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International Herald Tribune

May 4, 2004

Italian rappers try to hang on

By Elisabetta Povoledo

Milan -- Except for the language, the Italian rapper Frankie Hi-Nrg MC's concert at Milan's Alcatraz club in mid-April didn't seem to differ much from its American counterparts. The music was pounding, the beats syncopated, records were scratched and sampled, words flowed like quicksilver.

Still, in his light blue tracksuit and outsize black frame eyeglasses that hid a slightly goofy expression, Frankie - always a politicized rapper - looked more like a ball boy for Italy's national soccer team than a musical public enemy. And his lyrics, though scurrilous, were never outright obscene.

Frankie's song "Rap Lament," off his latest recording, "Ero un autarchico" (I was self-sufficient), which is being plugged with a national tour, used a soccer metaphor to depict the Italian Republic. Parliament was a "crazy stadium," playing a championship with "two teams wearing identical uniforms."

Hardly your misogynistic "gangsta rap" anthem. But Frankie, a.k.a. Francesco Di Gesł, got the crowd riled up when he asserted that some TV stations had refused to play his song. "They think it's too disparaging," he said, "and small radios don't play it because they're afraid someone will say something. This is Italy."

Actually, anyone stumbling into the crowded concert hall - a breathing catalogue of popular American sportswear brands - might have thought this was the United States (or Germany or Japan), at least at first.

As far as fashion is concerned, hip-hop culture is making acolytes of many young Italians who have shunned made-in-Italy chic to enthusiastically embrace (sloppier) American trends.

"There's a lot of interest in fashion," agreed Daniel Marcoccia, managing editor of Groove magazine, Italy's only magazine dedicated to hip-hop, R&B and reggae, whose advertisers are mostly sportswear companies. "Rappers love to show their brands. Hip-hop is tied to gadgets."

These days, mainstream Italian rap is getting a lot of attention. But if hip-hop in the United States has become the voice for many disaffected and angry young men, in Italy it has tended to be less violent and certainly less misogynistic.

"Rappers are much nicer here," said Alberto Castelli, who manages the Roman rapper Piotta, the stage name of Tommaso Zanello. That was also true when politicized Italian rappers adopted traditional dialects like Neapolitan or Pugliese to lash out against such problems as the Mafia or southern Italy's high unemployment.

By American standards, where rap is a multimillion-dollar industry, Italy's homegrown edition has a tiny market, falling far short even of other European countries like Germany, and especially France, where hip-hop sales are second only to the United States. But low demand hasn't stopped the nation's aspiring rappers from turning to small independent labels to have their voices heard and hope for at least modest sales.

"Just call me the Puff Daddy of the poor," laughed Castelli, who also manages small record labels. "It's still an underground market, you'll sell a few thousand copies of a record at best." But Castelli says he believes that in the near future Italian rap will benefit both from the increased popularity of American rap and R&B here, as well as the move many rappers are making from the underground into the mainstream.

In March, Piotta and Frankie performed at the San Remo Song Festival, a schmaltzy televised pop music competition. "It's a promotional window that lets you reach millions of people," Castelli said. "Your three minutes during San Remo is like months of touring." Piotta, who competed at the festival, came in last. "That's O.K. It's better to come in last and maintain your credibility," Castelli said.

For years now, hip-hop culture has influenced many aspects of American society, including the visual arts. But here, it was only in the past few years that graffiti, for instance, made the jump from illegal street scrawl to popular art.

For most of April, Milan's central train station offered the exhibition "Now Underground," which featured the work of 45 graffiti artists from around the world. "This is like a Renaissance, I feel like it's coming," said Plank, one of the featured artists in the show, the third exhibition he had worked on in the past year. The first was sponsored by Dank shoes.

Near Naples, another graffiti-scrawled area, the region's administrators decided to offer painters an official venue to vent their creativity. Since December, crews of artists have been tacking the walls of the train stations along the Circumvesuviana, the railway that links all the towns at the base of Mount Vesuvius. About 40 stations will be decorated. In giving the writers the space and recognizing the "artistic value and the function of the drawings," the Campania regional government and the railway company hoped to "link the stations to their urban context." They also hoped to reduce vandalism.

"They could seen that this could develop into a project with a high social value," said Luca Borriello of Evoluzioni, a group that helped coordinate the project and is organizing the Italian hip-hop awards, which Borriello said would take place this summer. He said that Italian hip-hop was now entering its second generation, which saw a greater number of artists "professionalizing their passion" and so making it legitimate.

But some fans miss the days when Italian hip-hop was more interested in being Italian than in being part of a global phenomenon. Joseph Sciorra of Queens College's John D. Calandra Italian American Institute and the creator of www.italianrap.com, said that one of the problems "is that Italian hip-hop lost its focus." "Instead of being concentrated on the social life of everyday Italy," he added, "hip-hop began to copy the corporate American scene, with its focus on gangsta rap, which we know sold more to white kids in Middle America than it did to urban blacks.

Frankie Hi-Nrg agreed: "I have the impression that the influence of commercial American rap has dulled our version a lot. Hip-hop is worldwide and, depending on where you are, it brings out the essence of a place. So there's no reason to imitate the flavor and the feelings of another place. That's why I speak about things that I see as our problems. I expose our raw nerves."

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