Caparezza - Out of the rap tunnel

Add the old me inside Club 27

Reborn in 2000 and it seems obvious to me

What luck my ruin was

I listen to new stuff, it's a little thing

The emptiness of an endless hit

By comparison Mikimix is Bob Dylan

The story of Michele Salvemini, born in Puglia in 1973 and better known as Caparezza, is that of someone who lives on the fringes of the hip-hop scene, within which he represents a genuine unicum. Over a career spanning more than two decades, which began at the Sanremo Festival under a different stage name and in a different style, he has taken part in the genre's rebirth in Italy, helping to free the domestic scene from the black-and-white opposition between uncompromising purists and mercenary mainstream pop-rappers, pointing instead to a third way made of blending, creativity and friction — one that, nonetheless, has brought him significant and lasting success.

Having found fame with the song "Fuori dal tunnel" (2003), he went on to follow an ambitious trajectory, not without the occasional rhetorical excess or structural bombast, which saw him take on the concept album and the rock opera, all while never losing his desire to connect more directly with his audience, which over time has grown ever more loyal and numerous.

So Caparezza is the man behind the theme song for "Zelig Circus" and the same artist who appears on a tribute album to the Quartetto Cetra; he's the one who took part in Beppe Grillo's "V2-Day", whose wide-ranging protest he embraced for a while, and who features Al Bano in one of his videos; he's the one who sings about opposing the system while signing to major label Universal and recording in California; he's the one who piles up intellectual references and convoluted allusions, only to then turn up at parties with friends and happily get everyone dancing without a care.

Last but not least, Caparezza is the one currently offering one of the most credible paths for Italian hip-hop to remain a compelling rapper even past the age of forty, drawing on life experience to reconnect with the introspection of the singer-songwriter tradition.

He is a complex figure and a multifaceted artist, who also strikes a chord with an audience that has little familiarity with hip-hop, or simply doesn't care much for it unless it bears the name of Michele Salvemini. It matters little that Caparezza is crowned hip-hop album of the year by this outlet or that, if he's also the only one, or almost, that they've actually listened to or reviewed.

For this very reason, recounting his career from the point of view of a pop and rock listener ends up overstating his merits, treating as unique solutions that others had already tried before him, while looking at him strictly from a hip-hop perspective risks losing sight of what makes him exceptional, dismissively rejecting his borrowings from other aesthetics, styles and genres, or lumping everything together under umbrella terms like crossover.

We will try, then, to shift the lens of our analysis as we go, in order to render a three-dimensional figure — one that isn't flattened into the hagiography that so many devoted listeners build comment after comment online, but that also doesn't strip Caparezza of a role that is anything but negligible for Italian hip-hop and its transformations.

The beginnings as Mikimix, as Italian hip-hop collapses in on itself.

Michele Salvemini began his career in Milan as Mikimix, purveyor of a syrupy pop-rap that even made it to the Sanremo Festival, in the 1997 "Nuove proposte" (newcomers) section. He competed with the song "E la notte se ne va", which comes across as an imitation of the romantic schmaltz of Sottotono tracks like "La mia coccinella", but with the harmless aesthetic of Gemelli DiVersi and without the g-funk references, the r'n'b-laden productions of Big Fish, or Tormento's warm voice. In short, a disaster.

His career as MikiMix was cut short almost as soon as it began, after the release of the operatic rap "Vorrei che questo fosse il paradiso" (1998), which echoes Xzibit's "Paparazzi" (1996) in its strikingly similar use of Gabriel Fauré's "Pavane".

History will remember, so to speak, two albums: the harmless, trivial pop-rap of Tengo duro (1996), whose title track and many other songs sound like an imitation of Articolo 31, if not of Jovanotti ("L'inedito"), the most facile reggae crossover ("Donne in minigonna") or the stickiest romantic melodic number ("Ti voglio meglio"); and the equally forgettable second album La mia buona stella (1997), which in any case rehashes many of the tracks already released.

