Now that it has come out While Los Angeles burns by Fabri Fibra, his eleventh studio album, three years after the previous one Chaos and driven by the individual What a taste there is With Thirteen Pietro, which will be discussed at least for the summer, many rappers of the new generation encourage him as a teacher. They say: if it hadn’t been for fiber, which in 2026 will turn fifty years, they would not have taken a microphone in his hand, in Italy, and made hip hop. Instead we saw how it ended. But Fibra also had his masters: he willingly underline that he is “son” of Neffa – his first album, Turb youth (2002), was born from a series of bases discarded by the same Neffa, a pioneer of the genre in the decade before and which in the meantime had turned to pop, as in a handover – but the real reference character, at least to get to the public, has always been Eminem.

The former Italian Slim Shady

It was 2004, in fact, when the name of fiber really began to circulate: a record had to do with it, Mr. sympathyhis second, in debt with the historic US rapper, who at the time had already left an indelible furrow in the genre. Always masks it was, whether they were Slim Shady or precisely Mr. sympathy. And the recipe was the same: a deadly technique and ruthless rhymes, which partially made social satire and partially paid down names and surnames directly, taking it with anyone, saying free obscenity and bad things and cloaking everything with a sort of basic “bad luck”; You want by the “dissociating” tone, so you never know if the protagonist is or does it, the pieces of eminem and fiber, in the same way, were presented as the delusions of an excluded from the tour, of a desperate looking for revenge, not a winner Wannabe. Here they are: then: some madmen, of the disadvantaged who always seemed on the point of exhaustion. Hypnotic.

The effect of Eminem, in the United States and then even by us, had already been that of a meteorite in a glass, here Fibra would take longer to be understood – to make it, that is, that its provocation was at least acceptedincluding as part of the game, and the outcome of the lawsuit with Valerio Scanu demonstrates it – but then, in fact, the mainstream revolution of the Italian rap, from its album, would have started Betrayal (2006) up. Clear, the long wave – even if only cultural – is not comparable, Eminem is a divinity. But it is not, here, aged very well: in the latest releases it has often seemed out of focus, in search of the scandal in a system in which it has stopped giving scandal, remaining mostly an idol of the millennials, while the rest of music – and rap – went on. Instead fiber – and if you hear While Los Angeles burns We realize this – you updated and above all, in its own way, it was disturbing.

A disturbing artist, fortunately

Let’s put it this way: Fibra is still ruthless, only that it has changed goals and ways. On the one hand, there is all the cucuzzaro of Italian music, targeted already from the beginning with Poisoned (pretext) – who samples that of Guccini, in a rediscovery of the songwriter who already work the peers Marracash and Guè – who brings a little the sums of the contradictions of being a rapper today. But among the various songs of the lot there is no escape at all, from the Hip Hop himself evidently expired to the market itself, a great decline in which he himself gets to the center. “Everyone in search of the summer single: even I do not make fun of” Rabpa, and it is a brilliant way – in which, however, it has always distinguished himself – to pop: selling himself, that is, as a victim of the system, by returning the dear, old doubt for which it is not known if there is or makes us. If in doubt, dancing pieces like this, with a summer vocation as the same Stupidon our sick relationship with social media, it is beautiful and alienating (and it had also been in the past, in the great successes of ours, from Except you to I was thinking about you).

But the whole second part of the album is also alienating, less as a ranking and more introspective, where Fiber emerges in what Eminem, to say, has never been able to fully manage: overcome the anger and the desire to be noticed initial, to tell under another lens his past life and the problems that led him so far, from the difficult situation at home to bullying immediately as a child. All we know about fiber-private we know from the songs. And what songs. The result, of course, is a fist in the stomach, from the crime news of Everything will be fine – Two stories of suicide of two teenagers, such Anna and Marco, to resume Lucio Dalla – a My fathera dedication to the parent who is an open peephide on his family, and in which Fibra does not offer any forgiveness, on the contrary, to those who have put it into the world. Or, on the other side, Sona surreal dedication “to the son I will never have”, and which can be understood as a piece for all the very young listening. With a certain bitterness, there is a new fiber, which tells others how to stay in the world. And the fact that then, in the end, we are not used to hearing songs like this, well, this is also why it is a special rapper. One of those who arrived where Eminem did not succeed.