Frankie Hi-nrg mc

It's easy today to say “Italian rap.” Looking at the charts of the last ten years, what jumps out—besides the incredible "self-sufficient" turn that has now pushed international stars into the background—is precisely the striking abundance of rappers occupying the top spots. The hip-hop idiom has become so pervasive in the national music scene that it has even breached sanctuaries once thought inaccessible: on the pop side, the Sanremo Festival, and on the singer-songwriter side, the Premio Tenco, already stormed by Caparezza in 2014 and won in 2022 by Marracash without even much fanfare. After all, the phrase "rappers are the new singer-songwriters," which at first could sound provocative, has by now become almost a truism, confirming how what initially seemed unusual, if not outrageous, is today entirely palatable. Meanwhile, Italian rap itself has shed its rougher, more uncompromising edges, drawing progressively (and at times shamelessly) closer to the itpop that now dominates every context. In short: Italy has absorbed rap, or rap has conformed to the dominant national models, depending on how you want to look at it.

It's easy today, then, but certainly much less so in 1992, the year a bespectacled intellectual nerd named Francesco Di Gesù, known to his friends as Frankie Hi-Nrg Mc, began to make a name for himself.

Of Sicilian descent, born in Turin and raised between Caserta and Città di Castello, Frankie Hi-Nrg Mc has been active since the earliest days of the Italian hip-hop movement, or at least since that underground movement began to take root with a wider audience and, above all, began to be rendered in the language of Dante. This was not simply a matter of linguistic translation but of adaptation to a different culture and society that, initially, rejected the very idea of Italian rap and preferred to pay tribute to the American founders, perceived (not without reason) as untouchable. The real hurdle to clear, the one that symbolically represents Italy's appropriation of hip-hop culture, was mainly linguistic: finding in the dictionary the equivalents of American slang, drawing where possible on youth culture and the inexhaustible reservoir of local, informal yet often highly effective coinages. Intercepting street jargon to make it dialogue with slang, and then putting it to the test by working it into songs: the real trial by fire, in short, was managing to rap in Italian. There were attempts in the Eighties, like Turin's Devastatin' Posse, still too raw, and little else in terms of albums and tracks. If we exclude novelty songs like "Faccia da pirla" (by Charlie, 1988) or the Aeroplanitaliani's landing at Sanremo with "Zitti zitti (il silenzio è d'oro)" in 1992, the only notable exception—bitterly debated when not entirely forgotten, often hidden away as something shameful and embarrassing—is that of the smiling swashbuckler known as Jovanotti, aka Lorenzo Cherubini, destined for a success of typically pop scale and reach. A different career and a different musical world from our own Francesco Di Gesù.

In 1992 Frankie burst onto the scene with a single that is a devastating indictment of the whole of Italian society, with its rampant system of collusion and corruption: "Fight Da Faida," with its distinctive use of the marranzano and lyrics split between Italian and Sicilian. From the outset the rapper presents himself as an impertinent, unconventional, free artist—to the point of even setting himself against those self-managed social centers (CSA) that, at the dawn of the Nineties, served as a sounding board for aspiring champions of Italian hip-hop, by refusing any contact with the market. It's hardly surprising, then, that in the same year that nerd with glasses as thick as bottle bottoms, son of an electronic engineer and a former Italian teacher and Egyptologist, was also called on to open for world hip-hop legends like Run Dmc and Beastie Boys during their Italian tour.

After that stunning debut single came the album "Verba Manent," the first Italian hip-hop record to be released by a major label, Bmg. It's a sin the purists will never forgive—a breach between hip-hop, sacred and pure, and the market, consumerist and diseased.

"Verba Manent" is a work that establishes Frankie as one of the most important figures in the entire Italian hip-hop movement, thanks to lyrics that are intelligent, sharp and venomous, steeped in brilliant rhymes and social commitment, and to dynamic, driving funk backing tracks inspired by the American Eighties. Also invaluable is the contribution of Dj Style, entrusted with the mixing, crucial in building the textures that provide the backdrop for the Turin artist's unleashed flow, always polished and torrential.