It's clear that this Michele Salvemini is still looking around, among those who had great success in Italy, trying to find a distinctive style of his own in a world feverishly hunting for new hits to feed the market, now that the moment is ripe. After all, it's a delicate period for our hip-hop scene. The golden era that began in 1994 - symbolically summed up in the masterpiece "SxM" by Sangue Misto - saw underground and mainstream clash, triggering internal wars within a scene that was rapidly expanding yet still young and culturally and economically fragile. 1994, however, is also the year of "SxM"'s negative image, namely the second album by Milan's Articolo 31, "Messa di vespiri": the compromise with a catchier, more immediate sound favoured broad popular success, and the advantage of having been born and raised in a city central to the Italian scene, as Milan is, together with the presence on stage of a showman like J-Ax, did the rest. It sold a remarkable 140,000 copies, quite an event at the time for an album that wasn't pop or rock, but it also caused the scene to reject the band, who would nonetheless go on reaping success for a long time.

In 1994 Jovanotti too - one of the first to do anything resembling hip-hop in Italy - sold extremely well with "Lorenzo 1994", the album featuring "Penso positivo", "Piove" and "Serenata rap". It totalled 600,000 copies, a true commercial triumph. Afterwards he would drift away from these musical shores, while remaining, nonetheless, a heavyweight of our pop scene.

The message that emerged from this Nineties boom was that, for anyone who could find the right formula - the compromise palatable to a mass audience - hip-hop was an ideal springboard for chasing success by following the trend of the moment.

Young Michele Salvemini, a newcomer at the time, fell victim to this misunderstanding and to the industry's frenzy to cash in on a trend that was perceived as fleeting.

It can't be judged, then, with the benefit of hindsight about what happened in the following decades, nor by applying the close listening typical of retrospectives: in the mid-Nineties, few would have bet on the genre's future in Italy, crushed as it was by its own celebrity.

With hindsight, given his personal history and his penchant for a hybrid music that often borrows mainly the rap singing style from hip-hop while rejecting the rest, the future Caparezza could have started out following in the footsteps of someone born in 1971 like Luigi "Lou X" Martelli - also from the South and far removed from the trendiest circles, but capable of depicting another Italy and sketching out a different kind of hip-hop, one of research and contamination, with the formidable trilogy "Dal basso" (1994), "A volte ritorno" (1995) and "La realtà, la lealtà e lo scontro" (1998).

Sticking with names better known to the general public, another model - one followed more closely, and even explicitly paid tribute to by Caparezza himself - would be Frankie Hi-NRG, not coincidentally another artist from outside the big cities and the fashions of the music industry, with a vast vocabulary, a sprawling culture and a sensational flow. The latter is in a state of grace on "La morte dei miracoli" (1997), an album that doesn't abandon social commentary, though delivered with less vehemence and more severity, wrapped in a bitterness that borders on contempt.

Hidden within this kind of creative reinterpretation lay the chance to keep the flame of Italian rap alive even after the natural fading of the initial enthusiasm shown by television, radio, newspapers and - to a much lesser extent - critics.

For his own rebirth, Michele Salvemini would start from exactly here. First, though, he would need to find himself a new identity.

The ground he had to tread as the century drew to a close was a minefield, so anyone who dared propose even an original compromise between hip-hop orthodoxy and other sounds, or other cultural niches, ended up being treated like a pariah by the scene.

The mainstream media and the general public, moreover, had simply grown tired of Italian rap by the late Nineties: not even the artists behind many of its bestsellers managed to find further commercial success, and between the two millennia money started running short, ideas were scarce and satisfactions were practically nonexistent.

In some cases the audience rivalled, in sheer numbers, the ranks of rappers hoping to carve out some place for themselves on the music scene: it's clear that a market so clogged up couldn't have much of a future.

The case of Tommaso "Piotta" Zanello, born in 1973 like Michele Salvemini, is paradigmatic: named MC of the year by trade magazine "Aelle" in 1998, and thus crowned by hip-hop purists as a rising star, he unexpectedly became hugely famous with a wildly colourful, deliciously kitsch and charmingly uncouth Roman-dialect pop-rap tune, the platinum record "Supercafone" (1999), triggering a short-circuit between underground and mainstream pop culture that touched the raw nerve of the - presumed, and distinctly Italian - contradiction between quality rap and successful rap.

