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Turning forty is that thing that, once you reach it, makes you say that the Cure is the best thing ever. It's obviously bullshit to believe that, not so much because Robert Smith's makeup is just cocaine, but because, in the end, what does it mean to be a great, indestructible musician? Everything flows and nothing dies, or everything dies and nothing flows; these are the two options. Certainly, the meaning of something like music moves along the winding paths of eras and especially of age: its ups and downs, its joys, and its world champion regrets. What does it mean to be a great musician, sweating over guitars and drum skins, when two guys more or less your age come along and, just by holding a microphone in one hand and an iPhone connected to Instagram in the other, open up your ass with rhymes?
A musician who is even slightly serious today should tackle the rap field. The rest makes absolutely no sense, especially in Italy. However, the problem remains age, because after a while, you can't do certain things anymore. Marracash and Guè Pequeno are two who understood this well and had the luck to already be within the Great Mechanism before Sfera and Ghali started turning it. “Santeria,” their only duo album, is the crossroads of Italian rap: it takes the old stuff ("Money," "Senza Dio") and transforms it into bricks, takes the new cement ("Salvador Dalì," "Scooteroni") and keeps it fluid like magma descending from the mountain and invading the city. Other gems are “Erba & WiFi,” “Insta Lova,” and of course “Nulla Accade,” but if you ever listen to this album, you will certainly be able to appreciate “Senza Dio” and “Cantante Italiane” and their wordplay that makes the common people smile (bye-bye Roger Waters fans), so that at your next gathering you can say “the other day I listened to some rap that was cool, I think you might like it too! it wasn't the usual sex and drugs stuff, but it poked fun at Emma and Malika Ayane who totally deserve it!!!”
“Santeria,” like Joker, cannot be understood by those who no longer have the fire of anarchy within them. And it won’t be a damn T-shirt with a circled A or a pig-blimp to reignite it from the ashes. Nothing happens by accident, Marra and Gué would say. Not even the fact that the only decent music in Italy today is made by musicians in the non-canonical sense of the term. It all seems so clear and transparent to me.
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