Massimo Pericolo
Le Cose Cambiano

Rap is an urban, city, metropolitan genre, it feeds on a pseudo-cyberpunk landscape, certainly eager for sprawl.

But here, we are in the Woods...

Outside Milan, and away from the smog. From the traffic, the neon of vending machines, the Instagram lives of Corso Como, the double-parked cars, fashion weeks, lofts furnished with style and champagne, and those patches of grass preserved in asphalt frames with no-entry signs planted in the middle.

The relationship with the province for Massimo Pericolo (known in life as Alessandro Vanetti) is the driving force that pushes his thoughts beyond the pen.
A rapper who refused the connections, the lights, and the blaring noises of what has been the metropolis of rap for more than twenty years, to stay in his province.
What do the metropolis and the province have in common? Drugs and decay. Which... are the two main topics on which the structure of rap has historically been founded.
And so we've learned that you can do rap from the province too.
well, great, let's leave it at that.

Eh... no... the news deserves a few more lines, bear with me.
Because Massimo Pericolo is not just a name in today's rap scene. Massimo Pericolo is (or at least should be) THE name in today's rap scene.
His songs, in addition to being more or less all hits with respectable listening numbers, have the undeniable gift of creating empathy with the listener, which goes beyond "you and I are similar" and reaches where Italian music was incredibly strong in the past but had been missing for years: it reaches songwriting. "Eh, finally!" one might add: in a musical genre where the most characteristic feature is that the lyrics are not sung but spoken, for the artist to have an obsessive focus on writing, well maybe I'm biased, but it seems to me the bare minimum.
Let's be clear: rap lyrics have always been dense with original rhetorical figures, loud impactful phrases, and other delightful linguistic tricks, but all too often, all this translates into a linguistic game that manages to communicate the stereotypes of the genre and little else.

Massimo Pericolo goes further. and he goes further, perhaps, because he doesn't start with the others. he rejects Milan, cherishes the environment around him that shaped him, and remains himself.
His lyrics are his value universe filtered through rap, and not the value universe of rap told with his voice.
It's impossible not to notice.
And I don't think it's possible to separate this from the place where he lives.
Away from the influences of colleagues, trends, and times
"But he has the internet too, he's not out of this world"
Of course, he's not out of this world, but it's the physical environment around us that defines and perhaps even decides our mindset, the way we think, reason, and, in the end, also express ourselves.
That rap needed to shake off the city to discover its maturity is beautifully strange.
But then again, it's also strange that a twenty-five-year-old who went through prison and introduced himself to the greater public by burning his voter registration card is the one maturing the genre.
By the way, I remember the scandal about this at the time but... hasn't art always been about scandal? you can't just go on stage and whip it out: that was done fifty years ago. and... from a communication perspective, a burned voter registration card seems more eloquent to me than Jim Morrison’s manhood pulled out on stage.

In short, Massimo Pericolo, Alessandro Vanetti, Vane, the Lord of the Woods, or whatever you want to call him, knows the art world, I believe he doesn't fully realize it yet, but he knows it. And art, for its part, has kissed him on the forehead, but it's better if he doesn't discover this too quickly.

The album: well, it's the first self-produced one, so no one tells him how to do things in a way that would be more approachable for the public. and maybe 16 tracks are a bit too many. Musically speaking: it's songwriting. if you start discussing the music accompanying the songwriting, in my opinion, you've picked the wrong sport, but that's just a highly debatable personal opinion. which I have no desire to discuss. So:
QUESTION: How is it musically?
ANSWER: You have two ears, use them.

Four balls not five because, quoting one of his producers: "my favorite Massimo Pericolo album is the next one."

Ah, the bold parts were the only thing worth reading. I really like this guy and wanted to dedicate a wild and pyrotechnic review to him. as always, when I talk about what I really like, I can't come up with a damn thing... Porco BOOM what a nuisance.