Even though the album "Comunque vada sarà un successo" (1998) is one of the most entertaining and original of its year, at least within its genre, it was disowned by purists, and Piotta would then struggle to find his own voice again, remaining a misunderstood rapper, a victim of prejudice and shallow judgement for the rest of his career.

We'll see that Michele Salvemini will have to guard against this risk too, but in a context that has become more open to new ideas over time.

The return to Molfetta and rebirth as Caparezza: the demos and “?!”

Back in his native Molfetta, he reinvents himself stylistically and, after growing out his hair and a goatee, renames himself Caparezza, initially stylized as “CapaRezza” and translatable from dialect as “curly head”. In his garage he produces a handful of demos, namely Ricomincio da Capa (1998), Zappa (1999) and Con Caparezza… nella monnezza (1999), though on the latter only three tracks are entirely his own, while on the others he acts as producer with contributions from other artists from Puglia.

He finally makes his debut with ?! (2000), right in the midst of the crisis of Italian hip-hop, reworking and refining 12 tracks already featured on the demos and adding two new ones. Using rap as a blunt instrument, Caparezza finds his own dimension by aligning culturally more with alternative, left-leaning fringes than with the broad, mainstream hip-hop audience, which by then was drowning in clichés or simply clinging to the hits of the recent past.

He breaks away from the self-satisfied grandeur of the gangsta imagery, using what's left of rock - not so much as a sound but as a culture - to find an unmistakable voice of his own, driven by an unpredictable musical flair.

On top of that, the new Michele Salvemini takes on the guise of an irritating character, with a sharp, piercing voice, a neurotic temperament and an eccentric nature, polemical in spirit and quick to lose patience, a far cry from the more common party-animal types who entered Italian pop culture on the wave of the hip-hop trend. This device - a double that overlaps with the individual like a mask exaggerating certain traits - is the same one used by Eminem with his Slim Shady, and in Italy it would find a further variation in the landmark “Mr. Simpatia” (2004) by Fabri Fibra.

This debut entertains and intrigues from its eccentric introduction onward, delivered in the tone of an old promotional video:

Dear listeners, technicians, directors and musicians are getting ready to guide you through the discovery of the new and extraordinary technique of “three-dimensional sound” achieved with 6-phase superstereo

It's the start of a game with the listener, one that begins with a strong urge to disown his past as Mikimix, as is made clear right away by the rap-rock of “Mea culpa”, still amateurish in its production:

C’era chi mi spacciava dosi di business tossico

Mi credeva un pesce lesso dal lessico anoressico

Io scontato come il chili in Messico ci stavo

Non rischiavo, buono e bravo

Uno schiavo ritratto in un contratto controproducente

Among the standout tracks on the rest of the album are: the lyrical creativity of “Tutto ciò che c’è”, one of the first demonstrations of his sensational ability to rattle off lyrics with a precise, fast flow, packed moreover with wordplay, substantial shifts in delivery and endless goofy references to famous people (Cristina D’Avena who “duets with Prodigy”!); the Branduardi reference that pops up in the frantic rapped 2-step of “La fitta sassaiola dell’ingiuria”, a manifesto of proud outsiderdom; and the odd rap-serenade of “Mi è impossibile”, with a singalong chorus and lyrics full of improbable comparisons.

This is a Caparezza who keeps an overall light tone, despite the social criticism, and who's downright hilarious on "Chi c*zzo me lo fa fare", which takes aim at youth subcultures. At the same time, he's already capable of showing off linguistic virtuosity, as on "Dindalè Dindalò", banking on speed and clarity of diction.

What's still immature here is mainly the production, too often amateurish and handled by Caparezza himself, who at times has a very heavy hand, as on "Uomini di molta fede", or fails to be particularly original, as on "Ti clonerò".

