Fbear in mind, rappers, those artists who have therefore chosen the word where their fellow singers have chosen the notes, to express their art, are often the least generous when it comes to being interviewed. For more than one reason, I imagine. On the one hand due to a lack of trust in those who would find themselves asking them questions, the fact that fifty years after the birth of the genre is still seen as something new, difficult to understand, almost bizarre says a lot about how effectively rap hasn’t been fully metabolized yet, perhaps not even deciphered by the mainstream, I am talking about communicators rather than the public, on the other the awareness of the uselessness of this type of communication for those who, after all, already have a huge, infinite mass audience at their feet, and have not therefore you need a sounding board for your words, something that highlights their power and that induces any audience to take an interest in your songs. In practice, rappers are allowed to have commercials, because these often end up being interviews that are almost always supported, they are useless, if anything they would be useful to newspapers, which thanks to the presence of these names would have more readers or clicks. Thus a sort of loop is generated, whereby those who are incapable of understanding the world of rap are essentially cut off from it, continuing to look at it as an inexplicable phenomenon, the “new” and “different” that is so scary. For this reason, not only for this but also for this, the arrival in bookstores of a volume like Explicit lyricspublished by Mondadori, not exactly by Shake or Odoya, so to speak, fanzine, so they like to say edited by Paola Zukar and Claudio Cabona, which brings together a large part of the rap scene and not just Italians, there to talk about censorship, is something that should be celebrated with seven days of banquets, or that should at least be approached with curiosity and attention. Because, putting aside the naive idea of the fanzine, Explicit texts, whose subtitle is “New styles of censorship“, it is to all intents and purposes a book, certainly a book with beautiful illustrations and photos, anomalous if by book we mean only those with pages inside which, at least formally, all resemble each other, but still a book, because, I was saying, Texts explicit is to all intents and purposes the most generous overview you will find on the world of rap from here for a long time, and even for a long time ago, as well as being a sort of documentary/document on everything that is communication and information, well, today, year of the Lord 2024.
