Chadia Rodriguez
Avere 20 Anni

Reaching the top of the mountain, we look down at the slope that fades into the woods, and then into the indistinct mossy green covering the valleys of our past years. This banally poetic yet cute thrust serves to introduce the subject of Italian rap, music today evolved into a form that doesn’t even remotely seem related to what Sangue Misto and all those guys from the 90s were doing. In short, it's a bit like looking at a strand of yarn from a few meters away and with -6.75 myopia; you don’t see a damn thing, except for an elongated cloud you’ve been told is a strand. This is to say that it should be clear that Chadia Rodriguez has nothing to do with Neffa and Gruff, yet she aligns with them, cites them as influences, even though her poetics move on very different roads, paved with candies, pink latex, and antidepressants shaped like colorful bears.

The absurd connection that unites a twenty-year-old girl singing about getting banged for hours to get her heart racing and three hooded MCs who sang about their position as strangers in their own nation in front of a nerdy audience lies precisely in the words I've just written, which coincide with the idea of solitude. Solitude is the engine of man, who moves, works, makes music not to feel alone. Chadia was a stripper as a teenager, now she's a rapper and strips, metaphorically and literally, in front of everyone. And those who know how to listen to her understand her message. In the end, it’s yet another triumph of rap, the true heir of punk as an art form capable of giving voice to the marginalized. The best legacy of the musical 90s is precisely this accelerated mush of rhymed words over instrumentals - certainly much more impactful than the grunge banality that had already worn out after three months. And today’s (some call it trap), if not the best, is undoubtedly its most genuine reincarnation, adhering to youthful reality.

I don’t remember what I wanted to say initially. Oh right, I wanted to say there is no point, neither in this review nor in all the phenomenological drivel you concoct to talk about contemporary rap, trying to interpret its codes and reasons for success among the youth. You won’t understand it, you’ll continue not to get it and continue to collect vinyl with a manic and sick attention to their maintenance, never being able to savor the taste of blasting tracks like "Fumo Bianco" and "3G" at the park and stopping them after 20 seconds. You'll become increasingly neurotic, while these guys, and these girls, will sweep you away. And history, whether you like it or not, is written by the victors.