It’s been less than a year since I met Baby Gang in a community on Lake Como. At the time (!) He was the next big thing on the scene and his consecration album was about to be released, Innocent. Today he is the most listened to Italian rapper abroad, he has climbed the charts of 30 countries with more than 1.5 billion total streams, and – thanks to an increasingly vampire and increasingly accelerated record market – he is already ready with a new album The Angel of Evil, whose specific weight according to the canons of trap business is measured before the release by calculating the value of the featurings: here there are practically all the big names, from Marracash to Geolier, passing through Lazza, Tedua (these two even in the same piece) , Sfera Ebbasta, Gué, Rkomi, Fabri Fibra. Many, too many, at risk of indigestion.
And the effect is that, net of Zaccaria’s talented flow: a bit like the PSG of the sheikhs, or Cristiano Ronaldo in the Saudi championship, today’s rap is, due to excess supply and demand, increasingly pimped, conformist and predictable, Playstation or ChatGPT stuff. Baby Gang raps on a script already written, the themes are always the usual gangsta from the Italian provinces in a neorealist key: weapons, drugs, cops, revenge, respect, anger, money. You certainly can’t blame him, it’s his world, and he hasn’t even had time to translate it into the future with new experiences, having been locked up between house arrest and studying until now, and having churned out almost a single or a featuring in drums every two weeks for a year now. But there is something to save, beyond the certain heights it will reach in streaming.
First of all the naturalness in rapping on every type of beat, from classic hip hop to Millionaire to the bachata of Madamefrom the Latin trap of Alone at the EDM zarra of Social workeralternating very dark flows with darker ones mellow and arabesque. However, there are only two pieces on the album which are worth spending words on, due to the fact that they are distortedly real, almost like successful manufacturing defects of the current rap game: the first is Free, a sort of stadium anthem/choir for convicts (“whoever doesn’t jump with us is an infamous”) which immediately brings to mind the current violence of the agents of Beccaria, the juvenile prison where Baby Gang was a guest. There is all the street poetics of the rapper, a victim full of society’s anger (“I hate Christmas greetings, I hate birthday greetings, Santa Claus wasn’t there for Christmas, there wasn’t a gift on the birthday”), spread on an easy-to-grab commercial beat as if it were the summer catchphrase of those who never experience summer (“They treat us badly, I’m in isolation and I just want to sing”). The second is pure turbo folk trap for a village party, it’s simply titled Italian and has the complicity of Niko Pandetta: it is grandiosely tacky, with hints of neomelodic, and a text of disarming basicity (“Italian screams and screams at the stadium in Marseille… he screams like an ultras, and to those who don’t understand we answer Suca!”) .
Perhaps this is the future, a gigantic Supreme branded sausage festival with fans ready to face police charges. We hope not, but out of desperation we embrace this urban and out-of-the-box dystopia of the new Baby Gang, now an “arch-Italian”: it is his world that we have to deal with today and we cannot delegate its story to webzines for teenagers or to the right-wing moralizing mantra of the Rete 4 talk shows that would like to get rid of Baby and all the second generation trappers by decree.
The only one on the scene so far to bring Zaccaria to the dimension he deserves has been Fabri Fibra, calling him to rap in the re-release of his single In Italy, precisely to represent a new part of society that the rest of the cultural scene still ignores or downgrades to trashy entertainment for mischief. The artist was unable to do the same with his new album: perhaps he could have allowed himself to gather around himself the best of a new scene from below, less known than Blanco or Sfera, but which would have better underlined what the its success represents today, far from Sanremo, talent and summer hits, “by the people for the people” as happened to Club Dogo more than a decade ago. The hope we can make for him is to go straight on his path without accepting the advice of record companies who only want to raise cash, giving up next time on producing a monster album of 16 tracks and concentrating on the evolution of the story, alone, as he does in the first pieces of the album – War And Bloods & Crips – before abandoning oneself to the compromise of featuring and useless attempts at songs (of all the most useless is Gangster serenade with Rocco Hunt). If it happens, it won’t be Baby who will go to Sanremo, but Sanremo who will go to him.
What the story of this boy – today under house arrest without being able to do interviews for promotion and play his music at the Forum – shows us, more than the album, is that rap as a social lift is a huge rip-off, a flop due to an underestimation of potential: the elevator has been broken for some time now, we have to find new paths, preferably in a group, and Baby Gang has all the potential to trace its own.
