Dargen D'Amico
Di Vizi di Forma Virtù

THE REVIEW

"Experimental" is a term used and abused, behind which the most profane of desecrators can hide as well as the most skilled of innovators.

It seems that nowadays the greatest obsession of an artist is to be original at any cost. The aim no longer seems to be to communicate something, but simply to give "something new" to the public. It seems that the value of a song exists only if it isn't something "already heard, already listened to." Thus, crowds of fools take a mixer, download a couple of programs, and start making experimental music.

An artist breaks the mold and is considered an "experimenter," regardless of the actual quality of their production. Breaking the mold. The mold is something ugly, it’s an obligatory path, a limit to true inspiration, so they must be broken, transgressed. How ignorant.

The true skill of an artist lies in having so thoroughly internalized THOSE MOLDS, in having made them so their own, in having walked and re-walked them so many times that music emerges from their mind already as it is played. This is the first step, it’s the minimum for having written a good song. Try to imagine how much musical knowledge Mozart must have acquired in his youth. Mozart didn't wake up one morning, take a piano in his hands for the first time and think, "Hey, I could play it with my butt, just to go outside the box." Mozart spent his life from the age of 6 on a piano, and only thus did he reach such mastery as to be able to play the piano using his behind.

In short: to be a true innovator, it’s not enough to be the first idiot who grabs a synthesizer and explores new sounds. The true innovator must be an expert.

Now, imagine that rap music is a rope bridge: Jacopo D'amico, known as Dargen, has traversed it so many times back and forth that he can now walk it upside down. THIS is being original.

Many probably remember Dargen as a thirteen-year-old handing corn cobs to twenty-year-olds in freestyle, or the hyper-technical and baroque Dargen of "salvation army-il senso di Dargen per le rime," or the ultra-fast and totally content-free Dargen of "tana 2000." Well, forget it.

After 2000, Dargen hid in silence for six years, meditated on the poverty of his purely technical songs, and made a choice that would certainly prove commercially unsuccessful by abandoning the "canonical" rap that is popular among kids today but would lead him to true and profound personal success by choosing a hybrid music, music that is impossible to describe in words. Beyond classifications, impossible for J.D., the true beauty of his music is its SINCERITY.

Like it or not, J.D. is visceral, sincere. He has no poetic pretensions; he doesn’t want to change the world, he just does what many don’t know how to do: COMMUNICATE SOMETHING. Certainly, he is neither a philosopher nor a scholar, but damn, you should really try to listen to "arrivi, stai scomodo e te ne vai" in silence: only then could you truly understand this artist's sensitivity and sweetness.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear. The others can go listen to "Il rap per me" or "Come l’Italia e San Marino," because what I’ve said is just a summary of those two wonderful texts.