Milo J Samples an Argentine Legend and Honors the Bus He’d Ride to the Studio on ‘166’

The first and last thing you hear on Milo J’s new album 166 is Argentine musical icon Charly García.

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The album opens with the father of Argentinian rock declaring, “We need to prohibit autotune. Thank you very much,” sampled from comments he made at the 2018 Gardel Awards. The cameo comes just after the track “Rock Star,” an autotune-filled cut that features Milo’s fellow rapper Duki. García’s words playfully contrast the sound of the LP, which uses autotune as an instrument throughout.

“It’s like ‘See where autotune brought us and where it’s going,’” explains Milo over Zoom from Argentina. “It’s doing so with a lot of respect for Charly, which is also why we sample him at the end.”  After 12 tracks, the LP ends with a sample of García’s iconic 1983 song, “ Los Dinosaurios ,” written about authoritarian rule over Argentina at the time. Milo got permission to use the clip. “We didn’t want this to be a mocking of his legacy. We wanted to show where autotune has brought us,” Milo explains.

At just 17, Milo J has become one of the most promising rappers out of South America, thanks to his impressive lyricism and slick flow. Before dropping his debut album, he had already launched a collaborative EP with Argentine producer Bizarrap , who introduced the star to a wider audience. He rarely does interviews, instead opting to spend time in his home studio, where he wrote 166 , his ode to Argentina and its changing music scene.

“This is a very Argentine album, but it’s not a cliché one,” he says. “It’s about taking that Argentinidad to more places. It’s an album for everyone, and we made it with that in mind.”

The album is named after the bus Milo would take as a 14-year-old kid from his native Morón into Buenos Aires, “the epicenter of Argentina’s music scene,” to get time in the studio. “To go to any of the studios, you had to take that bus. It wasn’t the fastest, but it was the cheapest way to get there. The message of the album is how we took 166 to make our dreams come true,” Milo explains. The album reimagines taking the same bus and getting his art to new places. “It’s also about reliving what this all cost me to get here,” he adds.

Dressed in a jersey of the Argentinian national team just days after Argentina won the Copa America, Milo J sat down with Rolling Stone and broke down the songs on his album 166.

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3 Pecados Después

We made “3 Pecados Despues” at a song camp. I went with [producer] Lisan. We had spent the day making songs, and he was already ready to go to bed. I sent him some mate and was like, “We need to make a beat.” I got some lyrics and I woke him up. I think the lyrics are the thesis of the album. That’s why we wanted it to be the opening track on the album.

Hippie

This song started as a happy trap song, but I was in touch with Zecca and he asked, “Can I change the chords?” He completely changed it to minor notes and it became a completely different message. I had to change some of the bars. At a second camp with Zecca, we decided to sample “Los Dinosaurios” by Charly Garcia. There was a dictatorship here in Argentina and he dropped this song as a protest. We wanted to sample the song at the end, knowing it’s a full circle because the album starts with Charly saying, “Hay que prohibir el autotune. Muchas gracias.” It opens and closes with Charly, who is very significant to the music scene in Argentina. He’s a one-of-a-kind artist. It’s a sort of homage. We spoke to his wife, and we showed them the song, and he accepted. I don’t know if he liked it, but he accepted!

La Tola y El Velero feat. Morad

This was the first song we made for the album. I made it while on tour in Spain when I met Morad. It was all very organic. We connected via Instagram, and I was a fan of his. We got together, I took a train from Barcelona and we met in the studio. The song was done in 5 minutes, because he wrote straight 2 minutes of bars in 20 minutes. I was mind-blown. He’s literally a machine. I used to struggle with writing in the studio. Most of my songs are written at home, but I started writing in the studio with this album. When I met Morad, I was in that transitionary period.

Paraíso (Daña)

I needed a song on here that talked about the impact of narcotics on the body. It was a song that we didn’t think people would want to listen to. In the middle of the song is “Daña,” which complements the story of “Paraíso.” “Paraíso” is like if you had a night, and “Daña” is like having an epiphany after that crazy night. We made the second part 15 days before the album dropped. We had the team with stress attacks! We were wondering if we should separate the songs. I always thought we should put them together because it was very new and it fit so well on the album. It’s the weirdest song on the album. There’s also about it feeling computerized and trappy. At the end of the song, we’re singing a classic Argentine trap called “De La Risa” by Malandro, so we wanted to pay tribute to it. And what better place than to put it than on the trappiest song?

Alioli

This is an ironic take on the effects of immediate fame. I don’t want to say I went through that so much, but it was a lot to become known overnight. It ended up affecting me a bit. It starts with a lower-sounding intro, but then later it becomes a much happier song. It’s about hiding the effects of fame at the beginning. The last line on the track is from a song I wrote when I was 13. There’s a video online somewhere of me singing that song in a McDonald’s. The same lyrics represent me today: “Right now, no hay plan. Secuencias fea’ de la vida me dejaron mal.” (“Right now, there is no plan. An ugly sequences of life left me feeling bad.”)  I wrote it when I was 13, but it keeps representing me today. Not everyone will get it, but it makes sense to me.

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