Assalti Frontali
Conflitto

Nineteen ninety-six. First year of university, radicalizing my political experience. One morning of any given month, after rigorous attendance in the student hall, I go to Feltrinelli to browse and waste some time (I just couldn't stand law lectures) and I'm struck by a blurry orange and black cover of a CD, tucked among the Manifesto releases and crowned by the title: "Assalti Frontali - Conflitto". In five minutes the disc is mine, and I go to listen to it in peace. Hip Hop... of which I am still unfamiliar (even now) except for a few negligible things. Militant A and the Brutopop ("damn the Brutopop, but I've seen them live!"), the music starts and everything seems anything but hip-hop-like: the palpable tension of the Brutopop's music starts, teetering between fury and despair, which admirably replaces all the typical samples and bases of the genre. It's a played and reasoned hip hop. There's something that reminds me of other atmospheres, other places kilometers away... I check and discover that the disc is produced (in the self-managed hall of c.s.o.a. Forte Prenestino) by none other than Don Zientara of the unreachable Fugazi (with whom the A.A. had also shared the stage and sweat some time before, what a strange and fascinating combination). Then Militant A's voice starts: "And every day I swallow some poison/every day/I who love harmony/and I go play a bit with my madness/doesn't seem fitting to spend life thirsty/under the power of failures", the voice of urban despair, tense, depressed. It talks to me about stories of Rome, of comrades and desolation, of losing and finding oneself. It puts me in a bad mood, it makes me angry even today, so tied to the nervously post-punk notes of the Bruti (defined by some, perhaps exaggerating, as the "Motorpsycho of us") that it gives me emotions that hip hop normally doesn't give me, it depresses me and makes me angry again: "I don't know if I could live in peace/only the continuous conflict/between ways of life/indicates a way out". "Conflitto", together with the previous "Terra di Nessuno" is the darkest and most desperate album, as if from the lyrics, from Militant A's voice and from the Bruti's notes an anguished rage is perceived, without any glimmer of smiles or lightness. It's a committed, political, biased album, which certainly will not please many precisely because of its frankness, but the truthfulness of characters like Militant A is beyond doubt (I had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with him after a presentation of his book).
The album slides away among the epileptic rhythms of the Bruti and the hiccupping and passionate flow of Militant A: more than a musical masterpiece, "Conflitto" represents a documentary source of the great political ferment period of the Italian underground after HardCore and a trace of how hip hop can be done in Italy while staying out of both sonic and poetic norms.