Menospreciado means 'underestimated' or 'scorned'. It's a strong word that captures a feeling of being looked down upon or undervalued.
In
Contra Quien Sea is Dorian Ampie's answer to everyone who wrote him off. The title means "against whoever it is", and the hook sets the terms right away: he is going up so that envy has to watch him do it, and so that anyone else who has been looked down on takes it as a reason to believe in themselves.
The verses explain where that comes from. Hunger and emptiness are what pushed him to become a soldier. He walks his own path and runs errands for nobody, he has always hustled for what he has, and people have looked down on him the whole way. He is in a pool now, he says, but he used to wash in a basin. Falling and getting back up is treated as routine, and so is scorn, which he reckons only made him more ambitious.
Faith runs through all of it. He puts his trust in prayer, credits God with escorting him the whole way, and asks his mother to get on her knees because there are people hoping to see him fall. The spoken tags at either end name who the song is for: the menospreciados, the ones nobody rated.
Dorian Ampie is a Costa Rican singer and songwriter working in his country's urban music scene, where he records and writes under his own name, Dorian Ampié Suárez.
His sound sits between Spanish-language rap and Caribbean dancehall: heavy, mid-tempo beats with plain, direct verses over the top. The subject is usually life in the barrio told from the inside, and the themes he keeps returning to are work, family, faith, and the experience of being underestimated.
He has built his following steadily online, where his videos reach well beyond Costa Rica, and at home he is often described as one of the country's emerging national artists.