Italian Hip-Hop 2024

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(“King Of The Jungle”, Club Dogo)

On January 12th, Club Dogo made their return, releasing their self-titled album ten years on from “Non siamo più quelli di Mi Fist”, which dates back to 2014. This comeback has brought things full circle, not just for the Milanese trio but for the entire scene, turning into a symbolic album — the kind capable of making plain to everyone something the more attentive among us had already noticed by listening to recent Italian hip-hop: trap is in deep crisis, after years of disorderly, certainly limited, yet undeniable innovation from a scene that used to be far less relevant, lively and rich. The return of Club Dogo — the group that, together with Fabri Fibra, represented the rebirth after the critical period spanning the turn of the millennium that had reduced Italian hip-hop to the underground — has been the perfect excuse to reflect on what's happened in the meantime. Ten years, more or less, considering that the "Cioccolata" recounted by Maruego back in (distant) 2014 was already Italian trap.

“We're back by popular demand because rap today sucks”, say Dogo, and sometimes you feel like agreeing, if only to indulge the boredom and frustration that increasingly floods your eardrums when listening to the new singles and albums from the countless names trying to climb the Spotify charts, sell out the inevitable arenas, and aim for the ever more popular stadium shows.

Over the course of seven albums, from the essential “Mi Fist” (2003) to the forgettable “Non siamo più quelli di MI Fist” (2014), the arc of Club Dogo has mirrored that of an Italian rap scene moving from the underground back to the mainstream, even at the cost of blending in with pop sensibilities. The trajectory of Club Dogo, however, seemed to have naturally come to an end, especially in light of the emergence of a new school — crudely lumped together as trap — that quickly made that somewhat cyber, somewhat gangsta language obsolete. “Club Dogo” isn't proof that the "Mi Fist" version of the group is back, but rather the result of a lull ideally suited to looking back and rethinking their own history. Clearly there were others before them, from Assalti Frontali to Sangue Misto, but the Milanese trio's influence has been made clear by a decade of stories about the city of Milan. Club Dogo are the forefathers of a way of narrating Milan and its life caught between business and crime. This album has brought their influence on younger rappers into sharp focus, leaning on the craft of three artists who are, to all intents and purposes, veterans of the scene.

It isn't a good sign, though, that 2024 has to be saved from oblivion by rappers in their forties like Jake La Furia and Guè — quite the opposite. Then again, better their way of presenting themselves, as graceless and brash as ever, than many of the other offerings released by so many of their artistic offspring. Less convincing, in the same vein, was what could have been the mature statement from Shiva, "Milano Angels”, the positive counterpart to “Milano Demons” from 2022, still too tangled up in the clichés of our trap scene.

Shifting toward a model more directly connected to the US scene can be an interesting stimulus, as demonstrated by Diss Gacha, a Turin-born rapper from 2001 who has found a way to stand out from the many competitors thanks to a creative use of slang, immediate tracks that combine trap and southern-hip-hop stylistic traits with a pop sensibility capable of turning some singles into hits with a young and very young audience. "Cultura italiana pt. 1" is his first (mini-)album, 21 minutes that broaden into a slightly more cohesive narrative. It was "completed" by "Cultura italiana pt.2", which is effectively a repack. The songs are fun and over-the-top, but more reflective moments are already starting to creep in, moments that tend to slip into some clichés of contemporary Italian rap. Let's hope the future proves wrong an increasingly widespread pessimism: too many new names have gotten lost after their first singles.

Examples of this can be found in the return of thasup as Yungest Moonstar on the confused "Sfaciolate Mixtape", which squanders Davide Mattei's talent right when a solid confirmation of being different and creative was needed, ready to last even when pop-rap overproduction gives way to another trend. The choice of a solo (or nearly solo) album in this era of epidemic featuring is much appreciated, but backing it up requires memorable tracks, which are conspicuously absent here. It's a different story for "Casa gospel" with his sister Mara Sattei, somewhere between r'n'b and nods to... gospel. The direction, in short, doesn't seem very clear.

Things aren't going any better for another leading name in our trap scene, Capo Plaza, who this year added "Ferite" to his discography. In terms of narrative, there's little that's new: the story of himself, winning against a vile and hostile world. Seven years on from the hit "Giovane fuoriclasse", three albums and a mixtape later, the content of his songs hasn't changed much, and despite Warner's deployment of resources, the album lacks a hit. Things went no better for his colleague Dani Faiv, who tried to relaunch his 2023 album with the repack "Ultimo piano B": at this point it's hard to imagine the rapper lacked opportunities, given the resources poured into the productions and the guest appearances.

