Meet Lismar, Bizarrap's Newest Collaborator and Underground Princess

Collaborating with world-renowned superstar producer Bizarrap is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the current slate of Latin artists. The Argentine star has made hits with Shakira, Young Miko, Peso Pluma, Rauw Alejandro, Quevedo, and more, all while helping his home country's rap scene garner international attention. Having done so much for Latin music these past few years, people have begun to pay attention to who he's collaborating with and speculating on who can be next.

Enter Lismar, an 18-year-old Dominican rapper making moves in Santo Domingo's underground hip-hop scene. Classically trained in music but choosing to study Biza's Sessions series and Red Bull Batallas, Lismar has conjugated a new flow with which the Latin world isn't very familiar. It's for that reason that Biza took notice and decided to make her his latest collaborator, releasing "Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 60" and "Subió La Temperatura."

"I had done a DJ Scuff freestyle session a week before he wrote to me. So he saw it and wrote to me, 'Hey, that freestyle was duro. You went crazy in there,'" she tells New Times. "He asked me if we could go to the studio one day, but he didn't tell me that it was for a session or anything. He just asked to go to the studio to record."

She adds, "The process was incredible. I learned a lot of things. I didn't know how to make a chorus of songs until I went to the studio with him, and he helped me in that process."

The young artist is bringing something just starting to bubble up into the mainstream: Dominican rap. When you think of hip-hop and trap in the Latin sphere, it's dominated by Puerto Rican artists ranging from Eladio Carrión to Fat Joe. Argentines like Trueno, Duki, and Nicki Nicole have recently put their own spin on it, thanks to Biza. But Lismar is helping change the perception of traditional Dominican music, like dembow and bachata, and adding hip-hop into the mix.
"Dominican rap was something that was very popular from the 2000s to 2015," Lismar explains. "It was the movement that brought the euphoria that dembow brings today, and it had super important figures like El Lapiz, El Foter, J Noa, and other rappers like that who are underground from the Dominican Republic. Then dembow came in, and the rap scene disappeared a little bit. And now, the emerging rap artists are trying to bring back that era."

Still, Lismar points out that because her sound encompasses many sounds, she doesn't consider herself a rapper. "I have a lot of genres that I do and all that, but we are representing what at some point was Dominican rap," she explains.

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Lismar had access to a variety of sounds and music to inspire her, but it was when she was gifted a guitar at age 7 that she began her journey. After that, she began studying music in school and took what she learned into the studio.

"I studied for this, I worked hard for this, and I feel very proud of everything that is coming out because I really spent four years studying music," she adds.

That academic knowledge is evident on tracks like "Modo Avión," "Nota," and "Delincuente con Traje," which she says she composed in minutes.
"The songs that are kind of melodic are the ones that come out the fastest," Lismar says. "I focus a lot on rap, but the melodic ones — I wrote a song in three and a half minutes. And I recorded it all in 30 minutes just because I was hungry and I wanted to get home. Those are skills that a person has to study or has to learn to do those kinds of things and get it right."

When she's not recording music, Lismar indulges in her other passions, such as fashion, and is a fan of the Met Gala. (Her favorite outfit from this year's event was Tyla's Balmain gown made of sand.) Though she's been encouraged to pursue modeling, she's unsure if she can take that on right now.

"Since I was little, I've always heard, 'You have to be a model,' because in the Dominican Republic, everyone who is skinny has to be a model. I like that a lot, acting as well. I don't know why. I get embarrassed about a lot of things, and I laugh about everything, and I don't think I have the ability to act yet, but at some point, if it happens, we'll do it."

On the music front, she especially enjoys Puerto Rican rapper Álvaro Díaz. He and Carrión are the two artists that she hopes to collaborate with at some point.

Even after dropping her biggest single of her career so far, she's focusing on her upcoming EP.

"I want to release that EP because it's going to be the way the world is going to know me since a lot of people don't know me yet," Lismar says. "I know they saw me in the session with Biza, but they didn't know about me. "The EP is going to be the true introduction to what they need to know about me before I officially enter the industry."