‘Our Best Revenge Against Death Is Life:’ How Ana Tijoux Found Radical Joy

The Franco-Chilean rapper’s first album in almost a decade is a call to action during turbulent times

The morning Ana Tijoux jumps on a Zoom call from Barcelona to talk to Rolling Stone about her new album, South African lawyers are making a case for Palestinians at The Hague. The Franco-Chilean rapper’s life has always been marked by politics. Born in Lille to Chilean immigrants fleeing the Pinotchet coup, she’s now a mother of two. Like much of the world, she’s been following the siege in Gaza closely and thinking about how people around the world can connect to what’s happening and speak out.

“Art finds its core in emotion, and it’s always important to go back to feeling,” she shares. “We can’t lose our empathy. Empathy is, first and foremost, the power to connect to another human on human terms. Not being from somewhere or having a tie to a certain place shouldn’t mean we aren’t moved or provoked. ”

Tijoux was born in France and migrated to her family’s native Chile in her early 20s. There, she learned how to rap and reconnected with family who had stayed through the dictatorship. Eventually as she connected with other artists, Tijoux would go on to make her name as the MC of influential politically minded rap crew Makiza. After the crew disbanded, she struck out on her own with 2007’s Kaos, garnering a larger following with autobiographical heavy-hitter “1977.”

Vida is Tijoux’s first album in a decade. Produced by Andres Celis, it’s an album grounded in the processing of grief through finding joy in life. Written in the wake of personal deaths and the birth of her second child, Vida is Tijoux’s her most broad-spanning work in terms of sound and feeling. Opening track “Millonaria” redefines wealth as having a fruitful family life against a bouncy trap beat. She makes a dance party from the apocalypse on pop track “Fin Del Mundo,” and samples a grandmother of Plaza de Mayo ​​— a group of women who organized against the Argentine dictatorship’s human rights violations in the Seventies — talking about her disappeared grandchild. The monologue is followed by a touching ballad called “Busco Mi Nombre,” a collaboration with Puerto Rican  where she furthers the very real search. 

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Tijoux spoke to Rolling Stone about family, finding radical joy as she grieved, living a politically active life, and her first album in a decade.

The first time I saw you play in New York, I remember everyone dancing unabashedly. I also vividly recall someone taking out and waving the Indigenous Andean flag.
The Whipala? I have it tattooed!

Now that you mention it, I see your “1977” tattoo…that was your big one, and it got everyone jumping at that show. Have your feelings toward playing your signature song changed after all these years of performing it?
I have a lot of love for that song for what it is, for how it was made, for the team that surrounded me as I was making it. I still enjoy singing it live to this day. I have a lot of affection for that song. I know people will often get tired of some of their songs, but I never get bored of that one.

You’re a kind of quintessential artist of the Latinx diaspora in a sense, especially thinking about how you found your sound and career in Chile after being born an ocean away. Have you thought about how that moment of reconnecting with your ancestral roots impacted your own development as an artist?
It’s a beautiful thing to return to your family’s country of origin, whether or not one was born there. It’s returning to the womb, the root. It’s becoming a tree, touching one’s trunk, returning to the house of the mother. It’s a safe place. One way or another, even if one wasn’t born there, it reconnects you to family. 

Apart from the more obvious things like giving you the chance to connect with the other members of Makiza, how did that experience change you?
In all of that confluence, it definitely makes one approach their work differently, no? I don’t know what would have happened had I never returned to Chile, but going back for sure built a part of my personality and how I view the world. I went backwards to go forward, cachai? I feel like I’m someone who adapts a little bit to everywhere. I’m very adaptable, and it also makes me very curious and interested in places all over the world. I started making music in Chile, and I go back all the time even though I don’t live there anymore. Last year I went back five times or so. I feel blessed to inhabit that middle point all the time.

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That adaptable spirit really shows up in Vida, which is your sixth album. It’s still firmly rooted in rap, of course, but it also veers into pop territory, ballads, and even dance music. Could you speak to that inclination toward a more moveable record?
It just so happened that I had people who I loved and who I was very close to pass away in a very, very short amount of time. These departures put us in a reflective and very existential state. More than anything, it’s delicate to position oneself in front of that fragility. I wanted to make an homage for the people I loved who are no longer on this plane. I also had the desire to dance; maybe not create a festive atmosphere, but dance it out. The way I saw it, that’s what made the album different and it was honestly a beautiful process, following that desire.

I honestly can’t even tell you what kind of music is on this album other than the fact that I love myself in a lot of different styles. It’s exciting also to interpret it as a live show, re-adapt the songs in another way.