And while it's no surprise that "Benediction" by Boro is also easily skippable — the album with which the Turin rapper tries to follow in Fred De Palma's footsteps and embrace reggaeton, with injections of the cheapest club electronics — it's even more puzzling to see "Popolari" by Rhove, the album with which the author of "Shakerando" was supposed to finally capitalize on that success. Instead, hardly anyone listened to it, and I fear even fewer will remember it in a few years.

If it's easy to dismiss "Pianeta di Miller" by Mr. Rain as an album that promises very little even before you press play, and one that will probably please many with the disarming simplicity of its formulas, it's fair to look elsewhere for a breath of fresh air. One option, for instance, is a female name: Rose Villain, who didn't do badly with her debut "Radio Gotham" and has returned with "Radio Sakura" — too bad the change of frequency turned out to be a disaster: an album that, by trying too hard to be ambitious, ends up confused, incoherent and all too often bland. Better is the debut of the much-discussed and divisive Angelina Mango, who on "Pokè Melodrama" plays with rap, mixing it with a bold, scattershot blend of pop styles into which she throws different moods. Let's hope that in the future she leans into her most distinctive traits, without taking the shortcut of the sloppiest pop banality. We'll see, much to the dismay of the haters and of those who think they've already figured out the whole career of a woman who is still only twenty-three.

There is, however, a name who has achieved even more success on Spotify than Angelina Mango and who is much closer to the hip-hop scene and the Club Dogo imagery we started from: Anna. "A true baddie" managed to do what "Popolari" completely failed to do: turn a one hit wonder into something more. Given that little or nothing about Anna matters more than the image she has cultivated online and in public appearances, and given that the successful tracks on which she's the lead artist are genuinely few, as of June 2024, "A true baddie" bets on expanding what little we'd already heard, veering toward a pop-rap scented with reggaeton that pretty much represents the model of a certain mainstream of the moment. Essentially, the aim is to produce photos, videos and social media posts out of an album that can finally give Anna a stable place in the Italian music of the moment. What was a game with "Bando" back in 2019 is supposed to become something more concrete in 2024 with "A true baddie". Looking closely, it's an album that, starting from its very title, seems to want to define her rap persona, complete with its own language and positioning within the rest of the scene: a mean, ambitious queen who uses an Italian-English slang to speak to an audience of under-20s.

The result is, at the same time, satisfying and disappointing: on one hand, success has finally been achieved (however much that matters to us as listeners), since Anna kept the album at the top of the charts for a full 10 weeks, doing better than any other woman since Giusy Ferreri in 2008 (11 weeks); on the other hand, "A true baddie" is a container that collects featuring spots and potential chart-topping hits without ever really landing a punch, instead falling back on a tracklist with no great ambitions beyond generic fun mixed with a predictable ego trip. Judged by the standards, and with the ears, of someone who grew up listening to albums rather than playlists good only for winning the streaming game, it's disjointed and confusing, tiring to get through despite lasting only three quarters of an hour. After five years of waiting, what will in all likelihood be the most streamed album of the year in Italy is essentially mediocre, fun here and there, but far from surprising, and above all it struggles to stand out from many others. If this isn't a symptom of crisis, what is? Consider that one of the other most-streamed albums of the year is "Icon" by Tony Effe, for example: a collection of tracks with virtually no content, unoriginal productions, overlong and padded out with featuring. Naturally, he was immediately called up on stage at Sanremo.

Then there's a group of rappers keeping the flame of mainstream celebrity alive, like Lazza with "Locura" and Geolier with "God knows": two very different approaches, both resulting in albums full of shadows. "Locura" is a "Sirio" with more resources and ambition, riding the huge success already achieved (it was reported just these days that "Sirio" itself has been awarded the coveted Fimi diamond disc certification). The packaging is lavish, even enjoyable in its alternating styles and its numerous details, but the content remains almost always forgettable. In its introspective moments, Lazza's lyrics end up repeating themselves or slipping into cliché, while the arrogant boasts have had their day and come across as toothless, weighed down by PEGI-12-rated language. The strength lies in the standout individual episodes, ones that many in our mainstream would envy.

For the most famous Neapolitan rapper of the last decade, on the other hand, it's even harder to talk about him without being besieged by fans and haters. Even though it's become much harder to say this than it was four years ago, since he's now hugely famous and therefore divisive, Geolier does have talent. He simply risks being smothered by excessive expectations: how can this twenty-three-year-old manage to make songs both for heartbroken high schoolers and for those wild late-teen nights out? Collaborations with established names as well as ones where he gives a boost to lesser-known artists? It's simply too much, just as 21 songs in over an hour are too many — practically two albums in one by 2024 standards. Growing as a rapper will mean choosing, and accepting the inconsistency of a path that can't keep being both street and Sanremo, both introspective storytelling and disposable hits at once.