The choruses work only half the time too, with melodic hooks that aren't always coherent with the song: sometimes they manage to lift the tracks and make them more memorable, other times they miss the mark, for instance on the already-mentioned "Uomini di molta fede" or with the cinematic sounds of "Il conflitto".

?! is clearly a reflection of the period of demos recorded in a garage, but an attentive ear can already make out the essential traits that will make Caparezza something unique in the Italian hip-hop landscape, making him a credible heir to Calabrian rapper Turi, whose mix of sarcasm and rapid-fire delivery he recalls, well summed up on "Salviamo il salvabile" (2001), and to the already-mentioned Lou X. This was only a (new) beginning.

A different way of making hip-hop: "Verità supposte" and success

With his second album Verità supposte (2003) Caparezza achieves national success and crafts one of the most creative albums of the rebirth of Italian hip-hop.

Having absorbed various musical influences (tango, dancehall, electronica, yodeling), refined the complexity of his lyrics and his attention to meter, and increased the weight of his social and political criticism, he also became an heir to Frankie Hi-Nrg, another peripheral figure in the scene, and not only geographically.

Michele Salvemini flees with contempt from the chart-friendly rap he was once drawn to, and which he tried unsuccessfully to practice. Far removed from the style of another album fundamental to the rebirth of Italian hip-hop, "Mi Fist" by Club Dogo, also from 2003, Verità supposte differs from it because, instead of analyzing society at street level, photographing the rot of a decadent, hedonistic Milan, it prefers to embrace broader themes, replacing the Milanese trio's gangsta-funk neorealism with reflections on racism, the Italian South, violence, the music and entertainment industry, trash TV and war.

Compared to another rapper essential to the period, Fabri Fibra, this Caparezza is less psychoanalytical or focused on his own stream of thought, more interested in talking about his way of seeing reality than about how he himself is part of it. On all these aforementioned themes Caparezza has a strong opinion, which he articulates through lyrics that are at once accessible, stimulating and refined. The exception is "Dualismi", which embodies the overlap between person and persona through a schizophrenic dialogue.

The hilarious brass-band extravagance of "Fuori dal tunnel" became an inescapable hit despite itself, but it remains one of the essential tracks of the period, with its grandiose succession of inventive touches in the arrangement, its sticky, chant-like chorus, and the paradoxical oxymoron of being an irresistibly fun, singalong song that targets precisely (a certain kind of) fleeting, homogenized, stereotyped fun. Metrically, it's a crowded inlay of internal rhymes, alliterations and assonances that drive a constant stream of wordplay. Among the lines worth remembering are passages like:

Sbuffo pensando a serate tipo del tipo: “Che facciamo?”

Io ho una Tipo di seconda mano

Che mi fa da pub, da disco e da divano

I'm here, like a lark, this is my branch

The anti-racist anthem "Vengo dalla Luna" and the polemical "Il secondo secondo me" are two other unmissable tracks, for their ability to engage with the language of melodic rap-metal à la Linkin Park (the first one) and to go beyond the dancehall template by energizing it with a frantically caustic lyric, packed with creative wordplay.

Other tracks are journeys full of twists and turns, even at the risk of veering into the cartoonish with their riotously colourful arrangements ("Dagli all'untore", "Stango e sbronzo", "La legge dell'ortica", the breakneck "Giuda me", the yodel in "Jodellavitanonhocapitouncazzo").

When the message arrives, however, without even a hint of irony or sarcasm, and when the lyrics start to turn into a little rhyming morality lesson, Caparezza gets a bit high-handed, overestimating the depth of some of his messages. That's the case with "Nessuna razza", another, far slighter song against racism, or the rather trite pacifism of "Follie preferenziali", whose chorus goes:

Preferisco ammazzare il tempo

Preferisco sparare cazzate

Preferisco fare esplodere una moda

Preferisco morire d'amore

Preferisco caricare la sveglia

Preferisco puntare alla roulette

Preferisco il fuoco di un obiettivo

Preferisco che tu rimanga vivo

Not exactly a treatise on pacifism, you'll agree. The Caparezza persona, born with exasperated, exaggerated traits, works better on this album when it pairs its message with an exuberant, metrically audacious, formally over-the-top delivery. The album moves, at times dangerously, between clichés and their mockery, so that at points it almost, paradoxically, seems to be criticising itself.

