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If in 2018 you still haven't grasped the importance of Sfera Ebbasta, clearly you're trying hard not to. Attention: the concepts of good and bad music are quite abstruse, and I don't care about convincing you that "trap is better than classic rock," or other bullshit that you put in the mouth of any reviewer who isn't a narrow-minded purist; simply, you must, if you are honest people, recognize the tremendous impact of the Sfera phenomenon, a phenomenon that couldn't have just happened on its own, overnight. The contemporaneity of young people isn't so much about Salvini; the contemporaneity is the young people who don't give a damn about Salvini because—whatever—it’s the same, I don't care about politics, and on Saturdays, they go to the club to listen to trap. Sfera lives in the contemporaneity, intercepts it, creates it, and puts it into music; the charismatic image and above-average melodic talent do the rest.
Emis Killa has been boasting for years about being the best rapper in Italy, even though he has never been. You will understand the surprise in having to recognize that his new album, titled "Supereroe" (triple "sigh"), incredibly does not align with the lackluster quality of the records he wrote in his youth. On the contrary, it's even pleasant, pairing a decently done sentimental pop-rap and serving it to us throughout most of the album. "Rollercoaster," for instance, is a remarkable single, both melodically and lyrically inspired.
Yet, once again, Killa shows he doesn’t understand anything about what’s happening around us, speaking a totally anachronistic language. First of all, he behaves halfway between the fashionable trapper (a role that doesn’t suit him) and the wise dad of all new rappers, the one who can still afford to throw a multitude of words into his lyrics pretending that it isn’t 2018. Besides not knowing which side to stand on, Emis does pop-rap "too well," so meticulously that it becomes showy and cloying, and "too badly" the trap, because, in the end, he doesn't have the necessary style to do it. Who would have the style to do it is Capo Plaza, who, however, in "Cocaina" hits one of the most appalling verses in history ("tu sei babbo babbo mica Totò Riina"), achieving the impossible feat of annoying the listener even in a trap track. Emis Killa also gets the features wrong, therefore, bringing in two incurable (though skilled) chatterboxes like Vegas Jones and Gemitaiz in "Claro" (but what a drag the third verse in rap is) and 6ix9ine in "Dope 2," as if just throwing in a random bad American rapper would make your album "an international record."
Emis, you're a good nursery rhyme writer, in this album you've shown yourself to be a decent pop author, but the rap game is no longer for you. You speak different languages, follow different rules. You have irreconcilable eyes and ears. You cite "Gomorra" which has been passé since 2015, you make punchlines with cocaine as if you were still twenty years old and outside the window it was still 2010 (have you ever heard about the Xanax alarm?), you compare the radios that don’t play you to Donald Trump, without deeply questioning why they don't play you. You're rather good, but to appeal to the kids you want to reach today, you need a few things that you don't have and can't manage to have. Starting with age, the one necessary to understand certain music and genuinely know how to reproduce it.
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