While plenty of other names are trying to leave their mark but still seem unripe, two have already nailed an album with real substance: Simba La Rue and Kid Yugi. The first, with "Tunnel", brings the listener a concentrated dose of violence delivered in dark, fierce language, recounting a deep-seated unease. The second has taken a path unusual for rappers of his generation, albeit with some caveats: the lyrics on his "I nomi del diavolo" are enriched by a broad, personal vocabulary, even if they too often hit the same clichés of street rap and trap. It's not a flawless album, understandably so for a rapper who's still very young, but these limitations aren't enough to deflate interest in one of the few names on the newest scene showing uncommon personality and skill. Far more reservations apply to one of the most-streamed Italian rappers on Spotify, Baby Gang, who this year, with "L'angelo del male", could have taken a turn toward a different kind of storytelling, putting his talent to good use, but instead remained smothered by countless featuring spots and hampered, perhaps, by his legal troubles. We remain hopeful.

Of all the others, which clearly neither the writer of this piece nor anyone with only 24 hours in a day could have listened to in full, it's worth mentioning the authorial return of Piotta with "'na notte infame": in a rap scene that all too often tells tales of criminal fairy-tales built for social media, this tenth studio album sounds like a happy exception. Also a novelist, Tommaso Zanello perhaps needed a great story to tell in order to find the right inspiration for what is the only album in his discography that, despite being utterly different, can stand alongside his underrated debut. It's his most personal and painful album, threaded through with thoughtful, singer-songwriter-like imagery and wrapped in a melancholy that intertwines with nostalgia and with processing the grief of losing his brother Fabio, known as "Il professore", a prolific writer of lyrics tied to mysticism and spirituality.

The situation is a bit different for MadMan, one of the most technically impressive Italian rappers, yet still bogged down in too many sexual lyrics and the usual bravado on "Lonewolf". The two members of La Créme, MACE and Jack The Smoker, released, respectively, "Maya" and "Sedicinoni": two very different albums, the first an ideal synthesis of his previous work, capable of sophisticated tracks within a new kind of pop-rap (though with a few lesser moments too), and the second a hip-hop album with a hardcore soul that nevertheless won't change anything about the scene or its author's discography, despite the featuring of none other than Conway The Machine.

Then there are those who keep carving out their own history, in a way that's not even particularly eager to please the critics, like Dargen D'Amico: in the unpredictable unfolding of his career, this time with "Ciao America" he alternates electronics with echoes of his abstract past. A minor album within a major discography. On the eccentric front we also find the prolific Gionni Gioielli, active both with the MxRxGxA project with "Be Great F.C." and under his own name with the less brilliant "Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare dell'estate". Nothing that really shifts the story of a producer and rapper who marches to his own beat, as we've already had occasion to note in the past. Much the same can be said for the producer Dj Fastcut, back with "Dead Poets 4 – Ad Honorem". As usual in his discography, a large number of rappers, more or less unknown to the general public, take turns behind the mic, giving the tracks an enviable dynamism: those who take part often stake their one verse on the chance to become known to the rappusi audience Dj Fastcut seems to be addressing, which drives a careful pursuit of maximum impact and creativity. An ideal antidote to the trap overindulgence of recent years, "Dead Poets 4 – Ad Honorem" is best listened to at full volume and on repeat, immersing yourself with the right awareness in its whirlwind of violent imagery, quotations and lethal rhymes. Against the opportunism of mainstream guest spots, designed to guarantee safe streams and equally certain platinum records, stands an idea of hip-hop as a culture to share and live, a movement to take part in while staying true to tradition, yet also charging it with an overwhelming density.

While Nayt continues to follow his own distinct path with "Lettera Q", an album focused on the power of language and on the importance, and the fragility, of interpersonal relationships, the Italian-German rapper Giuseppe Licata, known as Pufuleti, remains a well-kept secret of our underground: his latest album, "Gotico romanzo", returns to a shorter format and is even more narcotic and dreamlike, with guitar surprisingly taking a central role and many tracks that arrive at a contemporary singer-songwriter sound played with the emphasis of a sleepwalker. The Pufuleti project thus confirms itself as still evolving, foreign to any typical trajectory of the music business. Sooner or later we'll have to talk about it in more depth.

In extremis, when all seemed lost, Uochi Toki also rose again, but as a collective (!), for "Litost". An album where they gather friends just as unhinged as they are to follow up "Cambiare idea", which dates back to 2021. This year also brought the even more lo-fi "Bandcamp Plays 2010-2024", a collection of rarities in the old-school sense of the term. It's an album that tries to resolve a career that, even through exceptionally creative albums, has led to a fraught relationship with the very idea of hip-hop: here they resolve it with more instrumental music and by greatly reducing Napo's role on the mic. This too is one way of pointing to a change taking place in Italian hip-hop.