It's precisely the biggest hit single, the aforementioned "Fuori dal tunnel", that best sums up this contradictory quality: it's an anti-hit that became an inescapable radio staple, one in which the radio-friendly form ended up winning out over the elaborate lyrics that go with it.

Verità supposte also appeals beyond the hip-hop world and its usual listeners, because it folds in stadium-rock tricks, winks at nu metal, draws inspiration from rap-rock, and revitalises it all through frantic, multi-style collages. Of hip-hop culture, there's not much left, apart from the fact that Caparezza raps with rare skill.

With distorted guitars, electronic backing tracks and pop choruses, Verità supposte acts as a musical buffet: everyone will find something to their taste, and even if some of the dishes turn out to be familiar, the pleasure lies in the variety and the unexpected pairings.

Then again, the richness of the compositions is on another planet compared to ?!, and in the arrangements we now find a rhodes, a wurlitzer, a clavietta, the Malagasy harp, brass, strings and a toy piano, among many other instruments.

If the debut was practically a one-man effort, here numerous musicians step in, along with Carlo Ubaldo Rossi, an expert producer who has worked with, among others, Africa Unite, Baustelle, Vinicio Capossela, Irene Grandi, Jovanotti, Ligabue, Litfiba, Gianna Nannini, Neffa, Negrita and Subsonica.

Verità supposte is rewarded with a platinum record, proof of the commercial clout of an album that bitterly attacks the very music sitting at the top of the charts. This tightrope walk between message and accessibility is his specialty. Now all that's left is to kill off Caparezza too. More or less.

The "posthumous" album of a singer still very much alive: "Habemus Capa" and full maturity

The premise of his third album, Habemus Capa (2006), released on major label Emi, is Caparezza's own death: a device to dodge the risk of flattening his career onto the model of past successes, but also a way to approach a loose kind of concept album.

If the creativity remains the same as on Verità supposte, the form has been further refined thanks to contributions from multi-instrumentalists, choirs, brass bands and even an orchestra. The lyrics, which Caparezza - freed from the burden of playing various instruments and acting as producer - can focus on even more, are sensational in their density, metrical virtuosity and overflowing lexical imagination.

Stylistically, rap-rock is still very much present, following a model that's not exactly ambitious but, thanks to rich arrangements and nimble, acrobatic rapping, works well as a compromise to avoid overly wordy tracks: cadenced, strongly rhythmic verses are offset by more melodic, choral choruses that make it easier to take in walls of verses often rattled off at breakneck speed.

When the content is less focused, though, as in "Sono troppo stitico", one wonders whether a 19-track running order - which also includes some skippable interludes - couldn't have been trimmed down.

"Annunciatemi al pubblico" is an excellent cheat-sheet for the album, a syntactic and lexical labyrinth spiced with wildly disparate, zany instrumental interludes and pushed toward a chorus of distorted guitars and choir; there's even room for a guitar solo so clichéd it sounds like a (deliberate?) parody.

The operatic "Torna catalessi", with its dreamy horn melodies, and the ultra-kitsch, Spanish-flavored "Dalla parte del toro" are stops along a pastiche held together by an inexhaustible knack for wordplay, blending irony with sociopolitical critique.

The latter becomes more explicit on "Inno verdano", a frantic dance-hall track whose content comes across as almost didactic, and on "The Auditels Family" and "Ti giri", a double anti-television tirade that isn't particularly sharp-witted ("Tiggì tiggì ti giri e ti incula", hardly Pulitzer material).

