I'm thirty... No, more (sigh).
I've been listening to trap beats for quite some time. I really like them, a lot.
Shlump, Sayer, Moniker, Ethan Glass, Banganagangbangers, Conrank... half the catalog of Saturate Records has been pirated onto my HD; at least one of their albums has been in my "electronic" mp3 folder for at least three years.
I listen to rap very little, I’m certainly not the best person to talk about it, but given that just an hour ago I was in front of the enormous middle finger that the Milan stock exchange screams at the rest of the city (it’s not clear to the average Milanese why the statue wasn’t positioned the other way around, but whatever, Cattelan, the artist of the people, okay. Fine. After all, music today is X Factor; everything comes back), anyway, I was saying, having just been shooed away by Cattelan, the stock exchange, and all those who say, “that statue was donated in times of crisis as a sign of the Italian people's discontent with the economy.” Yes, fine: let’s get bent over with a smile, because crying doesn’t change anything... holy mother, what a screwed-up introduction you’ve written; now I’ll get to the point, eh...
Let’s start over: I’m old, Milanese, and I listen to trap beats. Better than the ones Marrachash sings on. I know nothing about rap, but the vocoder on "Milano Bachata" is annoying. Also the auto-tune on "la legge del più forte." I know nothing about rap, but this guy Ebbasta proudly shows off clothes that would get bullied even by the wardrobes of Gotham City’s mob.
But this is a problem that, in a less aggressive manner, seems to affect the whole scene, and I don’t find anything strange about it considering we’re talking about artists who grew up as children in the bad taste of Grande Fratello, Maria De Filippi, and various absurdities. What were absurdities to me were their childhood memories. And, honestly: someone think of the children, or else by the time they’re twenty they all look like they walked out of a ridiculous super-deformed Japanese cartoon.
Once we’ve overcome the aesthetic discomfort and accepted the bad musical taste, we get to the lyrics. And I don’t know. As soon as I get past all this discomfort, I’ll try to let you know what I think about this Sfera Ebbasta; for now, he should stop throwing paint bombs in the wardrobe; that would be a good start. But maybe the goal is to be rock, not to please the old fogies and ooze rebellion from every pore.
And from what I understand today, being rock means having turned-up pants and clean white shoes.
"It seems that now it’s fashionable to do what I used to get slapped for back in '93,
that tight pants were for fags and not for cool kids,
Converse for losers, computers for the unsuccessful."
The song by Zen Circus from which the above verse is taken is called "Vecchi senza esperienza," so no one gets offended.