You’ve always been a politically active person. To be an artist in the world today, creating amidst so much death and cruelty, one cannot think themselves separate from what is going on — and you never have. Death, and honoring your dead, permeates this record in particular. Your album really deals in that light treatment of the heavy. 
I don’t think there’s anything more violent than being disconnected from the world. People who don’t want to see, people who want to silence, people who put their hands on their ears and “la, la, la, la, la la.” Likewise, there’s nothing more human — nothing more sensible in this moment — than empathy. I find myself in a situation of profound privilege. I’m not being bombed. My children are safe, on the other side of this wall. They’re alive. We have food, a roof, heat. In 2024, in the face of a genocide, that’s a privilege. For me — first as a human, second as an artist, and third as a mother — this album was made before all the horror we’ve seen. 

At the time I was recording it, I was spending time with a friend who works as a clown at refugee camps. Not in Gaza, but all over the Middle East and specifically in situations of armed conflict and post-war. He told me something that stayed floating around my head for a long, long time: “Our best revenge against death is life.” Life as a tool, as a manifesto. The album title comes from that a bit, because it really knocked me on my feet. He also told me from personal experience about working in these places where you see such rough things and where it’s your job as a clown to make people laugh. I found it so beautiful. Art of all kinds — not just music but performance, painting, sculpture, dance, movement — is accompanied by process. I’ve often seen precarious situations where people bring vitality and, I would say, hope. Hope is always the last thing you lose. There’s nothing more political than this life, and nothing as profound as dancing through it. 

What you said makes me think of that famous paraphrase of something Emma Goldman said: “”If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
I’ve seen that quote everywhere, and it’s always made a lot of sense to me. I also think of that song “Plástico” by Rubén Blades and Willie Colón, which is so political and so danceable. It’s an interesting proposition. I’m not saying that’s exactly what I’m doing, but I find it so compelling to weave concepts into one’s work that society has historically tried to disassociate from. It’s those very associations we must always continue to try to reintegrate.

It’s been a decade since your last release in 2014. In that time, you’ve had a kid, moved to another country… The album being called Vida makes me think of the amount of lives you’ve lived, who has died in you to birth the person you are now.
At the end of the day, a decade depends as much on who feels like it’s a long or short time. When you’re young and are really attracted to someone, an hour can feel like ten seconds. Conversely, you can make the line for the bank and wait like an idiot and it can feel like forever but it was a short visit. I don’t know if a decade is a long or short time. I feel as time goes by that I lose my concept of temporality. When I became a mother for the second time and was on tour being hyperproductive, it was a prudent time. I had to juggle a lot, and it was hard to enter a creative mode when I had to be creative in so many other aspects. A decade felt short. As a mother, you watch your kids grow and it’s like, “No, how did you get so tall, how did time go by so quickly!” Temporality is super subjective depending on the moments we’re living.

Still, no matter how you mark time — linear or not — there’s a marked evolution and progress for you. How could there not be, after six albums!
So much happened that it made it go really fast. I feel like I’m really slow; I’m just now understanding things from twenty years ago. It takes a bit for me to process things, especially my emotions. When it comes to numbers I feel like that’s easier to understand: if you’re in debt, you pay it. With emotions it’s processing at another BPM, and it has a different way of entering your body, your head, your soul.

Especially painful things, like deaths…
Pain! Pain from romance, pain from physical death, pain from a part of you dying so you can be reborn. It’s the natural cycle of things, and it’s a very beautiful human dynamic.

Is there a song that was particularly hard to record? The one with iLe “Busco Mi Nombre”, which comes after that sampled monologue by a Mother of Plaza de Mayo, really moved me in particular. 
I love iLe. As an artist, I’m such a fan of her voice, her energy, how she writes. I love her. She’s a diamond — so small, but such a force. The honor is honestly all mine. “Busco Mi Nombre” was born from a conversation I had here in Barcelona with two close friends who are Argentinian children of the disappeared. This song is about people who search for their parents, who look for the detained. I started writing automatically, and I communicated with iLe who also connected with the story. It was one of those magical collaborations. She has a timbre that makes me emotional because it’s so honest. I think in these times that kind of honesty is going extinct and for me having it imbued in this track is a true pleasure, a delicacy. 

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Another was “Fin Del Mundo;” before we finished the album one of my best friends passed away, and I was with another friend who knew him crying and listening to that song. I got real emo, and I was thinking about him, like “this idiot who left us would be laughing his ass off if he saw us crying to this song.” He was pretty calm, not a pop guy at all, but he really appeared to me in this song. Like, if it’s really the end, we should stop everything and dance naked. 

This interview has been translated from Spanish.