Besides the epic "Fight Da Faida," the tracklist includes songs destined to lodge themselves in the collective memory, such as the militant "Faccio la mia cosa," the rave anthem "Disconnetti il potere"—a step away from Prodigy's big beat—and the retro proto-rap of "Omaggio Tributo Riconoscimento," dedicated to Otierre, a band from Varese and forerunners of Italian hip-hop, destined to become a national new sensation alongside Articolo 31. Also spectacular is the sample of King Crimson's "Elephant Talk" on "Potere alla parola," a breathless nursery-rhyme built entirely on disorienting tempo changes, with dazzling verses. Lyrics both harsh and refined at once, which seem to look more toward international phenomena like Public Enemy and Rakim than to the posses of the social centers sprouting up like mushrooms all over the boot.

As mentioned, the social centers were indeed the ideal megaphone for underground Italian rap, the kind that wasn't (yet) on TV. Between 1991 and 1994, in fact, they helped spread hip-hop nationwide. The self-managed social center became a place to build up one's knowledge of hip-hop, forge social networks and organize the first events, certainly inspired by the ideas that inhabited these spaces between the two decades. If hip-hop was born in the poor neighborhoods of New York, amid the decay of the late-twentieth-century capital of the world, then its Italian version and offshoot was born in the CSAs of a handful of university towns, with an inspiration that was almost always antagonistic, left-wing, and extra-parliamentary. From Milan's Leoncavallo to Naples' Officina 99, from Genoa's Zapata to Rome's Corto Circuito and Salerno's Asilo Politico, the posse (an English term meaning "group," "collective," "crew") multiplied. Their large spaces, organizational capabilities and do-it-yourself attitude made them ideal settings for long hip-hop improvisation sessions, and some crews aimed to take the place of (and blur into) the messengers of punk, hardcore, reggae and ska, the favored inhabitants of these occupied spaces.

The student movement known as the "Pantera," which exploded between 1989 and 1990, also gave a great boost to the whole scene, especially in Rome, where acts like Assalti frontali and Colle der fomento established themselves (with a young Piotta orbiting around them). And so the social centers became more open places, frequented also by people with no connection to that political milieu, perhaps simply interested in hearing those sounds. It was new music for our country, into which hip-hop culture had slowly seeped during the Eighties thanks to Afrika Bambaataa's first world tour, and through the broadcast on local private channels of a handful of American films devoted to the movement, such as "Beat Street" (1984), "Style Wars" (1983) and, above all, the 1983 feature "Wild Style."

But Frankie Hi-Nrg Mc, though destined to go down in history as one of the leaders of that generation, actually shows off the most modern approach of them all. A rapper and singer-songwriter at the same time. A musician, capable of creating sonic architectures far more intricate and melodic than his rivals'. A total artist, one might say. It's no coincidence, then, that a giant of cinema like Vittorio Gassman wanted him by his side to produce part of the soundtrack for the show "Camper", which Gassman himself performed together with his son Alessandro at the Festival dei due mondi in Spoleto.

A pause follows, during which Di Gesù gathers his ideas for his new album, deliberately staying out of the spotlight (apart from the evening of April 25, 1995, when together with the celebrated saxophonist Michael Brecker, winner of 15 Grammy Awards, he plays "La cattura" in Piazza Plebiscito in Naples). And it's a most opportune pause, because it's the prelude to what will remain, without question, his masterpiece.

By the time "La morte dei miracoli" came out in 1997, rap had already crossed over into the Italian charts and no longer scared anyone. It had spent the most uncompromising, barricadera energy of its forebears, and had blended with a thousand other styles and languages. According to some, its magic dissolved the moment it started chasing the next hit, the next trend. The breach had become a chasm: the crack in the wall dividing hip-hop from the market led to a collision between a world that was, in its structure, still underground, and a sudden, growing interest from the mainstream — from record labels to radio, all the way to film and mainstream TV. The short circuits were numerous: the scene, which had initially welcomed the influx of money and resources, grew progressively more hostile and aggressive, feeling as though it had been stripped of its creative freedom and expressive power. What's more, in swallowing up Italian hip-hop whole, the mass media confused this music with other sonic worlds, from raggamuffin to hardcore punk to ska and even punk (!), turning something new into a shapeless mass of sounds seemingly united more by their place of origin — the aforementioned centri sociali — than by any element of the sound itself. Even today, the unwritten rule that real hip-hop must carry a social and political message lingers among older audiences, a direct result of that early imprinting.

