Sfera Ebbasta
Rockstar

So, even before starting, I suggest a monumental fuck you to all the reactionary gossipers who dismiss the new Italian rap outright. Actually, Maurizio Cattelan has already thought about it (albeit with other recipients), so if you are old conservatives or blind hip-hop purists, I advise you to position yourselves in front of the middle finger placed outside the Milan Stock Exchange and let yourselves be hit by all its disdain. The new trap school has only done good things for our music. It has rejuvenated it, removed the New Era cap from the heads of thirty-something rappers who act like horny teenagers, and above all, it has gotten rid of said rappers and their rhetoric of street music, engaged, proletarian. Rap, while not excluding melancholy and seriousness, must also be fresh, arrogant, politically incorrect, nonchalant. But also creative, and the likes of Ghali, Tedua, Rkomi, Izi, and Sfera Ebbasta have really turned the idea of Italian rap upside down for the better in less than a year, bringing, for the first time, a sound with an international flavor.

The triumph of style over technique and swag over content, however, does not justify the production of frivolous music. Sfera Ebbasta's new album, Rockstar, is a frivolous, silly, weakly provocative album. Sfera enjoys narrating his life as a "rockstar" (because today's rapper would be yesterday's rockstar) filtering everything through an aesthetic made of little hearts, pink furs, little kisses, bunnies, syrups, trap-boys, candy-flavored opiates. Enough, come on. The Dark Polo Gang has already done this, bringing everything to levels of lightness and ignorance much more suited to what their character is.

Sfera had never been like this. For heaven's sake, he was never lacking a carefree spirit, but he was also the good guy from the bad neighborhoods, the one with a difficult story, the one with a burning desire for redemption, the one with a certain taste for well-done pop songs. The previous album, the self-titled Sfera Ebbasta, didn't fail to flaunt the pleasures of success in our faces, but it maintained a certain conscious vein in speaking of what life was like before making it and of what life was like for those who, unlike him, would never make it, trapped in the suffocating entryways of the Milanese suburbs. Everything took shape in nocturnal, shadowy, and even deep songs ("Notti" and "B.R.N.B.Q." above all).

In the new album, however, Sfera has completely bowed to the comforts of the noncommittal song, revealing a significant regression compared to the artistic maturity shown in previous works. Some say it couldn't have been otherwise that it would have been hypocritical on his part to talk about anything else other than his life as an aesthete. This is probably true, and the real reason for my disappointment is not that. The major flaw of this record lies instead in its stubborn insistence on riding sounds that are now outdated: the positively taken trap has aged for some time, and quite quickly too, but this album proudly reproposes it as if convinced of bringing unmatched freshness. No, just because Rolling Stone says that 2018 will be the year of trap doesn't mean you should believe it. We're not in 2016, and perhaps it’s worth remembering how Sfera and his producer Charlie had already written the definitive trap song, "XDVR," chantingly pounding and hallucinatory just right, way back in 2014, well ahead of everyone. Four years later, the two are still here, offering us a recycled and watered-down version of something they had already shown to handle with greater finesse.

Aside from the cloud-pop and beautiful melody of the title track, the Latin influences of the already known "Tran Tran," the excellent drive of "Sciroppo" and "Cupido" (with a feature by Quavo that, however, leaves much to be desired because it seems so forced), the rest of the album offers us music we could have done without. A pity, because there were the premises for a better work. Instead, we find ourselves facing a rather unattractive album born old, which instead of launching Sfera as the credible new face of Italian pop, presents him as the trapper skilled at exploiting a trend he himself helped create (and the staggering sales will prove it). He can afford it, you might say; it’s permissible to expect more, I say.