The release of the third album by Kid Yugi, child prodigy of Italian hardcore rap, is surrounded by layers of hype after the 250 thousand copy success of All the devil's namesa record from two years ago, which in today's rap correspond to at least three geological eras. This occasion could not be missed (in conjunction with the launch of Even heroes die) a documentary on the boy from Massafra, Francesco Stasi – Ciccio for his friends, who today have become his managers, videomakers etc. – which introduces us into his world right from the beginning (strange that, like Kanye West, Yugi also allowed himself to be filmed in every one of his appearances even when he was nobody… ).
The most interesting passage is when a friend says that the dream of the rapper, enrolled in the Faculty of Letters in Bari, was to become a librarian, because the only thing he should have said is “sshh, be quiet”. Precisely him, who has accustomed us to torrential rapping, in which high and low quotes, metaphors and slang overwhelm the listener, stunning him due to the quantity and quality of the inputs. Even heroes die it arrives precisely as a cascade of words ready to drive Genius and all his fans crazy: Huckleberry Finn, Friederich Nietzsche, Bertold Brecht are mentioned, there are songs named after Chuck Norris and Gaddafi, David and Goliath and Tristan and Isolde.
Kid Yugi today is epic, lyrical, gangsta, emo, dark, yet credible, authentic, not a Frankestein who feeds on Wikipedia and ChatGPT. Further evidence of this was yesterday's press conference, impressive for the quality of the rapper's speech, the lucidity of the project, the irony and lightness of his 24 years stuck in an adult and thinking head that thinks about the heaviness of expectations (“for this reason on the album I decided to let myself die, better myself than throwing it at someone else”) and wittily dodges the question about the knife on the cover, as sharp as those that the future law decree would like to punish (“on the cover the knife is in the hands of a dead man, it is not the object that is important, but the hand of the person holding it”).
Kid Yugi also responds on violence, that of his lyrics, and above all that inside and outside of us, quoting the beginning of a new piece of his, For the blood shed: “Revenge, fear, violence, prevarication and hatred / Honor and respect, absence of forgiveness / Really this is all we have left / We really can't do better / And I know that our land is poor / Poor in hope, but it won't do to water it with blood”. He explains: «Honour, respect, revenge are the words of many street kids, and they are hypocritical words, the street is hypocritical».
We journalists take notes, we are surprised when he quotes Pirandello off the cuff, or says he grew up listening to CCCP, which is why the album opens with the voice of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti in Occitania: it's a tribute to one of his favorite bands. We are not surprised that he talks little about rap, apart from his passion for Noyz Narcos, and that he says he listened to a lot of Guccini during the year and a half of writing the album: «Rap doesn't have to be inspired by rap, better the cinema of Tsukamoto», which he pays homage to Bullet Balletor the list of his latest readings: The moon and the bonfires by Cesare Pavese, Mishima, A bunch of idiots by John Kennedy Toole. Dostoevsky stands out above all, his “polar bear” – he says exactly that – because at 13 years old Crime and punishmentas far as he could tell, changed his life.
And so Kid Yugi represents at the same time the bugbear – for the sometimes violent, hardcore language – and the hope – for the cultural baggage put into rhyme – of many parents who “think well” compared to their children who only hear rap on their headphones. But as he himself suggests, “lower your expectations, there are no heroes, today meritocracy is false, only those who have the most money count.” Another off-the-cuff quote from Kundera (or Kid Kundera? Well, let's not check): “He who gets too lost in thought doesn't change the world.”
When I ask him why he often refers in his lyrics to names from the recent past such as Craxi, Andreotti or Gaddafi and doesn't mention, of course, Meloni, Trump, Gaza, he replies that “rap is unable to photograph reality, things have to settle a bit before being able to deal with them”. Yet the world it describes is the one we live in, even without well-defined names. He demonstrates this in the chorus River, all in apnea, of Gilgamesh: “Drugs weapons sluts Jordan / Money brands dinners boredom / Car trips hotel orgy / Whiskey fame street crowd / Life love death coke / Sex anxiety pink Rolex / Study van lies shame / Born raise children grave”. Which is nothing other than the long hip hop version of the chorus of Die by CCCP: “Work, produce, consume, die”. Everything comes back, and it comes back well. Let's just hope we don't find him again in a few years in Atreju with Meloni…
