Grudge was a guest of SPOT – The Podcastthe program that Michele Monina And Massimiliano Longo they record live at the Spot Music Fest in Bareggio. An almost hour-long conversation, which starts from the meaning of his name and arrives at the craft of writing, the relationship with discography and a position on the role of artists.
Why did he think about leaving the Rancore name
With the latest album Tarek coloring pagewhich bears his first name, Rancore had thought about abandoning the pseudonym. He felt it was tight, he says: the idea that resentment in music only served to exorcise pain no longer held. Then he changed his mind. Over time that name has changed its meaning, and today resentment appears to him as a weapon used by communication and power to pit people against each other. Continuing to call ourselves that, he says, is a way to sabotage that weapon.
Resentment, he explains, is not yet hatred. It's the moment before, when you can still choose whether to forgive. The verb that applies to it is “to brood”, as for a life that is yet to come. Hence the link he sees between rap and that word: both arise from those who feel trapped in the world they live in and create a rupture.
“Turning lead into gold”
For Rancore, talking about negative feelings is a necessary act. Putting a weight in a room of the head, giving it a name and transforming it into something creative is, according to him, the highest possible operation, a transformation of lead into gold. He chose rap at the age of thirteen listening to Eminem, at a time when he was skateboarding. Two things attracted him: dynamism and anger. There was also a short circuit with clothes, he says with irony, because overly expensive trousers didn't seem compatible with a life of skateboarding and freedom of movement.
The rapper who sings with his own voice
Rancore is one of the rappers who don't change their timbre when they go from speaking to singing. A choice which, he admits, was completely instinctive: he only realized it after years, when someone pointed it out to him. He found his language, understood as a language, by taking the courage not to follow the rules of the hip hop scene and building a world apart, what he calls Oxenoverso. From there the first different songs were born, from The chimney sweep to My neighborhood.
One of his texts in school books
A passage from Rancore ended up in a school book. On All Music Italia a Latin professor wrote that his is literature. He feels more like someone who borrowed the music than a writer who lent it to it. His approach starts from writing, with musical rules used as a dam to keep the flow flowing. On the topic of the song form as a literary form, he cites Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize and the metric that distinguishes song from poetry.
“I got ripped off a lot”: the relationship with the discography
On the relationship with record companies, Rancore is direct. In 2026, he says, doing things self-produced remains the best path for him, because his music is too personal for others to get their hands on. He admits that he has signed contracts against him and that he has been ripped off a lot, a standard that he hopes will end. He remembers the record companies who advised him to give it up, in a period in which he had no electricity at home and traveled from Milan to Rome closed in the train bathroom. Those words hurt, he admits, but if they stop you it means you weren't convinced enough.
On the rap scene, he notes that he is often lumped in with a group of “cultured” artists such as Caparezza And Murubutuand to sometimes be forgotten when talking about rap. He explains it with a question of communication: some projects have had an enormous communicative dominance, others have maintained a more artistic and less entrepreneurial attitude.
The two months painting furniture and the birth of Tarek to color
The record Tarek coloring page was born from a period in which Rancore had forced himself not to write and had only started restoring old furniture, recovered from the rubbish, in the studio he had taken in Rome. Two months of painting from morning to ornaments. In the end the only non-colored element in the room was him, and from there the title of the album was born. The furniture, he says, taught him patience: just as a coat of paint needs to dry before the next, so a song sometimes needs to be left to settle before finding the right rhyme.
De Gregori and the duty to expose oneself
In closing, a question about recent statements by Francesco De Gregoriaccording to which an artist should not take sides. Rancore distances himself from personal controversy: what De Gregori thinks, he says, doesn't matter to him. However, he has a clear position on the issue. For an artist who raps and is called Rancore, exposing himself about an injustice is right. He rejects the word “must”, but adds that whoever has the sensitivity to do it, in his opinion, must do it. If he remained silent out of fear of the market or out of pure rationality, he concludes, then he might as well stop rapping the next day.
