That rap is, par excellence, a genre that speaks on is something that we are openly aware of. “Care rap that talks about rap and talking to people who listen to rap is a contradiction, as if the books spoke of books, and of each photo we press the negatives” rapped Ghemon before one of his escapes from the genre in Nothing can stop meYear Domini 2006. In the last year and a half, or from the reunion of the Dogo Clubs of early 2024, however, a new (and equally worrying) attitude has been added to the talking about the hip hop community: nostalgia.
The last few months have been rather intense for the nostalgics of the first Italian rap. The year in fact inaugurated with an important short circuit: Sanremo. On the Ariston stage – which historically has no good feeling with the hip hop world – Shablo presented himself, accompanied by two historical figures of the genre such as Guè and Tormento, the first return after previous apparitions in the evenings cover, the second in the third presence after the one in the name of the undertone in 2019 as a guest of Livio Cori and Nino D'Angelo and the debut in 2001. Valerio Staffelli of Striscia la Notizia which then led inexorably to the dissolution of the duo. Just in the evening cover of this year, however, the short circuit: on the stage the two great rivals of the 90s, Neffa and torment, the underground and pop, to celebrate the history of hip hop made in Italy with two milestones of those years, are found on stage, to celebrate the history of those milestones, Waiting for the sun And Amor de Mi Vida. What seemed like a simple tribute to history, however, soon proved to be a premonition.
Just Neffa, post-sanctous, has returned to publish a rap record after a wait 25 years long and “10 years of happiness cancer”, as he told us in the cover story dedicated to him. The first rotation had taken place a few months earlier in 2024, in leaves with Fabri Fibra, but it is right after Sanremo that the singer came out in the open by announcing Canerandagio pt.1the real return of the Guaglione on the track since the times of the EP Chicopans of 1999 Here we are then served Hype (Newindagini) with Fabri Fibra, who closes an open circle in 2002 with Youth disordersthe first solo album of the fibroga. Backstory: Neffa after Chicopans He decides to close his parenthesis with the hip hop, leaving the beat in Tarducci who will shape his first solo adventure. Youth disorders opens Investigations are triggeredwhose sample is reused by Neffa precisely for the production of Hype (Newindagini)as parenthesis he wants to underline.
Less than two months pass and this time it is a fiber that fits from your past. For his latest album, While Los Angeles burnsthe rapper decides to entrust the closure – the now famous trace n. 17 – To the remake of one of his greatest successful successful successes, Towards other shores. Already re-assigned in the Live Scaletta for a few years, fiber has brought a rearranged version of the song to the streaming platforms which, in its original version-built around the sample of Is there anybody out there? Of Pink Floyd – he will never be able to see the light for copyright problems. “I was going to do it again because in the end the piece is mine and I make it back as the fuck I want,” he told us a few days ago in our cover story just before the release. He had to get to almost 50 years fiber to decide to find himself with this success of the underground released back in 1999: and to think that at the time of Mr. sympathyin 2004, rapped “I also had a son but I made him killed/ because he hoped that I would make another sea men”. After the abandonment of the scene of bad maximums such as Neffa, Fede and Fritz from Cat at the beginning of the millennium, in the Italian rap of 2006 there is no time to look at the past: you have to have courage, and regain the market from a deadline. Rap, in that historical moment, must invent its future.
There is no Fabri Fibra, but there is Neffa, and also Ghemon and Torento, in the rapper team that Dj Shocca wanted for 60 Hz IIthe sequel to its historic album of 2005, a lighthouse that held the Italian hip hop alive in a historic era defined by the same fiber “the total void after the Golden Age”. Already from the title, 60 Hz II It is a nostalgia operation. Browsing the tracklist, in fact, Rocbeats's crackling will be perceived to bring back its own past. The disc, in fact, is full of parts twoor of songs that start from the original beat of the time to give a new contemporary version. For fans of double H hearing titles like 60 Hz II, Rendez Vous with Delirio II (with Club Dogo), Blue night II (in the original of the Sicilian Frank only, here with Gemitaiz and Ernia), GhettoBlaster II (with Stokka and Madbuddy today reached by Jake La Furia and Izi) and always raw II (of the late first, revisited here by Tormento and Egreen) will flow a very long thrill halfway between the sweet youth memory and the adult terror of seeing the story dishonored. The stylistic exercise of shop is to restore the (its) past of Italian rap creating a direct dialogue with what it was, transforming old scratch stamps (as in the final of Rendez Vous with Delirio II And Blue night II), interlude in real pieces (“Roc I swear to you thank you / rappo on this interlude since 2004/20 years later they are in the studio to sign a classic” as Ensi points out in How We Rocreferring to Fourinstrumental interlude in the first episode of 60 Hz) and bringing the rappers to boxing with the shadow of their past between stanzas and refrains resumed literally by the original versions (it happens in all versions II). And it is strange at the opening of the album feel Madbuddy launch into “I hate rappers blocked in the past because memories are like a path of broken glass”.
Simon Reynold explained this contemporary trend very well by coining the term backthat is, the idea that pop culture – through remix, reprints, sampling and revival – is obsessed with its past to the point of becoming unable to produce something truly new. “We live in a pop era crazy for the retro and obsessed with commemoration. […] The danger is that we could exhaust the past itself “writes in his famous essay in 2011, in which nostalgia becomes something that paralyzes and Retromania is the symptom of the difficulty of modernity in thinking the future. If for sea men in 1999 Tomorrow is todayfor Italian rap the past is today.
And if even the new generations – see Santana Money Gang of Sfera Ebbasta and Shiva with the continuous quotes to Club Dogo (Guè also recently published Kg Anthem with Rasty Kilo, a reissue of Area one anthem of 2010) and Marracash – they begin to be fooled by the past by losing the furious iconoclastic approach, referring directly to the fathers (see that also the will to Salmo to have a historical figure like Kaos as the only featuring on his latest Ranch record), perhaps the idea of the future carried out by rap has jammed. It is no coincidence that today many of the Next Gen – Ele a, very black snake, Kid Yugi – we left the trap aside to return to rapping, as was done once, rhyme on rhyme, bar after bar.
If this nostalgia will be only a cyclical phase, a fashion that returns to 20 years from the originals, or something that has been metastaticly inserted in the subcutaneous layer of Italian rap we will soon discover it. In the first case we will talk about a tribute to the survivors of the glorious history of the Golden Age. In the second of the end of the driving force of what Fibra always called “the only Italian music revolution”. The feeling, if we were to bet the famous 2 cents, is that the sound of the road has also been swallowed up by its own past.