“Massimo Pericolo doesn't have confused ideas,” says the rapper in the intro to his latest albumThings change. And reading this excerpt from his autobiography it seems quite clear. Warrior monkin bookstores from today by Rizzoli, is not the classic self-celebratory book. And you can tell right away from the first sentence, “At the end of the summer of 2021, I was depressed.”
It's a journey that tells what you don't expect, the personal fall after the great successes of his first two albums Always shawl And Just everything. Between anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, the rapper's rebirth passes through meditation, martial arts, oriental philosophy and a trip to China to attend a Shaolin monastery. A diary, a natural continuation of his first book The Lord of the Woods, an open-hearted story that reveals to us a Massimo Pericolo once again different from any other artist on the scene. Because “Massimo Pericolo is not like you, Massimo Pericolo is not what you want”.
Here is a part of “Silence”, the first chapter of Warrior monk.
By the end of the summer of 2021, I was depressed. I had been spending sleepless nights for months. I almost always got up at three in the afternoon, sometimes even at seven in the evening.
I was completely stoned.
I had finished an absurd tour, with people sitting and distanced, all wearing masks. I was constantly thinking of a way to end my mental suffering. I had stopped psychotherapy about a year ago. I had left my girlfriend at the time. I was blown away.
For many years I had tried to silence my mind, my dark thoughts, believing that in this way I would not suffer, but they would not be silent and I continued to feel bad without finding a solution.
The feeling of full and lasting well-being that I had enjoyed like never before for over a year, after having achieved success, that incredible binge of life, during the pandemic had turned out to be an illusion, a soap bubble that had burst in me in your face.
I fell back into the state of prostration that I knew well. I thought I would be fine forever, but when Covid arrived I realized that I still had problems.
I only felt negative emotions. I had a phobia of doing anything. Nothing gave me relief, everything weighed on me. Drinking was the only thing that calmed me down.
I was wracked with anxiety. I refused to live, to have concrete experiences.
I just wanted to exist as little as possible.
In the loneliness that oppressed me I hit rock bottom on a mental level and I seriously thought about suicide.
Realizing that I couldn't feel good even after achieving success and making some money had thrown me into even greater and unbearable pain, because it was proof that I was the problem. […]
I approached martial arts as a child, starting with karate. I had attended a course in Treviso for a couple of years, where I had lived after the first move with my mother, and then I had continued during the period in Catania, where I had had a teacher who soon became a guide, a father in a moment when I felt orphaned. At that time I dreamed of becoming a martial arts master. I wanted to learn and teach kids. I fantasized about the Shaolin temple in China, famous throughout the world for its martial arts tradition, listening to the stories told by its master without ever having seen even a photo.
As I grew up I became passionate about kung fu, practiced with ups and downs and often alone. Then, at nineteen, I decided to leave and spend three months in Shaolin. I had gone there to rediscover myself and learn the art of kung fu, and there in fact I had acquired skills which, when I returned to Italy, had allowed me to start teaching, which I had done for a certain period, making my dream come true. that I have cultivated since I was a child.
Until I was arrested. I had made mistakes in my previous life, and the bill I had to pay came when I no longer had anything to do with that life, when I had already understood my mistakes on my own. And that belated punishment had only increased my desperation and nihilism.
In prison I had seriously practiced meditation for the first time, but when I got out I no longer felt credible as a martial arts master, I was sick, I was depressed, I didn't represent a good example or the portrait of health, so I had bet everything on music .
Rap for me was an outlet, a desperate scream, but in terms of aspiration, of purpose, the reasoning was: if I fail, I'll make money. Success fascinated me. But it never took the forefront of martial arts.
Once, in this regard, I asked my friend Pietro: “What do you think I should do, engage in music or kung fu?”.
He, without hesitation, told me that I would be better off dedicating myself to kung fu. He still throws it against me today, claiming that he has never seen me feel as good as I did when I seriously practiced martial arts. […]
Naturally that time, despite Pietro's advice, I chose music, the reality I was experiencing at that moment, the existential malaise, the dissolute and hopeless life I was leading at the time. Rap was better suited than a martial art to express the way I felt, it was a snapshot of the world around me, a world of shit. Many of my friends and acquaintances were stuck in that lifestyle, anchoring me to a reality that I didn't accept as mine. But at the same time I considered myself inadequate to follow a path of purity, even if that's what you really need to heal and change yourself and the world for the better.
With rap I hoped, but I wasn't sure, that I would make it big.
And yet it had happened.
Now, however, inside me I felt a worrying silence, a silence that foreshadowed the absence, perhaps the loss or even the forgetfulness of something substantial: my true identity, my values.
My soul was silent, the part of me that had drawn the most precious lessons from the martial arts, from the discipline practiced in the past, the same part that had understood the body as a temple. I had lived according to my career, forcing my faculties to a single thought: I make money. It was what I wanted and I got it. So why wasn't I happy? Why didn't it make me feel good to have a nice house, an enviable relationship, a growing career? Why did I feel so bad if I had achieved what I wanted?
I had forgotten why I wanted those things. I wanted economic and family security to cultivate spirit, discipline and improve myself.
I had forgotten that my goal was this: stability, to be able to dedicate myself to my soul.
I was trapped in a constant need to think about how to please others, forgetting that what pleased me was not what I had become, the successful singer, but the lost boy I had been before.
I opened books of photographs on the Shaolin temple, I looked for documentaries on Chinese children who left their families for that monastery and I felt like myself again, at home. And when I closed it I was left with the bitterness of living a life truly lacking in meaning.
You realize yourself thanks to what you did before success, then you start to see your life only from that moment on, and you forget what made you who you are. Strange. I didn't want it to be like that for me too. […]
In my mind I had a vague idea of what path I needed to take to get to a place where I could feel good about myself. I had nothing left to lose. I had to try.
So, one evening before turning off the light and forcing myself to sleep, I thought about meditation and martial arts, which had always been my reason for living and which in the past had really helped me feel better. The only way I knew to improve myself, to satisfy the aspiration to be a certain kind of man.
Master of your mind and body.
Taken from Warrior monk by Massimo Pericolo (Rizzoli, 224 pages, €18.00).
