She's small, but she has a giant ass
She's good in bed and also at FIFA
Tony Effe, that is, the Roman born in 1991 Nicolò Rapisarda, is an Italian rapper who began his career in the famous and infamous Dark Polo Gang, a trap group that was able to distinguish itself for a way of rapping so far from what was defined in the Italian scene at the end of the century that it was, depending on the listeners, unacceptable, hilarious, exciting or all three things together. That season ended disastrously with “Trap Lovers” (2019) and “Dark Boys Club” (2020), confused attempts to access the mainstream and therefore to return to those of the past, ending up in a parody of themselves.
The solo debut “Untouchable” (2021), yet another platinum album for Universal, is crowded with guests and tries to guess hit from the top rankings. Even Gucci Mane, one of the giants of American trap, intervenes. Tony Effe also reveals himself to be intimate, thoughtful, melancholic but does not give up on reaffirming his identity street and this heterogeneity that borders on confusion does not help the album much, published in a period of national hyperproduction. Everything needs to be reconfigured and the turning point comes from a single mainstream like “Taxi on the Moon” (2023), with his partner label Emma Marrone: a hit by Takagi & Ketra, where the two at the microphone would be interchangeable with others randomly chosen from the deck.
“Icon” is not better structured, divided between too many target to hit: the aggressive and bombastic trap (“Vero Tony vero Sosa”; “Carrara”; “Lap Dance”) and the more emotional one (“Honey”; “Pillole”; 2Particolari sporchi”), with a variety of danceable rhythms (“GTA”) and relational ideas (the questionable “Dopo le 4”, which dares to tell the story of violence against women by combining it with the theme of consent).
The lyrics are monotonous, trivial or so over the top or naive to provoke some perplexed laughter. A selection, obviously partial and to be added to the opening quote, includes lines like: “I ask her how she is, she answers: Good when I'm with you/ Fuck these sweet things, stop telling me”; “Tony Meravigliao/ Pieces look like cocoa beans”; “I take a bitch, she becomes a princess/ I gave her a new ass, I bought her a sixth”; “I call a whore a whore” to be connected with “I call you a whore only because you asked me to”; “I'm asking the mirror who's the most beautiful/ She answers me: Tony, you should have been a model”; “Balenciaga, I'll kill if they step on me”; “She wants to make a porno, I tell her: You're for porno”; “Ass and tits, I don't even look at her face”; “I wake up in the morning, wash my hands and then piss”; “Two blondes in the back and Vegeta in the passenger side”. The Dark Polo Gang quotes are wasted, the bars they are just a pretext to make another song and some references are repeated without any clear reason, other than laziness.
By talking about misogynistic, violent or simply illegal behavior, Tony Effe continues to stubbornly feed the imagery that the Dark Polo Gang has introduced into the new scene, only to then apologize to everyone in trap. conscious “Sorry”, glossing over with a childish “I’m made like this”:
Okay, I apologize to my fans, to those who wanted Dark to be united
To those who have left, to those who are still here
I apologize to my mother, I apologize to my father
For all those times I did wrong things
For all the ones I've fucked and then treated badly
For all the people I sent to the hospital
I'm made like this, but what can I do?
When Tony Effe is particularly light-hearted in his self-talk, he still manages to entertain, as in “Icon”, an exaggerated hymn to himself (“Eleven girls, it seems like a football team”) to be paired with “Boss”, on a sample of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”. In reality, the hit more easya bravado that has already achieved platinum status, is “Miu Miu”, also marked by some verses over the top. Also to be added to this short list is “Sesso e samba”, inserted at the beginning of the lineup: together with Gaia, it creates a hit which lives only on the contrast between the two voices and the two styles, as well as on Davide Petrella's ability to write continuous hits (his Italodisco, Cenere, Calipso and many others).
Crowded with champion guests of the streaming like Sfera Ebbasta and Geolier, “Icon” was released in mid-March and is one of the most listened to albums on Spotify Italy in 2024. It has already achieved double platinum status, destined to increase with the support of the aforementioned “Sesso e samba”, which we will also take to the beach. The news is not that Tony Effe has become an icon, as the title would suggest, or even that something has changed in the usual sex-money-drugs merry-go-round but that after “Untouchable” the ex-DPG has released an album that, at least according to the cold statistics of online listening, has achieved much greater success than could have been predicted even just a couple of years ago. That he did it with an album from content non-existent, with unoriginal productions, verbose and doped by featuringthat's a whole other story.
04/07/2024
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM