Mecna
Lungomare Paranoia

You leave Milan when it's dark, there's fog and it's cold. At the semi-deserted station, you board the carriage that smells of brakes and sweat with earphones in your ears, with zero desire to spend the next eight hours on the train. Destination Foggia, where you were born and raised and where, now that you're thirty, you never want to set foot again.
On the window, you see your face reflected, with your forehead pressed against the glass and that reddish beard that no one likes but you don't care. Outside, you see Italy rushing by, the plain, various stations where only a few night travelers like you loiter, groups of kids with spray cans, and homeless people sleeping on freezing metal benches. At a certain point, at the height of Pesaro, there it is. The sea stretches out before you. A still and deserted seaside promenade that will accompany you for the rest of the journey. It is the Lungomare Paranoia.

Mecna had disappeared. Once the promotional tour for the previous album (Laska, from 2015) ended, he had completely left out social media and contact with fans from his life. He immersed himself in writing new pieces, which he wanted to become the truest, the most real, the most sincere of his career as a rapper. Last January 13th, here he is again, surprisingly. The album is out, he writes on social media, I hope you like it. It's the album I have composed with the most freedom, he writes to all the people who have loved and followed him since the beginning, in the sense that he didn't set any limits on topics and sounds.
And indeed, Lungomare Paranoia really sounds like that, honest and sincere and without any limits. It's an album by Mecna, but the one speaking in the tracks is Corrado. "I shoot another 200 kilometers and go / where I left smiles the last time I was there / where I'm no longer Mecna but Corrado" he says in Vieni Via.
In the twelve tracks of the album, all the insecurities, fears, and paranoias of Mecna can be seen. It's his story of an ordinary guy, alien to the clichés of Italian rappers full of tattoos and womanizing. In 71100 (which is the old ZIP code of Foggia), Mecna anthropomorphizes his hometown, and dialogues with it. He opens up to it, wondering "How is it that we don't hear from each other anymore?" By leaving Foggia, Corrado found his path, shaped his adult life. "In the end, I found the way / in places where perhaps I had never been / I'm leaving".
The insecurity and fragility of Corrado/Mecna are recurring topics in many of the album's tracks. In Labirinto, he talks about how not following others' advice created obstacles too high to jump over, which he still struggles to overcome.
In the single Non Serve, the story of a young girl is narrated, who does everything to get into the jet-set and make quick money. The rapper's words are sharp: "You trade photos on Snapchat hoping someone calls / as long as he's famous, no one knows why / even if he's not the artist, but even the driver is fine by you / as long as he's in the circle, come, you can enter the circle".
The Corrado of today, solitary and not at all fond of parties, navigates the words of Buon Compleanno, the final track of the album. He has never liked being the center of attention, being the protagonist of a party, and being surrounded by other people. And still, despite touring Italy for his concerts and having to in some sense "bare himself," to show his private life to others, he still feels extremely embarrassed. Loneliness, distance is in his nature, in his way of being.

In this third album, with dark and melancholic beats, Mecna writes spontaneously, puts himself in all the words of every single track. He does it as an "anomalous" rapper, far from the spotlight, far from models, reality shows, and squabbles with politicians on social media.
In "Lungomare Paranoia", Mecna is simply Corrado, a boy with a normal life who listens repeatedly to albums by Frank Ocean and Drake, and with the normal "paranoias" that we all have in everyday life.
It's an album that for this very reason grabbed me right away, involved and moved me. A rap album even for those (like me) who do not love rap.