Guè Pequeno
Il ragazzo d'oro

Tomorrow, Guè Pequeno's new album is coming out, so it seems like a good opportunity to revisit his debut. "Il ragazzo d'oro", released in early summer 2011, probably received less attention than it deserved at the time. It was somewhat seen as a lighthearted hiatus, a temporary exercise in style during a break from the Club Dogo project. Those who had the foresight to give it a thorough listen discovered a valid work full of pain; while those who dismissed it, partly because it was a rapper's album (and therefore rightly) and partly out of snobby pride (wrongly), have, as of today in 2018, every right to bear the weight of shame for having been such a genuine idiot.

Whether it's a street album, a mixtape, or a fully-fledged album, "Il ragazzo d'oro" is a work that can still give you chills. Yes, hold on, I'll say it now: there's some crappy music in here, but the heights are high enough not to let us see it.

So, take half the tracklist and throw it in the toilet along with the albums of Afterhours and Verdena. Reduce everything to the essentials. The title-track is a masterpiece, with a delirious Caneda and a Guè already projected into 2015: trap before you. Ti frego all'ultimo, Benny Blanco / Lattte macchiato? No, thanks, plain. "Il Blues Del Perdente (6 Gradi di Separazione)" is a rap song written as God intended, so theoretically it should suck, but hey, it's actually beautiful. The two "XXX", parts 1 and 2, softcore and hardcore, are not as crappy as they seemed at the time, at least not entirely: the one with Baby K is surprisingly cute, in the other one there's Vacca who is a mental case. "Pillole" is obsessive, turbulent, visceral: a journey into the crap, into depression when the glimmer of light is only represented by some pills mixed haphazardly when paranoia takes over your brain.

"Big!" seems to me to be a posse track, something for a student council representative at a technical school for surveyors: in other words, the translation in the form of a rap rant of a much more suitable "whatever". "Da grande" does better, first of all, because it makes grande rhyme with grande, then because it makes you cry, because if you have a bit of a heart and are not blinded by the rhetoric of Real Music, you can empathize with the pain of a new thirty-year-old overwhelmed by restlessness and guilt for the huge mistakes made so far.

In short, there's a good chunk of everyone in this album, so you better take off that Joy Division t-shirt (which by now will smell of chemical waste) and listen to it. Come on, it's not too late yet.