With his double at the WiZink Center last weekend, Duki is confirmed as the undisputed voice of a cultural and musical movement. The third phase of the development of the urban genre in Spanish that was born in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, developed as the new pop worldwide in Colombia, specifically in Medellín; and lives his period of maturity on the back of the Bizarrap Sessions while speaking with the voice of the protagonist of the weekend in Madrid.
Duki has become the most important sensation of this new movement. After having left behind the rest of the Argentine performers of his generation, for various reasons, with the exception of Nicki Nicole, and after having also sold tickets for five soccer stadiums in Vélez, at a rate of 50,000 people per stadium (Bad Bunny filled two), Duki was presented in Madrid before an absolutely transversal audience. The triumph of normal people who follow like crazy an exceptional guy who before he was 27 years old has become the musical face of a country, which, before his appearance, had not produced a single memorable artist in the urban genre, and that after him is the center of urban music in Spanish throughout the world.
The children, adolescents, and not so young, crowded the length and breadth of the WiZink track, and up to the last row of the stands, with their faces painted replicating the tattoos of the Argentine singer. DukiFor his part, he went up on a stage that he shared with exceptional guests such as Dano or Quevedo, and with a rock band that was the most notable surprise of the night.
The tendency of hip hop and urban artists to go out on stage with a band to revalue their show is one of the consequences of the popularization of their sound and the need to make it fit into the standards of a live music industry whose formats, venues and actors come from a fifty-year hegemony of guitar music. In the case of Duki, it was the least beautiful of an iconic show. It’s okay that Argentina is a rock country, but I don’t think it is to the point of modifying an entire repertoire to make it sound like a pure rock concert, before an audience that for the most part has not heard a Led Zep song in his life. The versions of some of the songs were done to perfection – I think of ‘If they want to front’ o ‘She Don’t Give a Fo’ o ‘Drip’– but in others, especially the most danceable and belonging to his ‘Reggaeton seasons’the mix was difficult to assimilate at the speed and with the spontaneity that a concert requires.
However, the brilliance of the songs of Dukias well as an amazing staging with some of the best visual and lighting effects I have seen in my life and that did perfectly reflect the spirit behind the work of the man from Buenos Aires, raised the level to such an extent that this back to back in a WiZink full to the brim, it not only represents the commercial success of the artist, but also his consolidation as the voice of his artistic generation. The entity of Duki as a frontman and an ability (and a style) to phrase that I have not seen in many Spanish-speaking singers, they work more than enough to establish him as the great star of the moment in his own.
And when I talk about his stuff, I think of a great planetary system, like the one we live in, with celestial bodies orbiting around a star, turning on themselves looking for the light that they themselves cannot generate. In the new urban scene in Spanish, in the Argentine scene and this weekend at the WiZink Center, that star was Duki crowned as the Sun King. The sun that shines on the Argentine flag. Duki is a star like the third to shine in the albiceleste shirt since the World Cup last December. One of those, like the World Cups, take decades to appear, and that you have to enjoy because we don’t know when they will happen again.
