You can have millions of young followers, you can exalt them in the use of weapons and drugs, and still be considered by judges as an artist to be respected, because propagating that lifestyle is attributable to your “expressive choices”. And never mind if your followers take you seriously. It is not the trapper’s fault if the violence of the urban outskirts has his music and his words as a soundtrack.
One of the best-known names in the Italian trapper universe, Zaccaria Mouhib, known as Baby Gang, twenty-three years old, was pulled out of prison in the name of freedom of expression. Who, to tell the truth, had ended up in prison not for a crime of opinion but for a brutal act of blood, a shootout in front of a nightclub against a rival gang: he and his friend and colleague Simba La Rue were sentenced to five years and two months in prison, the sentence defines their selfies at the scene of the crime as “archaic hunters who had themselves portrayed next to lifeless animal prey” to impress the girls.
Pending the appeal, Baby Gang had been granted house arrest. And from here, in April, to promote her new album, he published an image on his Instagram profile in which he points a gun at the camera, leaning on bags full of marijuana. “Both the weapon and the drugs were fake,” his defenders now say. But for the Court of Appeal, the message sent to three million followers with those photos was still true. And Baby Gang had been sent back to prison. From his cell she had claimed her right of expression, the photos had to be “read in light of their symbolic and artistic meaning” and had “the sole purpose of emphasizing the charisma of the Baby Gang trapper”. Poetic license, in short. Even if the young man in real life doesn’t differ much from the image he conveys: in the meantime, a complaint for another wounding and one for the attack on the police during the filming of a video have been added to the conviction for the shooting in the nightclub. Baby Gang is in fact one of the undisputed protagonists of the permanent feud between rival bands of musicians, widely reported in the investigations of the Milanese prosecutor Francesca Crupi. In short, in her case it is difficult to glimpse that distinction between artistic image and real life that was taken for granted in the literature of the past.
The judges also took into account the criminal context in which Baby Gang operates and his judicial curriculum in April when sending him back to prison after the publication of the video. Yesterday the Review Court (the same one that had already freed Simba La Rue a few days ago despite the “repeated violations” and the “total inability of self-control” which had also sent him back to prison) also released Baby Gang from his cell: when he he had been granted house arrest and was authorized to work, say the new judges, and even the images posted on Instagram are ultimately part of his job. «These are contents – the magistrates admit – which on the one hand testify negatively, since they at least denote that the accused never intended to distance himself and indeed seems to want to continue to nourish an image of himself as that of an inserted subject in an illicit lifestyle.” But “in the specific case they appear to be attributable to the expressive choices of the accused within the scope of the work activity which he was authorized to carry out”.
It is a complete success of the defensive line of the musician’s lawyers, Niccolò Vecchioni and Jacopo Chiappetta, who when the judges brought their client back to San Vittore accused them of not understanding his language, attributing to the magistrates «a moralistic and values” against Baby Gang ei
his friends “because they are considered emblems of two social phenomena that are particularly hated today, namely that of the so-called ‘baby gangs’ and trap music” which “borrows the use of bloody expressions and images from rap”.
