Niceto is a popular club and it’s known for having great weekly parties, including glammy Club 69 on Thursdays and live music at Compact on Fridays. Niceto is also home to Zizek, a night that has reached beyond the scope of a regular weekly party in Palermo, Hollywood. Going on its second year, Zizek is a movement in Buenos Aires.
Zizek is the Wednesday night event thrown by What’s Up Buenos Aires and DJ Villa Diamante that is breaking new ground for Niceto and for the music scene in Argentina. The celebration starts before midnight but gets going around one or two in the morning and is fueled by cumbia, dub, reggaeton, and hip hop beats. This is where Buenos Aires’ homegrown hip hop crowd goes out to be seen.
Zizek was apparently named after a well-known Slovenian philosopher (?), Slavoj Zizek, who married an Argentine lingerie model. The party includes live cumbia and South American rap acts along with resident deejays and their guests. Villa Diamante is a resident, Zurita makes appearances, as does El Remolon, Daleduro, Oro11, and Marcelo Fabian. These are the members of Buenos Aires’ default rat pack of hip hop/ cumbia/ reggaeton. Whatever name you give it, they bring the street to the club.This March, they’re taking their party mobile; not to Punta Del Este or even to Rio, these boys are bringing Zizek to the source. The Zizek rata pack is skipping the music industry appetizers and heading straight to the South By Southwest festival in Texas. They can do that — why? — because Zizek has more going on than any other weekly party in Buenos Aires — and Buenos Aires is hot right now.
Buenos Aires is a city with a high IQ for hip and fashionable — where nightlife is vibrant, interesting, and accessible, and where there are few international elements to fill the void caused by a lack of capital and infrastructure. This is a city whose fiscal system went bankrupt only seven years ago but it’s a city that, until that point, was one of the most posh locales in the world-below-the-equator. Currently, Buenos Aires is at the top of the list for urban travelers and for anyone else seeking the high life accompanied by a low price tag. Argentines demand, and expect, cool from their pop culture — and with the globalization of street music (read hip hop and its various offspring), Buenos Aires club-goers want a piece.
Enter Zizek: in one year’s time this party has surpassed its peers at the ever-popular Niceto, and even attracted the attention of Diplo ( MIA’s first deejay/producer). He’s made guest deejay appearances at Zizek and his blog touted the talent of local BsAs deejays who are putting BsAs cumbia on the map. Some US media has followed suit — getting excited about a veritable Argentine cumbia mash-up explosion. The magazine XLR8R featured the party in a recent issue and the rata pack is poised to have a banner year of partying. For hip hop in Buenos Aires, you can check out Lost or try a neighborhood centro cultural – or you can witness a movement in the making: Wednesdays at Niceto in Palermo Hollywood is where the local breakdancers, beatmakers, and sneaker mavens come out to play.
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One Comment
This is a great night, would highly recommend – nice to see there’s a growing seen in Buenos Aires for hip hop / funk, although am not so keen on the reggaeton.