The rollercoaster flow of "Ninna nanna di Mazzarò", a delirious tongue-twister weaving together memories of Verga and references to runaway capitalism, is one of the album's high points. Virtuosity within virtuosity comes in a web of rhymes opening the third verse, all built around the "x" sound:

La mia donna bella donna pure in unisex

A letto siamo un Moulinex la metto a cuccia come Rex

Col mio Vicks Sinex vado spedito tipo FedEx

E vivo, momenti piccanti emulanti il Tex Mex

But in a multiplex I saw Mazzarò with two transexuals

He told her: ‘I'll take you to Hollywood like Frankie from Relax

Drink a couple of Beck's and let's have some sado sex'

And from that day she was my ex, dura lex

Equally delirious is the collage of “Felici ma trimoni”, animated by a sinuous flow, little choruses and operatic snippets, drum'n'bass beats and an arsenal of sonic details. The poppiest single, “La mia parte intollerante”, built on a danceable beat, is broken up by radio-friendly choruses that eventually spiral into a fake-punk bellow: it borders on parody, a conclusion that's perfect in its own way. There's fun to be had too in the fake nonsense of “Titoli”, an electronic rock track stuffed with financial slang. 

Here's the MC of Wall Street

Throw a BTP bond on the LP with the beat

I'm the big shot of the MIB, I've got a MiG in my briefs

Cheque to cheque, cheek to cheek

Like Bill, here we invest in bits

I'm betting on .com and on .it

A hat-trick of stocks and I play the VIP

With a chic trip to Sharm el-Sheikh

Prosit for every profit

I'm cashing in while I've still got sprint

Another gold record, Habemus Capa is a Verità supposte with bigger means and bolder nerve. This path, already trodden successfully, now seems destined to be abandoned, and the inspiration comes from the less self-mocking and more rhetorical side of Caparezza.

Rather than moving past the dizzying collage of styles, the Apulian artist doubles down on it, drawing inspiration from even more worn-out models than the rap-rock crossover he's long practiced. Gripped by a certain nostalgia, he looks toward prog rock and its concept albums.

The first pseudo-concepts: "The dimensions of my chaos" and "The Heretical Dream"

The dimensions of my chaos (2008), his first album for major label Universal, celebrates the fortieth anniversary of 1968, name-drops Jimi Hendrix, and winks at the rock audience more than ever on formulaic tracks like "Ilaria condizionata" (which nonetheless cites Amon Düül) and the rap-metal of "Un vero uomo dovrebbe lavare i piatti" (as if the "Battle of Los Angeles" were still raging).

Conceived as a musical companion to his book "Saghe mentali", the album is enriched by cameos from several well-known Italian voice actors (Michele Kalamera, Pasquale Anselmo, Dario Penne and Christian Iansante) and from Cinzia Fiorato, an RAI journalist, as well as a feature from Ministri on "Ulisse (You Listen)".

Everything sounds less lively and inspired, especially when it falls into self-quotation, as on the hard-charging "Abiura di me", and the concept hinted at by the packaging and intro derails quite often, so following it properly takes attention and dedication in order to piece together a plot full of twists but not exactly memorable. The album's overarching structure promises more than the listening experience actually delivers, as would happen again later in his career.

The Caparezza persona also seems to make room for Michele Salvemini's own reflections ("Non mettere le mani in tasca", the first intimate track of his discography), and even when he wants to go back to joking around in his own way with "Pimpami la storia" and "Cacca nello spazio", it sounds unusually restrained, with more straightforward arrangements and less display of rhyming skill.

To find a track on par with his best work, you have to get to the single "Vieni a ballare in Puglia", a taranta-rap-rock number capable of replicating the miraculous balance between message and entertainment that "Fuori dal tunnel" had achieved. Once again the track makes its way even into the most fleeting party spots, but by now it would be naive to call it a fluke: this is a hit that was aimed for and achieved, earning platinum status with no surprises. The first single, "Eroe (storia di Luigi delle Bicocche)", is instead packaged as a tear-jerking pop-rap number, dangerously close to the most mawkish and rhetorical pity-mongering.

