Make Rap Great Again

Trap has been made in Italy for more than ten years now, so much so that for many it has become synonymous with contemporary Italian rap: if you rhyme over a beat in the language of Dante, someone will label you trap, and often they'll do it as an insult. Intellectual and musical laziness is certainly to blame for this superficiality, but so is the understandable difficulty of grasping the differences between one artist and another in an oversaturated scene, promiscuously entangled with the crudest mainstream of summer hits, of the Sanremo Festival, of guest spots on mainstream TV shows or the cheapest Netflix productions (dear "La nuova scena", I'm looking at you). Aside from those for whom trap is the music of their own generation, roughly Gen Z (ages 15-30), everyone else struggles just to tell one song from another, one singer from another. On top of that, every speaker in every public space pumps out trappitaliana, or what the casual listener perceives as trappitaliana, sine requie (the Latin is there to prove I'm not Gen Z, obviously). So, by synecdoche, in this article we'll use the label trappitaliana to mean all the pop-rap mixed with reggaeton, it-pop, dance, singer-songwriter fare and whatever-else that the casual listener, uninterested in such distinctions, perceives as, precisely, trappitaliana.

Let's move on, trust me. Through all this, the trappitaliana scene, oversaturated for far too many years now, keeps doing its part, churning out a steady stream of mediocre albums, promising rising stars who crash and burn against their first flop single, social media scandal, or collaboration that irritates the wrong target audience. Since supply vastly outstrips demand, it's demand that sets the rules of the game, chewing up and spitting out new faces at a breakneck pace, churning out one-hit wonders on a continuous loop. Sometimes, half-hit wonders.

Homogenization reigns supreme, as it typically does in mass production. An admittedly incomplete rundown of trappitaliana clichés would have to include the irrepressible need to namedrop Tony (Montana) and (Alejandro) Sosa from Brian De Palma's "Scarface", and possibly Coppola's "The Godfather" too, along with the widespread use of a vocabulary built on luxury brands, bitch, snitch, bro, frate, baddie and other terms favored by the very young. There are so many trappitaliana albums out there that you could compile actual statistics on how many describe themselves as having "started from the bottom", grown up "in the neighborhood" or, worse still, "in the block", entangled with varying degrees of enthusiasm in drug dealing, invariably referred to with a none-too-imaginative range of nicknames — at least if, like yours truly, sadly and guiltily, you've clocked a few days' worth of trappitaliana listening.

Far too often, the imagery, the stories, the rhymes, the productions, and the boutades that precede albums and mixtapes (a word that's fallen out of use, incidentally, after years of music-journalism enthusiasm) all sound the same. Almost everything sounds like trappitaliana because the biggest names keep popping up on pop singers' records, and this imagery — initially modeled largely on the French scene and now increasingly on the American one — has ended up shaping even those who've never lived in the block, don't go loco for the coco, and whose most illegal act ever was watching an episode of The Simpsons on an illegal streaming site.

The new trapper — or, more rarely, the new female trapper — joins an already endless list of names, only a tiny fraction of whom will manage to survive more than a few months in the mainstream. Meanwhile, those in Italy who've been making hip-hop the way it's been made for some thirty years now get crushed under all this, pushed to the margins of a market too busy convincing us that there's a new nineteen-year-old who makes Nas look outdated, an absolute game changer who obviously won't survive past his second mini-album, sells out with a single alongside some leftover contestant from "X Factor" two-thousand-something, and ultimately ends up fit only for Sunday-afternoon TV or an honest, hardworking job with actual responsibilities — so much for being a trapstar.

So what's to be done? Despair and give up, since the end is clearly near and nothing can be saved anymore? Everyone could just go back to listening to the music of their own adolescence, which is of course objectively, absolutely, indisputably better. Sure, you can do that, and it's a perfectly legitimate refuge — provided you let the no-longer-young person's anger cool off enough to realize that there's more out there beyond the mainstream, and that the Italian hip-hop scene has never been richer in alternatives than it is today, buried as they are under the latest incredible seventeen-year-old, hyped up by the major label like some new Rakim from Tor Bella Monaca.

A project that has managed to make a difference in this respect, and that offers an excellent entry point into a different kind of Italian hip-hop -- one that even the most casual listeners will (hopefully) struggle to file away as trap italiana -- is Make Rap Great Again, also known as MxRxGxA. This aim of recovering a bygone greatness, ironically echoing Donald Trump's slogan, takes shape in an endless string of mixtapes and albums driven by numerous artists from that corner of the underground most attached to the idea of hip-hop built on plenty of rhymes and few hooks, relying on the punch of the bars and skill on the mic rather than on autotune and the danceable crossovers so fashionable in Italy between the 2010s and the 2020s. Hardcore, certainly, but also contemporary, with often drumless beats, thoroughly up-to-date references, and a total immersion in Italian identity past and present.

At the helm is Veneto-based producer-rapper Matteo "Gionni Gioielli" Prata, flanked by numerous collaborators (rappers, photographers, graphic designers). Clearly inspired at first by the distinctive style of the US label Griselda (the one that puts out Conway The Machine, to give you an idea), with an abundance of jazz and soul samples layered under aggressive, explicit lyrics, the project counts among its many quirks a desire to tie its various releases together through track titles that all connect to a single overarching theme -- one that, incidentally, is only occasionally touched on in the lyrics themselves or through brief audio interludes.

There's an album, "Michele Alboreto" (2019), centered on the world of Formula 1, but also the covid album "Pray 4 Italy" (2020), one about "Alta moda" (2020), and another inspired by Milanese petty crime titled "Ligera Memories" (2022).

The vast discography is a world worth exploring, full of references both obvious and obscure, names, asides, turns of phrase and news stories more or less buried by time.

Starting with the first album, "Young Bettino Story" (2018), the releases under this name and in Gionni Gioielli's parallel, intertwined career number in the dozens, and kept coming at a rate of a handful per year up until 2023. Scattered across dozens of mixtapes, singles and albums are razor-sharp rhymes, atmospheric, melancholy beats, and a whole underground scene of rappers (Lil'Pin, Armani Doc, Nex Cassel, Gionni Grano, RollzRois, EliaPhoks, Bras, St. Luca Spenish, Montenero, Toni Zeno, etc.) who, resolutely rejecting the market's suggestions, deliver a sound that sits outside trends and outside time, a tribute to hip-hop and a declaration of love for it. Put to the test of the verse, these voices become a concentrate of flow, wordplay, sarcasm and imagination, retaining a raw intensity.

In August 2023, however, Gionni Gioielli announced the end of the project, after five years that had brought dozens upon dozens of tracks and some thirty releases. An understandable moment of fatigue, which nonetheless led to the release of "The Greaters" (2023), a closing self-celebration parading all the project's protagonists past, and which -- even though hardly anyone talked about it -- ranks among the Italian hip-hop albums worth hearing from the past few years. The good news is that Gionni Gioielli then had a change of heart, and a new album arrived, "Be Great F.C.", released in May 2024. Anyone who has immersed themselves in the world of MxRxGxA will find all the project's trademarks intact, including the cultural references you don't expect and which, if you're not Gen Z, you'll appreciate all the more. The track titles are named after footballers, from Paolo Montero to Marco Materazzi.

A different kind of Italian rap, then, is not only possible -- there's a whole vast underground scene that has been practicing it for years. Make Rap Great Again has carved out a niche for itself in a hostile, selective market flattened by banality: with hindsight, I'd say you could rename it "Made Rap Great Again" and keep giving us a glimpse of what's happening in the underground for a few more years yet, before skipping town to Hammamet.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google