He was born in Guayaquil and dreamed of being a surfer, but life led him to settle in Buenos Aires and today he is the producer of some of the most important local artists such as María Becerra or Tiago PZK.
There are stories that deserve to be told, especially when they begin with a teenager surfing waves in his native Ecuador who, making religious music in the church, ended up becoming the hitmaker for several of the most relevant musicians in Argentina.
Xavier Rosero Moreira, better known as Xross, went through a life full of cultural changes in one of the epicenters of Latin American urban culture. This led him to perfect himself in musical production and choose it as a life path. Today, settled in Buenos Aires, he has worked with musicians of the stature of Tiago PZK or María Becerra, with whom he created some of the most listened to songs on the platforms and managed to consolidate a friendship and camaraderie that are key to revolutionizing the national scene.
News: How were your beginnings in music?
Xross: Music, one day, arrives among all these things that urban California brought. A classmate played songs at mass and they gave him points at school, so I did the same one summer, so, on the one hand, I hit mass songs hard, but also Nirvana’s unplugged (laughs). Summer ended and I formed my first band. I didn’t know what I was producing, but I already had a peripheral vision of the group. Then, a documentary about Justin Timberlake and Pharrel Williams comes across my life and I begin to see that the crazy man was doing the same thing as me, that is, he wasn’t so wrong (laughs). There I realized that the world was divided between those who took us seriously and those who didn’t. By that time it was too late, I was in love with art.
News: How does Argentina come into your life?
Xross: An Argentine teacher came across me at a music school and made me listen to Soda Stereo, Spinetta and Charly. My brain exploded. I began to investigate the history of Argentine rock and everything that it entails socially. Rebellion, saying things even if people don’t like to hear them and I came to Gustavo Cerati, who for me is the Latin American representative par excellence of music.
News: What impact did it have on your career?
Xross: With that love for music, I started to have a lot of bad grades and problems at school, rebellion. My mother put me in the conservatory and then I had to choose a place to perfect myself and I came to live in Buenos Aires. He was 19 years old. I studied sound engineering, but I wanted to study music production. I met a teacher who told me: “You don’t study that, you are born with it, you have it, but you have to develop it.” And there I understood that my main instrument was my ears and that I had an interface in my head that made me transfer the ideas I had to reality. I realized that I had been producing for years.
News: What led you to discover urban music?
Xross: One of the things was that I faced racism many times, but I didn’t know it existed, I wasn’t aware. I don’t say it from the place of victim, but from the place where I experienced it. And I started to find people who had the same thing happen to them in movies and series. There was the whole African-American boom in the United States and I began to find heroes like Kanye, Jay Z, Beyoncé, who defined it in the songs. That took me to Malcolm X or Martin Luther King and it took me headlong into the urban. I started to use my African culture, which was already in my blood, with my Latin culture and my rock culture.
News: How do you feel when urban music is criticized?
Xross: I am a fairly hybrid producer. I produce with instruments and a computer, but it seems to me that there is a part of frustration in us human beings and many take to social media talking about what they consider to be art. At the beginning of trap in Atlanta, those were kids without resources and without opportunities who with a couple of beats could communicate what was happening in that neighborhood and that the news did not want to tell. The musicians are the reporters of the street, of the neighborhood. The art that is expressed there is brutal and if you can’t see it or understand it it’s because you haven’t connected yet. There is also a lot of prejudice, because all this has to do with the time you take to think about things. That’s why I never take criticism badly.
News: And what about the criticism of autotune?
Xross: There is a problem that I think people don’t understand. Autotune if you don’t sing well, the correction is not good either. But if you use it as an effect, it’s amazing. Who is going to tell me that Cher doesn’t sing well without autotune? What people don’t understand is that there is still no plug-in, no program that makes your voice cool or digestible. What people call flow, there is nothing that a computer does, so that is where the issue is divided.
News: Speaking of flow, who is María Becerra today in her life?
Xross: María was an incredible artist, she is the person with the easiest way to make hooks and make melodies that humans like, that I know. She uses notes that are not normal, but people love them. It’s amazing how she manages to connect the melody with what she wants to say. That’s brutal. We became very friends and have spectacular musical chemistry. She understands me how I work and I understand her how she sings. María makes incredible vocals, she does things that are choral, harmonies, textures, she is very skilled and that chemistry to make music technically also transfers to the composition. I am super grateful to María for giving me the opportunity to take what she has in her head, the abstract idea, and bring it to reality and make it work like that.
News: Together they had the difficult task of making “Te cura”, a song for Hollywood that was part of “Fast and Furious 10”. How was that experience?
Xross: It was crazy how we made that song. María tells it quite chilly. We were going from here to there, from 8 in the morning without stopping and bam! We got the date that we had to make a theme for a Hollywood movie, which is “Fast and Furious”, but we had three hours to do it. I put everything together in the hotel room and this chemistry that I tell you began. Ideas began to fall. Because ideas are floating and we have to be attentive to know how to grab them. It was three hours that we really took advantage of. And then people say “ah in three hours”, as if criticizing the song. It takes years to achieve something like this, to understand each other and have tools to not block yourself.
News: What do you think is going to happen to Argentine music?
Xross: I think it has no limit, because it is a country with a lot of culture behind it. Something that I learned from you, although I already feel like I am from here, is courage. In soccer, for example: a world final arrives and eleven kids stand up and say let’s play it, with their head, with their fingernail or by blowing, but the ball goes in. And that is clearly seen in various things in society, including music and art. You see artists who reach unexpected places and from a very young age. Where we get to, we will see in a series in about 10 or 15 years.
News: What is Argentina for you?
Xross: It’s homeland. She is a mother. He gave me everything. I feel very grateful to this country. I would do anything for this country. He trained me and with that he helped me defend myself anywhere on the planet.
