The Latin Kings, abbreviated TLK, was a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 hip hop

Hip hop music

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...

 group from the municipality of Botkyrka

Botkyrka Municipality

Botkyrka Municipality is a municipality in Stockholm County in east central Sweden, not far from the capital Stockholm. Its seat is located in the town of Tumba....

 in the southern suburbs of Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

, Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

.

The members of the group are the lead rapper

Rapping

Rapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The art form can be broken down into different components, as in the book How to Rap where it is separated into “content”, “flow” , and “delivery”...

 Dogge Doggelito

Dogge Doggelito

Douglas León, known by his stage name Dogge Doggelito is a Swedish rapper, lecturer, social commentator and author. He is one of the founders Sweden's most successful rap group The Latin Kings . Doggelito is one of the most acclaimed artists in Sweden...

 (Douglas Léon) and the two brothers, Salla and Chepe. They all have roots in Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

 (Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

 and Chile

Chile

Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

), which is why they took their name from the gang Latin Kings.

They grew up in the concrete suburbs

Million Programme

The Million Programme is the common name for an ambitious housing programme implemented in Sweden between 1965 and 1974 by the governing Swedish Social Democratic Party to make sure everyone could have a home at a reasonable price. The aim of the programme was to build a million new dwellings in a...

 in Botkyrka where a large proportion of the population are immigrants and refugees and the poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 is more visible than elsewhere in Sweden. The hip hop subculture has a large following in these areas of Stockholm. Their songs reflect life in the less affluent suburbs.

TLK were, in 1994, among the first to release a hip hop album with lyrics in Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 (the first was Just D

Just D

JustD was a Swedish hip hop trio formed in Stockholm in 1990. The group consisted of Gustave Lund , Wille Crafoord and Peder Ernerot ....

). Swedish rappers had before that time almost always used English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

. The debut album was Välkommen till förorten (Welcome to the suburb) and the very first single was "Snubben" (The dude). The group felt like they had been ripped off by their record company and they decided to start their own label, Red Line Records, on which they have signed a number of talented hip hop artists in Sweden such as Fattaru

Fattaru

Fattaru is a Swedish Hip-Hop group mainly known for their hit songs Mina hundar and Första femman . Their debut album Fatta eld was released in 2001 and quickly branded the group as Sweden's fastest rappers...

, Kalle Kath, Fjärde världen and Ison & Fille.

If their contemporaries Infinite Mass

Infinite Mass

Infinite Mass is a Swedish hip hop group that was formed in 1991.In 1992 the group won the talent show Swedish Championship of Rap. The same year, they achieved fame when they participated in the movie Sökarna and released the single "Shoot the Racist" which was later renamed "Area Turns Red"...

 were influenced by the West Coast

West Coast hip hop

West Coast hip hop is a hip hop music subgenre that encompasses any artists or music that originates in the westernmost region of the United States, as opposed to East Coast hip hop, based originally in New York alone...

 sound, TLK has more of an East Coast

East Coast hip hop

East Coast hip hop is a regional subgenre of hip hop music that originated in New York City, USA during the 1970s. Hip hop is recognized to have originated and evolved first in the East Coast...

 flavor. The Latin Kings has become famous for rapping in the local Rinkeby Swedish

Rinkeby Swedish

Rinkeby Swedish is any of a number of varieties of Swedish spoken mainly in suburbs with a high proportion of immigrants and immigrant descendants, which emerged as a linguistic phenomenon in the 1980s. Rinkeby in Stockholm is one such suburb, but the term Rinkeby Swedish may sometimes be used for...

, a "multiethnolect language" that is used in areas with many immigrants. This is a form of Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 with loanwords from Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

, Aramaic

Aramaic language

Aramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, Finnish

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

 , Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

, Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 and other languages.

Albums and singles

• Välkommen till förorten
  Välkommen till förorten
  -Reception:Välkommen till förorten was very well-received among swedish critics and is now considered a classic swedish hip hop album. The Latin Kings were praised for their lyrics about the swedish society from a suburban view, both by the general public and politics...
  
  (Gold 50 000 sold) (1994)
  • "Snubben"
  • "Kompisar från förr"
  • "Mecka"
  • "Fint väder"
  • "Halva inne"

• Bienvenido a mi barrio (1995) Spanish version of Välkommen till förorten
  • "Latino somos"

• I skuggan av betongen (Platinum 102 000 sold) (1997)
  • "Botkyrka Stylee"
  • "Borta i tankar"

• Mitt kvarter (Gold 83 000) (2000)
  • "De e knas"
  • "Blend dom"
  • "Ainaziz"

• Omertà (2003)