Dark Polo Gang
Trilogy

I know it's easy to heap loads of crap on the Dark Polo Gang. And I know it's even easier to do so on those who don't speak ill of them. It's extremely easy to bash those who speak well of them. And impossible to do so with those who speak ill, because after all, we're in Italy, a country of saints, navigators, and reactionaries, and it's right to pour buckets and buckets of holy water on an uncomfortable flame which, if left alive, might, just might, be useful.

Useful for what? To spark a fire, an alarm that might awaken minds lulled by serious rap filled with empty rhetoric that we've been dragging around for too many years, with which we've been deceived for too many years. I understand the taboo of drugs, easy sex, vulgarity, and plutocracy. And I understand not sharing all these things. But why hassle the artist who pursues them? Why say that he is the problem when the problem is the herd-like teenagers who have no desire to educate themselves outside of Instagram and Spotify's trap playlists?

No, because excuse me if I like the first three mixtapes of the Dark Polo Gang. And excuse me if I like them as a whole superior to the parts, as vibes superior to intellectual pleasure, as entertainment superior to the message. And excuse me if I think, and believe, that Sick Luke's productions are the best in Italy: his trap is vibrant like the night, dark like the unsaid, alienating like the most ambiguous side of our mind. And then, really, it breaks down walls, everything.

Tony Effe, Dark Side, Wayne Santana, and Pyrex are four pretty mediocre rappers. But they have been able to see beyond, they have surpassed rap and cleansed it from its biggest flaw: the slavery of rhyme. The rapper, after all, has never been a musician: the rapper has always been a nerd with an incredible will, which pushed him to want to throw words on a musical base hoping to convince himself that what he did was music. It wasn't, and it isn't: the DPG's is more music, more proudly light, more faithful to harmony (as strange as it may be to say, it is) but also less "convinced" (and I give "convinced" a negative connotation).

So, ten thousand times better the Dark than a Dj Gruff, than a Neffa of 'that bunch' and so on. Hip-hop is no longer in the street, how the hell do I have to tell you? And it's not even in the lyrics anymore. Hip-hop today is in the kick drum, in the club, in the incendiary beat, in the colorful verse, in the sound and aesthetics. Today we are in 2018, but the arrogance and carefreeness of the Dark Polo Gang in their three mixtapes, now republished in the collection Trilogy, in 2016 was avant-garde. What is it today? Something that makes you laugh, makes you vomit, makes you sing, makes you dance, makes you argue. But that doesn't go unnoticed. The poverty of content here is not flatness, but a new essence capable of reproducing itself. These three records break, and will break until they deprive us of the right to blast music on stereos and headphones. And the desire to be carried away by a silly, visceral, and primitive vibration like our own nature. Forget the subsequent "Twins" and its lol-rap: here are real classics, whether you want to admit it or not. From "Mafia" to "Cavallini," from "Pesi sul Collo" to "Riviste," from "Sportswear" to "Fiori del Male."