Caparezza - Out of the rap tunnel

Caparezza has broken out of the cage. The one from "Prisoner 709", which went from being a diary of his phobias and personal crises to a ten-month, entirely sold-out tour. And now it's become a new record. "I wanted to seal this fortunate experience," he tells us in a wide-ranging interview, moving with ease and irony from music to politics, from an analysis of his personal evolution to a reflection on the new horizons of the web and Italian society.

Your "Prisoner 709" explored the theme of mental imprisonment. What are our cages today?

The first cage is us: we're all prisoners of our own bodies, slaves to hunger and sleep. But the worst enemies of our freedom are the roles we've been assigned. We're an operating system that started out blank and got filled up with programs: contaminated thoughts, impure, full of prejudice. You have to shake off these invisible imprisonments, you have to question yourself, with a form of self-criticism: you need self-irony, you can try to imagine yourself as different from how you've been until now.

You too have been caged by labels and tried to escape them. It's no coincidence you sang "Sono l'evaso dal ruolo ingabbiato di artista engagé"…

Sure, because I've always been perceived that way, as a socially engaged, deliberately alternative artist. And every time I do something different, it becomes a problem.

Then again, cages are a bit of an obsession of yours. Even the cage of fun, which you were fleeing in “Fuori dal tunnel”.

That was the cage of the nightlife scene, of forced fun: a tunnel, an imposition. I find it incredible that there are people who aren't willing to spend a certain amount of money to see a concert - and thus add a special memory to their life - and would rather spend twice as much on drinks, messing around with friends until late instead. Because that's considered "fun" par excellence. A concert or a museum, apparently not. Or you can accept watching only a lighthearted film, but not a serious one. These are all self-imposed limits dictated by a certain way of viewing social behaviour.

As a pioneer of hip-hop in Italy, how do you view this proliferation of rappers and trappers?

I'm fine with it. For years I had to put up with insipid pop songs, and I'd level at them the same criticisms many people now aim at trap.

But it's a different thing compared to your idea of rap. Or isn't it?

Rap in Italy was legitimized by the centri sociali, it was a political phenomenon. Today it's something else entirely. But it has added something to our musical discourse. It's freer from conventions. And it has upended the old mechanisms of promotion, through the web, social media, YouTube. Kids today have an updated operating system.

Do you have any sympathy for talent shows too?

I don't like competitions, even though I've done both Castrocaro and Sanremo. It makes no sense to have songs compete against each other. The big flaw of talent shows is that adults give advice to young people: it should be the other way round. An adult's frame of reference is rooted in their own youth, and then they often get stuck, unable to grasp what's new anymore... On talent shows you sometimes see talented young people being told to cover an artist who's simply not their style - hardly brilliant advice. It would be like me being told to model myself on 1960s singers, when instead I started out from rap. You should start from contemporary culture. And besides, these are television programmes, not music programmes, what with crying parents, love stories and all the rest.

How have you found playing concerts abroad?

I've toured Europe and the US, but in the end those shows are always put on for Italians living abroad. It's often trumpeted that some artist is famous abroad too, but really their audience is always Italians living overseas. Then there's the language problem: we consider English interesting but not other languages, except for Spanish in summer, who knows why... And German? Maybe it's too wintery!

Do you have a new album in the works instead?

Every time I finish a record or a project, I have no idea what I'll do next. I struggle to see it as a job. Every time I close one chapter I don't know what comes after, it's time to loosen my grip and go back to normal life. I never want to get drunk on fame: that's the worst thing that could happen.

Do you still believe the only viable religion is "Confusianesimo"?

Yes! Because it's impossible to make the various religions line up with each other, you risk going mad trying. Take Christianity: many who call themselves believers have never even read the Gospel or don't follow its principles. Religions survive because everyone tweaks them to suit themselves, thinking they have a direct line to God.

A bit like Troisi in the famous San Gennaro sketch…

Right, like the contest between San Gennaro and San Ciro. I come from a religious family, like almost every family in the South, but the same exercise can be applied to any religion. My religion is creativity, which incidentally is credited with a kind of divine power: God created nature. The creative person creates a song, a film, a ballet — something that didn't exist before. Creativity has been able to make us imagine the existence of God. God is the child of creativity, which is the child of man, so God is the child of man… in the end I think I've reached the same conclusion as Jesus Christ!

Speaking of creativity: you started out as a comic-book artist, then wanted to go into advertising…

As a kid I devoured comics, but I drew them just for myself. They gave me a taste for creativity, but I still saw music as something too spontaneous to be a real job. So I turned to the one profession where they actually pay you to be creative: advertising. In the end, though, I discovered that the client decided everything, which is absurd: if you go to a professional, it's precisely because they're supposed to know more than you do. The same thing is happening in politics now, with ordinary citizens taking the place of politicians.

Right, let's talk about politics. Ten years ago you were already imagining a party born from the web that would win the elections (a year before the Movimento 5 Stelle was even founded), you pictured a spaceport in Puglia for tourist trips into space (a project later approved in Grottaglie), you sang about "espelli il negron" and a mysterious "lunar migrant," foreshadowing today's witch-hunt against the "different." Do you happen to have prophetic powers?

And I also predicted the rise of the Southern Lega voter!

Impressive. How do you do it?

Just imagine that everything will go as badly as possible… I'm a keen observer and I talk a lot with people — not online, where frustration tends to take over, but face to face. In person, people are far more interesting. I suppose there's basically no escaping it. History just keeps repeating its cycles and catching up with us.

So let me put you on the spot right away: what awaits us in 10 years?

I imagine certain web phenomena will have gone out of fashion.

Well, Facebook is already less popular with younger people than it used to be…

Right, because kids don't want to be in the same place as their parents, which instantly makes it feel old and outdated. So they move to Instagram, which one day might disappear too, just like Myspace. Here's the thing: we could end up becoming a society obsessed with privacy, as is already happening to some extent in America. In Los Angeles I once tried to photograph a piece of art in a venue — a deer made out of various objects — and I was immediately scolded because I might have captured someone in the shot who didn't want to be photographed. Online, we've reached the peak of it all: by now everyone says everything about everything, as if each of us had our own readership. Sooner or later all of this is going to implode.

In politics too?

Yes, I delegate to someone who should be more competent than me and represent me. It shouldn't be up to the citizen to decide whether England should stay in Europe…

Careful, you might upset the direct-democracy diehards… As for you, though, don't you always describe yourself as “a communist without a surname”?

Yes, I could never be a Renzi supporter or a Five Star supporter, I still believe in ideologies. I find it hard to imagine non-political, de-ideologized "pastoni" [catch-all news round-ups]. It's all very poetic, but when you actually get to talking about immigration, your pastone will have to be either left-wing or right-wing. I look at this new politics with curiosity, but also with a lot of skepticism: I see plenty of hashtags and very little skill. And above all I hope this stadium-terrace politics, this football-style hatred, comes to an end. Nanni Moretti is right: those who speak badly, think badly and live badly.

Will it end up that rappers have a more sophisticated vocabulary than politicians?

Well, for a while they called rap music "the CNN of the ghetto," back when it dealt with the social conditions of African Americans, with their social demands. Before the "bling-bling," before "I'm cool because I make a lot of money and I didn't used to have any." So, why not?

(December 13, 2018)

(Extended version of an interview published in the newspaper Leggo)

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