Calle 13’s Cabra drops Visitante persona

Calle 13’s Eduardo Cabra is shedding his Visitante persona in a graphic new video that serves as a launch for his solo career and new record label.

The artist who’s won 28 Grammy and Latin Grammy trophies will now be known simply as Cabra. The debut is not without some bloodshed.

In “La Cabra Jala Pal Monte,” filmed pre-pandemic in Argentina and released Friday, a man dressed in black from head to toe and with his face covered cuts Visitante’s throat before taking off his hood to reveal his identity: Cabra himself.

“Without Cabra there is no Visitante,” sings the 28time Latin Grammy and Grammy winner from Puerto Rico in the song released on Friday, whose title — literally translated as “The Goat Pulls The Mountain” — borrows from a Latin American saying about the return to one’s origins.

“I don’t see it as a death,” the veteran producer told The Associated Press Friday from his studio in San Juan. “I see it as Cabra was always there.”

Cabra achieved fame and critical acclaim in the early 2000s as part of Calle 13, a duo he formed with his brother Rene Perez, aka Residente. While Perez was the voice of the group, Cabra’s Visitante was its producer and musical director. Throughout the years, he has performed many other roles: producer of other artists, composer of original movie scores, creator of Trending Tropics (a duo with the Dominican singer-songwriter Vicente Garcia). The idea of leaving behind his famous nickname, he said, was to consolidate all those sides of him.

“La Cabra Jala Pal Monte” is not only his first song as a main vocalist, but the first release of his new independent label La Casa del Sombrero, or The House of the Hat, based in San Juan.