If the very young hikikomori seek shelter from the outside world locked in their bedroom, the “Dogo generation” producer Don Joe hides away every day in his recording studio – seen from our Zoom connection it resembles a spaceship – thus isolating himself from many ephemeral trends of rap game, as he tells us in this interview on the occasion of the release of his latest single, Hikikomori precisely. And we start from the piece in question, rapped by Niky Savage and Emis Killa.
«As always, I preferred to bring together artists from different generations, one who is not old school but experienced like Emis plus one from the new school like Niky. They had already collaborated together on a Villabanks project, but for me it's a fairly new pairing. Musically I was inspired by the moment, as it was close to Halloween, creating a somewhat creepy with the piano, with a hypnotic arpeggio.”
Do you rationally try to differentiate the projects for your historical production, the Club Dogo, from the others?
Yes. The essence of Dogo lies in their superclassical production, while this is very modern. I also like to experiment, in my career I have produced things ranging from reggaeton to trap.
Hikkikomori and the previous single Animal instinct are they born in the perspective of an album?
No, I'm making smash hits. The idea of making a record today doesn't overwhelm me too much, because it's very challenging for a producer to always make the right combinations.
I also wondered if you had never tried, beyond Dogo, to find a small circle of young rappers who represented your idea of music. As for example Night Skinny did with Kid Yugi, Nerissima Serpe, Papa V and others.
Night Skinny is a fairly successful album, it created a crew of artists, but the idea of having the same rapper on four or five tracks doesn't convince me. De gustibus, many like it, but I prefer more diversified work.
In today's crowded scene, who do you like the most?
I would love to collaborate with Kid Yugi again and I really appreciate Tony Boy – he has a nice pen – and the Nerissima Serpe-Papa V combination.
Your colleague Jake La Furia said there's too much trap going around lately. Do you agree?
It's a phenomenon that the new generations are enjoying, I don't listen to an entire album of trap music, it's almost always too repetitive in terms of sound and lyrical themes, with few ideas. But there are singles that work: I'm also a DJ, so sometimes I look for bangers to play in clubs, and some trap songs are used for that.
What assessment do you make of this live return of Dogo, after ten sold out Forums and San Siro?
I don't call it a reunion because the group never broke up, we went back to working together again and it resulted in an atomic bomb that even we couldn't manage at the beginning. The best thing I take away from this experience is the enthusiasm of the new generations: they came to the live shows, bought the album and promoted our return. We didn't expect so much attention: within 15 minutes the presales for the first three dates of the Forum were gone!
And how was the reaction to the concerts?
I look at the whole audience even when I'm playing and it seemed to me that many went to listen to the old records and arrived at the live shows very prepared. There was an incredible harmony, it reminded me of our historic sold out at Rolling Stone years ago. From the stage, nothing seemed to have changed since 2000.
Yet both rap and Milan have changed a lot since the 2000s. In Hikkikomori raps Emis Killa who was involved, albeit tangentially, in the scandal of the relationship between football curves and organized crime…
I don't want to speak for him, but in reality many more or less many are in this world simply going to the stadium, without any other purpose. Today's generation of twenty-year-olds is linked to pro-American stereotypes much more than us, they flaunt violence in their songs, but there are very few who actually make a mess, who are truly linked to the streets. The rest is emulation.
Stereotypes emulated like the dissing of which the other voice of has been the protagonist in recent months HikkikomoriNiky Savage, together with Fedez and Tony Effe.
This waging war, “that's your friend, I'm not coming”, seems bullshit to me. I wouldn't see it as big as some newspapers make it out to be.
But the newspapers only talked about that, about Fedez, about the insults to Ferragni…
That is a generation that in my opinion we can easily eliminate, we can easily pretend that it never existed. I'm sorry because they are people I know, but it was a really bad moment for Italian society: he, she, the other influencers had too much space.
Have they polluted the air of rap?
But why do we have to define Ferragni and Fedez as rap? Tony Effe is one thing, but Fedez had gone off on another tangent, and then tried to come back in a somewhat awkward manner.
Some of my journalist colleagues, but also some of your producer colleagues, say that hip hop has reached an inevitable moment of decline, of tiredness. Do you agree?
It's a cycle for all genres and subgenres, because we can now define rap as a genre in Italy too: the subgenres get tired after a while, no one does drill anymore, and so does Jersey Club, and a lot of trap has broken the fuck. Instead, classic rap never gets tired, because at the base there is an idea of how to produce, how to write lyrics, what to write in the lyrics, which is the very idea of hip hop.
With Club Dogo at San Siro. Photo: Edoardo Anastasio
Can you see with the diamond-studded glass ball of rap what's going to happen between now and the next two or three years?
I also follow many small producers and they are taking the path of sampling even within trap productions: they use jazz and soul samples, there is the return of the pitched voice. There's a lot more music and not just boom boom, the mess. Maybe because that mess pissed me off. The phenomena that are happening today bring a lot of melody, I think of Anna, of Tony Boy.
You said Dogo never broke up. Do you have any new projects planned together?
No, not for the moment. We're still a bit dazed from the tour, in the end we're almost all over 40 and some are close to 50, me for example. You have to think about things carefully, you can't do it instinctively like you were a kid.