Helped also by relentless touring, the album is a solid success. The Heretical Dream (2011) is even more committed, not to say demanding, in its concept, discoursing in rhyme on socio-political issues and stringing together lofty references. New anthems like "Chi se ne frega della musica", a kind of jokey cabaret number, don't match the earlier highlights but still entertain. It's better when he shuffles the deck and wholeheartedly embraces nostalgia with the slightly crowd-pleasing synth-pop of "Goodbye Malinconia" (featuring Tony Hadley), or returns to fast, danceable beats with "La fine di Gaia", a textbook piece of electronic rock, perfect for getting everyone jumping at shows. There's also room for an anti-Berlusconi reggae track, "Legalize The Premier" (featuring Alborosie), decidedly more glib than "Ninna nanna di Mazzarò" but less overblown than "Non siete stato voi", which makes "Eroe" sound like a carefree little tune by comparison.

While still unmatched in his vocabulary and dense with cultural references, Caparezza's increasingly pop-rock-leaning rap ends up partly smothered by self-reference and verbosity, becoming less explosive, less fun and less innovative, forced to dig into the past for inspiration. Amid all this, though, comes a last flourish of the abrasive persona he created at the start of his career, in "Kevin Spacey", yet another rap-rock track, but one driven by an enormous array of comic details and, above all, by lyrics made entirely of spoilers: it's his way of playing the villain, a homegrown, deafening and goliardic Slim Shady.

Buoyed by the platinum success of The Heretical Dream, he also releases the live album Esecuzione pubblica (2012): live, as ever, he's an eclectic, overwhelming showman with few equals in Italy, but recorded documents can't match the live experience, which is absolutely worth seeking out.

This is the moment to say a word about Diego Perrone, the essential second voice and right-hand man of so many Caparezza shows, a tireless support to the lively nights of music and spectacle that Michele Salvemini puts together.

Perrone is essential in making the studio versions of the songs work live, acting at the same time as a hype man.

The (almost) unanimous consensus: the Targa Tenco, "Prisoner 709" and the metamorphosis of "Exuvia"

The artistic concept behind Museica (2014), which nevertheless wins the Targa Tenco and goes platinum, seems to overreach into the convoluted and the overblown. As the artist himself puts it:

It's an album inspired by the world of art, the audio guide to my visions put on display. Every track on Museica takes its cue from a painting, which becomes a pretext for developing a concept. There's no single track that can represent the whole record, because there's no single painting that can represent an entire gallery. In practice, this album should be visited more than listened to.

On actual listening, though, these lofty, masterpiece-worthy inspirations are often just a flimsy excuse for tracks that, despite being billed as a new debut album, fall back on a style we already know well, starting with "Avrai ragione tu (ritratto)", a new rap-rock number with cabaret flourishes, this time taking aim at anti-Bolshevik satire, and continuing with the electronic rock of "Non me lo posso permettere", another slice of social criticism with a sticky chorus and gypsy violin, among many others.

New rap-metal numbers like "Mica Van Gogh" and "Argenti vive" sound dated, despite the polish of bro-step, and the new material amounts to variations on familiar themes: the stylistic references hybridized with the rapping change, always precise and sharp, but by now the content is so recognizable that it sounds predictable even in the usual jumble of pop-culture references.

There's fun to be had ("Giotto Beat", "Comunque Dada"), but it's "China Town" that stands out, an atypical love song that, once again, lets the person behind the persona show through, with a delivery that turns calmer and more emotional and lyrics that veer into intimacy:

⟦Q1⟧

⟦Q2⟧

⟦Q3⟧

⟦Q4⟧

⟦Q5⟧

⟦Q6⟧

⟦Q7⟧

It's precisely this introspection, also dominant on "Fai da tela" (featuring Diego Perrone), an unprecedented psychodrama in his discography, that points the way forward.

The album about himself and his own creative and personal crisis, Prisoner 709 (2017), double platinum and a number-one chart entry, is even more lavish: recorded between Molfetta and Los Angeles, it boasts high-profile guests (John De Leo, DMC and Max Gazzè) and a production full of rock muscle courtesy of Chris Lord-Alge (Muse, Green Day, My Chemical Romance, U2, Eric Clapton and many others) - not exactly groundbreaking, but the work of seasoned professionals.

