This excerpt is taken from Thomas Gareth's article "Urban Music on a High in Europe" in the July 21, 2001 issue of Music & Media.
In Italy the general feeling about hip hop tends to be one of doom and gloom. The genre may have enjoyed a boom in the past but, talking to record executives, those days appear long gone. Alessandro Massara, general manager of V2 Records, goes so far as to describe the situation as "disheartening. Our personal experience has been pretty negative. Last year we ended our licensing agreement with Aria Cronica, the label owned by the duo Sottotono, as sales were so disappointing, and we recently decided not to continue our relationship with the group Atipici, for much the same reason. The situation regarding the market in general also looks pretty bleak."
Luca De Gennaro, head of talent and music at MTV, agrees: "There's a creative crisis. Acts which were producing great stuff in the past are either doing nothing or else have switched genres, if not professions. Take Neffa, who was part of the vibrant Bologna scene some years back. He's currently got a single in the charts, "La Mia Signorina" (My Little Lady)--it's a great song and a great video, but it has nothing to with hip hop or rap, being a more gentle form of R&B, while the one decent Italian hip hop magazine, "Aelle," has gone out of business. Actually it's coming back as a multi-genre publication, "Groove," which kind of says it all."
Gigio D'Ambrosio, head of programming at the CHR station Radio 101, is no more encouraging: "Hip hop did have a period of splendour when acts like Articolo 31 first burst onto the scene, but Italy has seen a mutation towards what I call "Hip pop," bands like Gemelli Diversi with an altogether softer sound. Given the cultural divide — Italy isn't exactly crawling with ghettoes — that's pretty inevitable." Stefano Senardi, head of the indie label NuN Entertainment, sees it as "a process of evolution. Hip hop is becoming contaminated with other types of music, as happened with rap."
And yet the majors seem to be sticking with hip hop acts. Sottotono, who haven't managed to repeat the 200,000 sales of their 1996 album Sotto l'Effetto Stono (WEA), appeared at this year's Sanremo Festival where, in true bad boy style, they assaulted an interviewer who raised doubts about the originality of their music. And, talking of bad boys, Eminem's last album sold 200,000 copies in Italy for Universal, the label whose roster includes Jovanotti, the man who virtually introduced the rap/hip hop style to the country. Universal Italy's President, Piero La Falce, observes that "Nowadays Italian youngsters tend to be more interested in American acts, rather than local repertoire. Italy doesn't really have a hardcore tradition. I don't think there really was a hip hop boom in this country, so much as a period of fortunate popularity."