Just to clarify: when I spoke in the editorial office about my discovery of the Wu-Tang clan – one of Paola Zukar’s favorite hip-hop groups, manager of Fabri Fibra, Marracash, Madame – the looks of my colleagues oscillated between paternalistic affection and the poorly concealed reprimand. And there I understood: I really lacked the basics of the musical genre.
A genre that today has become so popular as to be (almost) invasive, but which is still too often looked at with a certain air of condescension. For example, from me. That WAS me. Paola Zukar changed me. If I ever succeed, I would like to be able to transfer even just a modicum of the enthusiasm that she transmitted to me.
For me it was the epiphany, for her it was the African American boyfriend she had in Washington in the late ’80s and who introduced her to the genre. A genre that won her over for that feeling of revenge, “of feeling cool even with little” contained in her DNA.
Then you know how things are going, you digress before finding your way again. Curiously, one of his digressions took her to Switzerland, to the Canton of Zug, to teach Italian.
Who knows what we would be talking about now, if Paola Zukar had not accepted a return proposal which at the time was not very attractive, due to its intrinsically precarious and uncertain character: going to work in the newly founded (by a friend) magazine dedicated to hip -hop Aelle, in his Genoa. It was the ’90s and the popularity of hip-hop (from which rap derives) was not exactly what it is today: “it was an elitist thing, there wasn’t even the internet, which would have favored its diffusion” underlines Paola.
It was elitist and after all it had to remain elitist, at least for a while. “Every time something becomes fashionable it becomes a little distorted, especially because people approach it who are not genuinely interested in that thing, but are interested in being there where ‘success’ is. In the 90s there was an intention to protect the genre and it was right because at the time it could really be tattered. But it could also have imploded and remained a small, niche thing. If it has grown and not imploded it is because it was told well, translated well, codified well – as I tried to do in my work and as the first who ventured into this terrain tried to do: Fibra, Marra, Guè , Club Dogo. There was a moment of rethinking at the end of the nineties. We asked ourselves where we were going and what we should do to avoid imploding.”
The rest is history. Rap today, duly refined, has come to tread the national-popular stage par excellence, that of Sanremo.
“As the Americans say: you have to be careful what you wish for, because it might come true! After all, it is the Italian music festival and today we cannot help but say that Italian music is strongly represented for the new generations by rap, by rhymes, by that way of doing things” she underlines. And what is left today of that idea of revenge for one’s origins, of the idea that one can feel “cool” with little? Is rap still uncomfortable or disruptive?
“This is a question that everyone has asked themselves, fortunately it still has this disruptive force and has grown with its audience. If today you go to the live concerts of Marracash, Fabri Fibra or Guè there are also parents with their children, with children. It is true that the issues have evolved. Take Marracash for example, with the last two albums: Person And Us, them, the others they deal with social issues with almost psychological implications, or rather without almost… psychological ones! Narcissism or this great theme of division/inclusion. They are adult themes, but younger kids are very interested in hearing something that concerns them and something that keeps them connected to current events, to reality.”
And it is on the terrain of belonging that – for me – my definitive abandonment to rap took place: rap continues to be uncomfortable, because between cycles, contaminations, “hustler” slips, it continues to weave the network of belonging and to reflect on the concept of belonging.
“There is a beautiful song by Marracash, which is called I belong. And he tells us viscerally, in a very sanguine way, what belonging means for kids today. It’s an even more difficult question today, when you are or can be all about social media, you can reinvent yourself into a completely new person, then your avatar can go to boundless countries, you can sell yourself as rich, as famous, as intelligent. In my opinion, belonging is the litmus test of the person, that is, of the true identity that you really want. In Italy and around the world, many kids from the suburbs – who struggle to find themselves – have instead finally found belonging in rap.”
Then as now, rap offers a way of being a community and finding your place in the world.