It's finally a substantial change of direction, with a less rambling fil rouge running through more personal content, confronting both personal and artistic struggles.

He's always been popular with rock fans, but this album cements his status as a rapper listened to even by people who generally dislike hip-hop, mainly because he breaks the genre's already loose ties to flirt even with prog-rock ("Il testo che avrei voluto scrivere").

As with Museica, the more intimate tracks like "Una chiave", "Larsen" and "Prosopagnosia" stand out from the rest, with the happy exception of the double-platinum "Ti fa stare bene", a lively, danceable rock single adorned with a choral chorus that escapes the trap of the socially critical hit in favor of something more immediate and playful.

By the end of the tracklist, a full 16 songs, one might wonder whether every track, including the electro-gospel of "L'infinto", was really necessary in the final version, or whether some trimming would have given the album more punch and cohesion.

Prisoner 709 Live (2018) documents the live rendering of this period, shortly before the forced stop caused by the pandemic.

The conclusion of this rocky path of change, repeatedly sought but never reached with full stability, arrives with Exuvia (2021), the ideal personal drama in which the central scene is the killing of the Caparezza character, leading to a total artistic emancipation from his own past. Finally, the seeds that could already be glimpsed in Museica and Prisoner 709 bear fruit.

As in much of his career, there remains a tendency to build up brainy superstructures and concepts that, in their richness of intent and references, require footnotes, reading interviews and deep knowledge of the author's life story; but while in the past these limits also hampered a less guided and informed listen, this time the intimate, introspective writing is enough on its own, even without the elaborate exegesis of every element of the work.

The manifesto of rebirth "Fugadá", the melancholic "El Sendero" (feat. Mishel Domenssain), a more mature reckoning with his own past ("Campione dei novanta") and a bittersweet reflection on death ("La certa") are central moments in a new way of expressing his creativity, with rap updated to contemporary flows (especially echoing Gemitaiz and MadMan), a less mannered use of rock, and an adventurous but less sprawling tracklist.

The ninth album of his career, Orbit Orbit (2025), was supposed to be just a soundtrack for reading the graphic novel of the same name, but it evolved into something more, with 14 songs in 61 minutes.

It is, declaredly, a Caparezza who stays outside the present, outside politics, outside the everyday, to observe everything through the eyes of imagination, floating weightlessly. He embarks on a cosmic journey, steeped in synths, vocoder and arpeggiators, which at times slips into cliché.

Once again, it's when the rapper reveals his more fragile side that he's most convincing: when the curly-haired jester's mask comes off, his skill as a contemporary singer-songwriter is (re)discovered ("A Comic Book Saved My Life", "Come la musica elettronica", "Pathosfera").

To this writer, it seems an album that alternates excellent moments, some among the best in his entire discography, with others less convincing, which either look to the past without creative drive or, worse, lean on the clichés of space-inspired music.

The need to carry the story forward, once again through a concept album, forces shifts in style and register that aren't always creatively coherent or consistent: some episodes are splendid confessions from a musician in his fifties, but elsewhere the goal seems to be simply to advance the plot. One might also wonder whether a trilogy about one's own personal crisis isn't a bit self-indulgent, a flaw not hard to pin on the rapper.

For all this, the album doesn't measure up to Exuvia or other high points of his career, and every now and then one is tempted to borrow his own words: "the adjective that best fits is old".

A one-of-a-kind in Italian rap

Past the age of fifty, Michele Salvemini proves himself a credible exponent of a mature singer-songwriter rap, still distinct and personal compared to many of his peers.

As the 2020s arrive and some artists on the national scene begin to assert themselves, now at ease with an evolution of hip-hop in an authorial sense, tout court or lato sensu, like Marracash or Dargen D'Amico, Caparezza finds his own personal expression with Exuvia, partly confirmed by Orbit Orbit.

It's the culmination of a varied career not without second-guessing, but it's nonetheless an important milestone for the artist and for those who appreciate his music. Perhaps Michele Salvemini has truly come out of the tunnel of his own persona, at last.

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