The turning point, perhaps, was the release of Personthe album of the return to the scenes of Marracash, in 2019. From there, the Italian rap took another course: no more “young” music and for “young”, whatever it means, but mature genre that can speak to many, beyond the fences and inside the most reactionary environments, as evidenced by the Targa Tenco – the fief of the song of the author, for better or for worse – always in Marracash for the next We, them, the others (2021), which has definitively consecrated it as an artist “for all”, other than. New intellectual, almost songwriter, who knows. In any case, the key was simple: to leave behind not a certain brazenness, which in hip hop takes, but the cialtroneria, towards songs that resembled more and more to analysis sessions, personal and social, however intimate. If rap, as it is true, remains the best tool to investigate society – for immediacy, ferocity, adherence to the truth – it is worth investigating those who, that society, live it, to remove free hyperrealism (the machines, women, the drugs flaunted, because “our children are so”) and the search for easy hit, and to do introspection.

A mature genre

It was fair and physiological, at that point, that to begin were the ultra-quarantine of the Giro, by Fabri Fibra, Salmo and Guè, always deadly in finding according to readings to his dissolved lifestyle. Less obvious was, here, that he was Ernia, that is, Matteo Profession, born in 1993 from Milan. If nothing else, for generational reasons. Many will know him for Superclassicalworkhorse of 700 thousand copies sold in full Covid, others will have heard of it for Good nightthe piece with which in 2022 he had told the abortion seen by the couple’s father, already more intimate and in some ways social. In 1978, ok, there was Venditti with Will be, But find it today, in pop, a song that addresses this theme – and this should already make us reflect on the importance of rap.

Sensitive and above all aware pen, grown in the myth of Guè – with which he shares the legacy, never hidden, of a small bourgeois who went down to the street, therefore not the usual story of public housing and redemption, but that of those who partially cut the roots but remain, however, “different” – and of the clubs Dogo all, hernia in the new album For money and for lovereleased today, shows better than all where the hip hop itself is going.

The standards got up, the sensitivity of the public also: records like Milan Angels Of Sfera Ebbasta and Shiva, a pure trap that seems made with artificial intelligence, they still manage to speak to a large nucleus of even loyal, but the genre to grow needs something else, especially precisely of a ability to analyze and look inside, in short of literary thickness. Ernia, even more than Tedua, is among the first of her leverage to get on these steps, with a job in which the giant stigmades are in some way brought – we speak, in the end, of an ultra -popular rapper, which performs in the buildings, full – to play differently, starting from the minimal, even piano and voice productions, of Charlie Charles, architect of the revolution of the 2016 trap, Ebbasta in Ghali, evidently “raised” him too. In the United States, on this trail, there was Kendrick Lamar, who won a cleaning for the value of the texts: it is not that the level must be the same, of course, but at least try us, here, yes.

It will be then that Ernia is thirty years old, repeats in the interviews. It will be that he became a father. Or it will be that, in a broader sense, it is simply the right time for the scene. The fact is that, really, this is the album that best tells who is behind the generation of rapper today, those of thirty years precisely. There is everything: the family, the run -up towards the apprenticeship and hunger, but also the criticisms of the -musical system – from which he, however, does not feel foreign – and the sick relationship with the money, up to the sense of emptiness that involves success, summarized perfectly in the introduction of I remember. There are, here, texts with rhetorical figures, ruthless but also lucid, pungent, alarmFor An intimate story that – and this is the point – does not even make news, but confirms what the standards of Italian rap are today. The forty -year -olds did it first, now it is also up to the thirties.

Festivals, company parties, hosted in the disco: everything the singers do (but they don’t say)

The new songwriters?

And then there is Whyduet with Madame Shades, these explicitly social, between prisons, immigrants and anything else. Again: how much of this substance is, today, in pop by radio? How much of this goes to Sanremo? If you remove part of the songwriters, however an Indian reserve, and all the music more or less independent, still little, we are at the minimum terms. And instead in Hip Hop, between Fabri Fibra, Marracash and the same hernia, among others, the level is definitely another. Not to mention the very young Kid Yugi, not surprisingly in the guest in For money and for lovea living encyclopedia applied to the street story. For this reason it does not make sense to continue to consider hip hop as “non-musical”, indeed. If anything, it is a genre that is emancipating from the need for the hit, which is maturing and that, at the level of texts, for content and depth, puts meat on the fire as nobody. Woe to ignore it.