By Andrew Mason
The 34-year-old rapper uses his Mexican-American roots and ability to collab to create a distinct Fillmore hip-hop sound.
I first caught wind of rapper “Li Wrecca” (@liwrecca) the same exact way that I come across many of Ventura County’s up-and-coming hip-hop artists: Instagram.
Scrolling through my explore page feed during one of the first nights of the Coronavirus quarantine, I saw a snippet of the official “Fillmore Cypher”, directed by 4Twenty.Vizion (@Ishuez420). As a music journalist living in “The 805”, I had never seen this before, and was, as you could guess, excited to watch.
Fillmore is a historically agricultural town located in the non coastal half of Ventura County. It’s home to just about 16,000 people, about a mere 1.8 percent of the county’s overall population. Fillmore wasn’t mentioned a single time in my first Undrgrnd issue “The 805”. It was (and still is) a rap scene full of unknown.
But it was clear that people from the area were creating songs and visual content to go with their music (just as important!). Fillmore had an official cypher, one that was produced well and boasted solid artists. Bottom line: moves were being made, and Fillmore caught my eye.
Though all four rappers went hard, the individual who stood out to me the most from the cypher was a 34-year-old Mexican-American man by the name of Lisandro Cabrera, or Li Wrecca. He looked like a friendly dude, rapped with sometimes funny, sometimes serious, and even sometimes bilingual lyrics, and hit a flow that was clear and digestible.
Thus, I slid into Li Wrecca’s DMs and was able to grab a 20-minute phone call with the man himself. According to Li Wrecca, the 2004 Fillmore High School graduate has been rapping for an estimated 15 years, after initially finding himself a fan of the East Coast “boom bap” style of hip-hop. Many of the hip-hop artists coming out of Fillmore in the mid-2000s knew each other well before their musical talents were exposed, Wrecca says.
“We all grew up together, a lot of us,” he says. “Off of those friendships, we were just like, ‘let’s work together.’”
Around 2007, Wrecca partnered up with Kryptic (@kryptic_ww) and DJ Joey Funk (@joey_funk) to start the rap trio by the name of “West-Word”. The group released their first album "A Work in Progress EP" in 2009, and allegedly have new music dropping in 2020, according to Wrecca.
In addition to getting West-Word off the ground, Li Wrecca found himself part of Jeffy Obvious’ (@jeffyobvious) emerging “The Gutted Cigar”, a 805-based hip-hop squad that played events and clubs mainly in Los Angeles (“at ‘The Airliner’”) and Ventura.
“We just started doing shows,” Li Wrecca says of his initial days with The Gutted Cigar. “We were just performing. We were a group.”
Li Wrecca claims that eventually The Gutted Cigar turned from what he called a hip-hop group in its early days, into more of an event planning service that now does most of its work locally. However, he says the business is important to this day in terms of bringing new Ventura County artists to the spotlight.
Li Wrecca is unmarried with no children, but has a girlfriend. Aside from creating music, he works as a graphic designer and in the restaurant game. You can also check out his personally drawn and written series of comics on his Instagram account @liwrecca_comics.
“I have this really silly side that I wouldn’t really show through the music,” Li Wrecca says. “I like to have fun with stuff.”
Li Wrecca is bilingual, often delivering bar after bar in Spanish, then slowing down the flow as he reverts back to English. This is a skill, he says, that is common among rappers from Fillmore, as he claims “the majority” come from Hispanic roots.
“I did a song [titled "Toma"] a couple of years ago. One verse was in English and the other verse was in Spanish,” Li Wrecca says. “That was the first time I did something like that and a lot of people responded really well...they didn’t see it coming.”
Those like Li Wrecca demonstrate everything I look for in a Ventura County rapper: the desire to work with others, a willingness to bend the genre to find a distinct sound, and the unconditional love for a hometown, no matter how much it changes.
“When I was starting there was a lot of Chicano rap going [on] around here,” he says. “There are trap rappers here now. I think Fillmore kind of has a variety at the moment. It has a little bit of everything.”
Li Wrecca doesn’t have a ton of content on Spotify or Apple Music, but can be heard on SoundCloud under the name “Li Wrecca”. At the time of this mid-March 2020 interview, he claims he is working on more cyphers and collaborations with other artists, and promises new solo work and West-Word music later this year. He has no shows currently planned, mainly due to the uncertainty created by the Coronavirus.
Ultimately, Li Wrecca represents an important piece of Ventura County rap that I had been previously oblivious to. Fillmore is a small town, but has a big past and an even bigger personality. And in a county where roughly 43 percent of residents are Hispanic or Latinx, there is no question that this Spanish-influenced style holds significance within “The 805” hip-hop scene.