If the year was marked by the Club Dogo reunion, it's only right to also mention two other hip-hop groups just as important, albeit for very different reasons: Co'Sang and Articolo 31. The former return fifteen years later, strengthened by a scene that has come to see them as trailblazers, perhaps too unlucky and burned out too fast. "Dinastia" is similar to the contemporaneous "Club Dogo" or Sottotono's "Originali", a self-celebratory comeback that in their case takes the form of a third chapter split between street life and the retelling of their success. There are high-profile guests, including someone who sees (or once saw) them as a model, namely Neapolitan pop-rap star Geolier.

Twenty-one years after "Italiano medio" (2003), the Milanese duo Articolo 31 return to the album format, having already made a stop at Sanremo 2023, where they placed sixteenth with "Un bel viaggio". In the meantime, all sorts of things have happened in Italian hip-hop in general and in pop-rap in particular: the Nineties generation gave way to the one that revived the 2000s, led at a mainstream level by names like Club Dogo and Fabri Fibra, and then, a good ten years ago now, trap once again upended the Italian scene, with Sfera Ebbasta, Ghali and many others racking up streaming numbers unimaginable for rappers of the late Nineties.

Whatever one's judgment on how Italian hip-hop has developed over more than thirty years, 2024 revealed what feels like the closing of a circle, perhaps even the end of the dominant pop-trap paradigm, through the return of Club Dogo and, also, Articolo 31. With this double comeback, the Milanese scene celebrates itself in retrospect, now that the historical importance of the artistic paths - very different, yet both highly influential for their own reasons - of two of its most famous groups has been settled: while "Club Dogo" (2024) is self-celebratory from the title onward and forgoes any new message or sound, since its whole reason for existing is simply to reaffirm itself and its own style, J-Ax and Dj Jad, more shrewdly, have to spell out their influence on the present and recent past of Italian rap.

"Protomaranza", pure J-Ax in style, is however more of a provocative title than an actual key to understanding the duo's career, which over the course of the Nineties turned into a commercial pop-rap powerhouse comparable only to Sottotono (who, incidentally, have also made their comeback). Articolo 31 ham it up when they suggest an outsider role, a "king of the ignorant" in the Celentano-esque sense, because in truth they have always been ready to cater to a broad, wide-reaching audience, won over more by J-Ax's showmanship than by the populist bent of Dj Jad's productions.

The return of Cor Veleno with "Fuoco sacro" and of Assalti Frontali with "Notte immensa" is less surprising or newsworthy, since these are essential but less mainstream-known acts; besides, it's hard to add anything surprising to two of Italian hip-hop's most decorated discographies. This despite the fact that the former have released an album that's hard not to rank among the best of their career, and therefore among the best from the Roman scene in recent years at least, and despite the fact that the latter hadn't been in such good form in a very long time.

Finally, just when the picture seemed settled in its own indefinability - since no one today could dream of having heard even a tenth of all the Italian hip-hop being released - along comes the surprise return of Marracash. This is the album that follows the Premio Tenco, following his growth as a songwriter and his recognition as an author and musician, not just among hip-hop diehards. "È finita la pace" is a record that risks being crushed under the weight of expectations, stunned by the clashing opinions that pollute the web we're all tangled up in. It's an album by a 45-year-old rapper commenting on the present, from politics to society to music, with no featuring, no lead singles, no countdown on social media to stoke the hype.

If "Persona" (2019) was a rebirth, with Marracash finally seeming capable of shifting register and approach, "Us, Them, the Others" (2021) marked a peak that would be hard to replicate, and "È finita la pace", rather than trying to replicate and surpass it, veers sideways, pushes past a few boundaries and, occasionally, returns to a simpler, more direct, more muscular language. With this approach, which has of course disappointed those expecting an even more structured album than the previous ones (weren't those enough?), Marracash has only confirmed what 2024 whispered to anyone willing to listen: through sheer repetition, Italian hip-hop has found itself turning back toward its own past, searching for historic names and comebacks more or less unexpected, while too many young artists struggle to find their own dimension, a quid, the distinctive mark that would let them stand out from a crowd of carbon-copy trappers and rappers. He, on the other hand, is still searching for a personal path, in constant evolution. To this writer, "È finita la pace" doesn't feel like the exploit that the previous album was, but it's still capable of pointing toward new directions, different approaches, ideas that deserve further exploration.

In some ways, then, 2024 marked the creative death of a certain standardized strain of Italian hip-hop, squeezed dry by a rapacious, opportunistic market, but it also showed that on the margins, and even among some names known to the wider public, there's still a creative spark - one that bodes well for imagining a 2025 a little more freed, at least, from an indigestible and by now terminal pop-latin-trap mush.

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