Many have met him in love in a supermarket, although the artistic career of Damià Rodríguez, better known as Lildami, accumulates years of experience that he now pours into his third album, Dummy. This new work by the eclectic rapper from Terrassa, as colorful as the pink that invades the cover, is an expression of the successes accumulated by this jury of the TV3 program Eufòria (repeats in the second season) thanks to Supermercat, the first single from the album , whose video clip was the most viewed in Catalan in 2022 with more than a million views.
Graduated in engineering, Lildami has substituted the usual CD, which is increasingly in disuse, and replaces it with a piece of die-cut wood the same size as a compact disc that becomes the head of a crash test dummy, those dolls that are They are used to test the safety of vehicles in the event of an accident. We begin the interview by asking him about the design of this die, which he has made himself. “I had to amortize the degree”, he answers with a smile, “make my mother feel proud of having paid for four years at UPC”.
How did you come up with the idea?
I don’t have a CD player, and I think that the people who buy them do so to support the artist, like those who buy merchandising, rather than to listen to the album itself, which they listen to on Spotify or Apple Music for a few euros a month. I come from product design and I considered creating something that takes you to the CD and all its imaginary but that is not necessarily a record.
Dummy is a more cheerful, more optimistic album than Voyage en spiral
A record is the reflection of the moment in which you find yourself emotionally. The first two albums had dark, almost black covers. It was clear to me that Dummy had to be the opposite, because my last two years have been very happy, with many projects. That’s why it came out like this, without wanting it, I don’t get to talk about sad things. Everything is going well, I can’t complain.
Will you leave Terrassa for Barcelona now that you are successful?
No, Barcelona is cool as a nerve center, but I come to visit, as a foreigner. I still live in Terrassa surrounded by my people, my family and partner, I lead a super quiet life. After going out bowling, I come home and I’m the calmest person, I don’t go out to parties. My grandmother and my lifelong colleagues live two streets away. Why do I want to go to Barcelona?
In your hometown you have organized the Maleducats urban music festival. Will there be a second edition?
We are working on it, but we still don’t have anything confirmed.
You design, compose and organize festivals. How do you come up with so many ideas?
I never stop thinking, before music was my hobby, but now I open the “office” at eight in the morning and close it at twelve at night. Also, my mentality leads me to try many things, thinking why can’t I do it? Although this attitude also brings me headaches, of course.
It is compared to a Crash Test Dummy within Catalan music
The crash test dummies are the dolls that are used to test whether a car is safe. With all the humility in the world, I consider that before I released my first album there was not so much rap on the radio, or nobody had worked to organize a festival where rap was played in Catalan. If in 2018 you tell me that someone from the urban scene would be on television participating in a prime time program, I would tell you that it is absurd. It may have inadvertently opened some doors that will allow those who come after, the young people who are now rising strongly, to see as normal that rap in Catalan sounds on the radio, or that an urban figure appears on TV.
Is singing in Catalan a commitment?
It’s how it comes out, although a part of me sees it as a claim, but that doesn’t mean that tomorrow I won’t be making a record in Spanish. In my environment I use Spanish and Catalan, my father’s family is from Córdoba, I don’t even have the nine Catalan surnames by far (laughs), and I kick the dictionary a lot. But I am clear that if I sing in Spanish it will not be for economic reasons, but because one day I will decide that there is something that I can express better in Spanish, as I do at the beginning of Que et donguin.
When composing, do you start with the lyrics or the music?
For the concept. Normally I work with two notepads, one is the conceptual one where I write down the things I want to say, a word for example. I write down all the words around the concept. In the other notebook, meanwhile, I refine the ideas, I link them together and look for coherence.
engineer thinking
Surely, I don’t start writing like crazy. It works very well because it gives you a semantic field to work with. In Crash Test Dummy, for example, I write down terms like car, accident, crash, impact, tests. Sometimes there are phrases that come to mind and I tell Siri to save them for me. Yesterday I was thinking “Italian car, Italian clothes, how do you want me not to think about pasta”.
What are your influences?
Especially rap, trap and also pop, such as Lil Yatchy, Liz, Metro Boomin, Roddy Ricch, and also classics like Jay-Z or Kanye West.
Does the order of the songs follow any logic?
I try to make a trip, that has a certain coherence. I was clear about the first and the last (Ulleres de sol and Crash test dummies). Beyond that I take into account the sounds, I will not play two songs in a row that are quiet. I like that the album is a roller coaster and that’s why I order them on a stylistic level, between two rap songs I put a pop one, it amuses me a lot.
What do you think of the tendency to release loose songs to the detriment of records?
It’s how the industry is working, I myself intersperse records and singles. We have gone from movies to series, from there to YouTube, and now with Tik Tok we are in 30-second formats. The way of consuming is getting faster and faster, and unfortunately or luckily the same thing happens with music. You see the news on Fridays and you get 60 new themes. On the other hand, I like to explain stories, that’s how I conceive music, and the way to explain stories conceptually is through a record. In a topic I can explain a concept, but when you have the global photo, the emotional photo is better understood. It allows me to do social criticism, hesitate, laugh, talk about love, things you can’t talk about in a single topic.