two bonded over their desire to break the rules.

"Neoperreo comes from a search to mix elements without fear—experimental sounds from the underground," she says. "From sex workers, drug dealers, all the people that are in the shit. The underground in Chile starts there—where the conflict and the dirt is. That's where neoperreo was born."

"The underground in Chile starts where the conflict and dirt is. That's where neoperreo was born."

By 2018, Tomasa dropped her debut album, Bellaca Del Año, synth-ridden reggaeton ride that crystallised the neoperreo vision and got worldwide attention. Internationally, other artists were also exploring reggaeton to subverting ideas of feminine expression: the Cuban-American rapper Goony Chonga, Argentine Ms Nina, Spain's Bad Gyal: "We started connecting online, and in some way we were all doing the same thing," says Lizz.

Chile was singled out as the heartland of a now global underground scene—with Lizz and Tomasa at the forefront. Both have been upfront and apologetic about their bodies, and sex work—Lizz's 2021 track, La Puteria "I'm gonna buy my new ass, from the money, de la puteria (of the whoring)"—and she's spoken openly about her love of OnlyFans—"for me sexuality and my body are part of my freedom" she told a Chilean tabloid. "OnlyFans is a proclamation of that".

Neoperreo is female-fronted, which is hugely important to Lizz. "It has a lot of revolutionary content, because, finally, women are telling their side of the story," she says. "As women singers, we can appropriate our own sexuality. Before we were hypersexulised by men, and now we can hypersexualise ourselves."

She makes this point clear: "Reggaeton mainstream from Puerto Rico is about joy, but neoperreo is about discomfort and provocation."

That's why anything goes at a neoperreo event. Lizz has taken Chismoteka across the world including London, Miami and Madrid, taking her haven for the world's outliers into an international arena. She has also has performed neoperreo sets to Boiler Room LA, while Tomasa has taken Coachella stage.

"I would never have imaged that people have understood what we've tried to do," she says. "We did what was possible in a place with zero opportunities, zero acceptance to queers, to indigenous, to lower social classes to women. And we resisted so much that we ruptured the taboo."