I was listening the other day Carsan album by Lucio Dalla – the one with inside Nuvolariso to speak – from 1976, which opens with a piece, Interview with the Lawyer, which presents Gianni Agnelli with the account of FIAT’s excessive power at the time, also making him pass off, if it goes well, as a fool. It may be the parallel with the situation of Stellantis, but I wondered if today, in Italy, records like this no longer come out, of social denunciation, against the system. And I also wondered, if so, where to look for them. In rap? Well, his hyperrealism is often considered a testimony to what our country is like, but the feeling is that he is doing the rounds and bordering, at times, on a lack of depth. In today’s singer-songwriters then? Well, with some exceptions, like Brunori Sas, they too seem to be retreating from their commitment, unlike their ancestors, including satire à la Dalla or Rino Gaetano. Then without warning, last Friday, Marracash published Peace is over. And the dynasty continued again.

A snapshot of current events

Of course, eras and sensibilities change: the Seventies were a season of great collective debates, protests, cultural revolutions, it was even more normal that there were courageous artists like Dalla Interview with the Lawyer and that, if necessary, they were not too marginalized by the system. At least not to the extent that Marracash talks about and attributes to himself these days: he came out as a surprise – but not communicating is also communicateok – with a record without feat., easy choruses, shadow authors like much of today’s pop and rap, limited by the need to go to Sanremo and the various summer broadcasts; if anything, he has written a personal work, in which he digs inside himself and lays himself bare and, on the other hand, talks about what is around him. Songs like The stragglers lost or Factotumthe first on the metropolitan desolations of today and the other on chronic precariousness, are a deadly cross-section of what it means to live in Italy in 2024. And they have a greater anti-system weight than their ancestors might have had at the time, because for promotion and other reasons they don’t make friends or take shortcuts, and they demonstrate how difficult it is today to be the “singer-songwriters of the past”. In the sense: only Marracash can do it.

Obviously the use of this word, “songwriter”, triggers panic in all factions, and the Barona rapper himself has only begun to familiarize us now, with an album in which for example he samples Florence by Ivan Graziani. In reality, the parallel had already been raised, for example, by the beautiful documentary The new Genoese school (Prime Video), which linked Tedua and the Drilliguria with the various Gino Paoli and Umberto Bindi, but it was the hip hop environment itself that proved hostile to certain comparisons. In a certain sense, Marracash was already a “songwriter” since Personthe album of the rebirth of 2019, the strictly personal one, which together with the following one Us, them, the others (2021) and this makes up a trilogy. But if in the first it was more about looking inside with ruthlessness and in the second it was about looking around, yes, with equal cynicism, this third and final chapter overlaps the two levels: Marracash evaluates himself as a citizen of the world, as an artist and as an individual, he puts himself in the circle of sinners, but describes around him an Italy and a world torn apart by struggles and privileges.

Beyond rap

Getting stuck on a genre, at this point, makes no sense. Marracash is now on a planet of its own, in connection both with Gaetano and Dalla and with rap and its language. The style, in fact, is always raw and aggressive, therefore competitive hip hop, but also critical towards the presumed reference scene and its commercial contradictions, slapped in the opener Power slap. More often, what works is his own description of himself as a strong man who is not afraid of emotions, and playing with certain stereotypes: Troi*for example, is a potential hit, with a swear-word refrain that could become a catchphrase, if only on a second reading it talks about Marracash who calls himself a “t…a” alone for being so promiscuous in love, reflecting on why, for males, an equivalent term does not exist. In short, the image of the rapper full of women who returns, not denied but overturned: it is in this space that Marracash’s entire character lies.

This is enough to understand that he plays in a different championship compared to many colleagues. Just as this album, with its depth, stratification, quotes, the continuum that envelops the songs and links them with the previous ones, is truly anti-system. And as such, it requires an equally “non-aligned” attitude to be truly appreciated: time, care, attention. We will see the public, in turn involved in the criticisms of Peace is overlike everyone, how he will respond.