DARGEN D'AMICO - Di vizi di forma virtù

High pressure. Low horizon. Sea and sky indistinguishable. "Di vizi di forma virtù" arrives at a moment of dead calm for Italian hip-hop. That is, after the 2.0 wave, with its easy enthusiasm and just as much mainstream noise, crashed against a general shoreline of mediocrity and indifference, without ever delivering works comparable in quality to the cornerstones of the 90s (with the possible exception of Fibra's "Turbe Giovanili" and Microspasmi's "13 Punti Di Sutura"). But our friend Dargen, either alien or alienated from most of these concerns, rather than bowing out, doubles down: a second solo album spread across two paired CDs for a total of nearly forty tracks.

An excessive, unprecedented, mammoth work, whose only real fault is probably having arrived too late to stem the movement's decline. That is, assuming anyone is willing to explicitly recognize it as part of that movement at all.

A story that begins in Milan at the end of the last decade, in the shadow of Chief and Zippo's "Circolo" with the Sacre Scuole, but only starts getting interesting from 2003, as they morph into Club Dogo (whose debut "Mi Fist" features Dargen on the second verse of "Torna 2000"), under the wing of Crookers and Two Fingerz, as well as the trusty Franco Gaudiesi, first through various compilations and collaborations, then with "Musica Senza Musicisti" (2006), poised between rap's verbal sparring and the "other" ambitions of Italian singer-songwriter tradition.

Point break: Dargen raises the danger threshold to an extreme degree, leaving his hip-hop chrysalis behind to transform into a linguistic and musical butterfly hovering over lush, unexplored meadows, draining their nectar like a bee. Obsessively crafted over two years of meticulous production, "Di Vizi Di Forma Virtù" represents the definitive stage of this metamorphosis: Dargen carves up truncated syllables, sets accents ablaze, tightrope-walks across the vocabulary, allows for a surreal, almost Pirandellian multiplicity of voices and autobiographies ("for me rap means saying things you don't believe in over music that isn't yours"), argues like a young Holden Caulfield amid the rubbish of a Luciano Bianciardi (“e quando cala la sera/ mi chiedo come mai ognuno ha la sua carriera/ mentre io aspetto ancora la mia”); musically, meanwhile, he runs through the muscular, hi-tech transparency of the Milan school (as in "Low Cash", where he reinterprets street rap's materialism in an ascetic, freakedelic way, "Show Me Love", the club cadences of "Tra La Noia", the Spaghetti Funk parody of "Passerà Al Bar", "Sul Carro") following the lesson of Daft Punk ("Ci Ricamo Sopra", "Anche Se Dite No", "Sms Alla Madonna", "Alì Il Thailandese"), in gleefully absurd Italian dance mockery (the brilliant "Un grande pregio (delle boyband)" and "La Divisione Del Lavoro"), 80s pop-wave and synth-pop ("Al Meccano", "Pubblicittà", "Come L'Italy E San Marino"), as well as stark, unadorned masterpieces like "Limitato Dal Poeta" ("the limit of those who trust the police / is their own children at school, if the school is the Diaz").

A tangled, impenetrable electronic skein, a chameleon-like tour de force that often takes on the shape of a merciless gospel of the outcast ("the limit of the church remains death / if you find it shut when you flee on foot at night"), about the precariousness and the horror pleni of our generation (Dargen, like the author of this review, was born in 1980).

A singular, urgent, nagging record, the kind that sets a precedent. But in twenty years, if we're lucky — this is Italy, after all.

Ride the wave of great music

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04/09/2008