Sangue Misto
SXM

"Feel how it sounds..."

It sounds underground ("Lo straniero"), it sounds experimental ("Fattanza blu"), it even sounds acid jazz in Giglielmo Pagnozzi's alto sax ("La notte") which seems like a counterpoint to the trumpet of the last Miles Davis, the one from "Doo-Bop" (1992). "SXM" succeeds in this; it allows you to associate the music of New Orleans with what many mistakenly consider a genre "minor": rap.

We are now in a period of sell-out, everything glitters around rap, even the bullets have a golden coating. Amidst butts, boobs, and big cars, people show-off but do not express. Neffa, Deda, and DJ Gruff, however, had plenty to say. Emerging from the circuit of social centers, equipped with a cultural baggage that often manifests in a stylized but self-ironic "antagonism" as rarely heard (nothing to do with the crude anger that often emerges, for example, in the early 99 Posse), the three produced in 1994 this small gem of Italian underground, structured as a panorama of states of alienation, from social to sensory alienation. And it is precisely when they dip their rhymes and beats into the resin of their favorite plant that Sangue Misto give their best, demonstrating the fact (as Neffa's career later clarified) that more than social discomfort itself, the three best represent the everyday situations of a playful "counter" life.

At this level, what is perhaps the best track of the album, "La porra", fits in, almost seven minutes of ode to hemp, where the musical influences of the three are mixed by Gruff in a production of surprising musical depth, with Neffa and Deda's lyrics rising and falling in metric spaces with the Delta-9 spaceship (or a mind-altering compound, delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol); all embellished, in the finale, by the solo of Antonio "Etti Panetti" Gabriele's guitar.

Ultimately, "SXM" perhaps better than any other album represents the young Italy of the '90s, which looks to the streets of America but does not forget that our small strip of land in the heart of the Mediterranean, for better or worse, belongs to another history.