So, after the era of the "posse", there followed one in which an internal war afflicted the scene not long after a market had formed and gained considerable weight across the media. The supposed purity of the scene that predated the big commercial hits sought to reaffirm the existence of an Italian hip-hop untouched by its encounter with the market and contamination with pop. Anyone who opposed this crusade was often pushed to the margins. Dj Gruff would become one of the standard-bearers of this battle against the "suckers", with consequences that helped shape the idea of some form of pure hip-hop, meant for devotees and insiders, utterly incompatible with a mainstream audience.

Among the reasons for this resentment was the greedy, disorganized, superficial and poorly informed way in which the press, television and above all the Italian record industry told, honored and supported the genre as it moved toward maturity. So, while these ideas about the need to remain untouched by mainstream contamination and the market at large may seem, in hindsight, obtuse and short-sighted, one must also weigh the impact of the disappointing attempts by the media and music industries to interpret, narrate and organize hip-hop.

1994 is the year the two worlds virtually collided: the fresh, creative hip-hop of Sangue Misto made history with "SxM", while the charts featured "Serenata rap" by Jovanotti. Within a couple of years, the Italian hip-hop bubble had swollen so much that it was clearly bound to burst, under the pressure of too many pop-rap singles, assorted crossover experiments and fleeting careers built to squeeze whatever they could out of this music before the entertainment and music industries moved on to the next thing. Between a "Tranqi funky" by Articolo 31 and a rap verse haphazardly stuffed into pop songs, the original substance was diluted to the point of feeling both everywhere and nowhere at once. Of course, a proud, uncompromising underground survived, but the "middle ground" became an inhospitable place, where any given rapper was exposed to crossfire criticism: too out of step with the trend to appeal to the crossover market, yet guilty, in the eyes of the purists (often labelled at the time as "estimatori", as opposed to the aforementioned "suckers"), of having lost their original purity.

Frankie Hi-Nrg is well aware of all this. And he goes even further. Leaning into darker, more bitter and reflective tones, he tells, in his own way, the story of an aggressive, embittered, hypocritical Italy for which he feels a mix of contempt and rage. While the scene too often struggles to make sense of what's happening within it and all around it, dazed by an unexpected explosion of interest, Frankie looks at the bigger picture. And he does so with a track, "Quelli che benpensano", destined to go down in the history of Italian song as a whole, not just of the genre. As soon as the anxiety-inducing groove of the beat kicks in — a looped sample by Ice One, who had discovered that strangled trumpet fragment in a jazz-funk track by Jimmy McGriff ("Blue Juice") — you immediately sense you're in the presence of a killer single. But it's only once you hear the lyrics that the song lodges itself irrevocably in your mind and heart, gripping the listener in that tangle of rhymes brimming with solemn indignation, delivered like a mantra of invective:

The stakes are at their highest, the imperative is to win

And let no one else take part

In the logic of the game the only rule is to be cunning

No scruples, no respect for one's fellow man

Because the last will be last if the first are unreachable

There are so many of them, arrogant with the weak, fawning with the powerful…

They do as they please, let it be known, they do

They spend, they flaunt, and they are what they own

Then the other twist: the chorus sung by Riccardo Sinigallia, at the time a member of Tiromancino and guru of the Roman scene. Heartfelt, sincere words, carved in granite:

They're all around me, but they don't speak to me

They're like me, but they feel better about it.

In a handful of verses, perfectly delivered by a true tightrope-walker of the word, Frankie sketches a nightmarish portrait of the "new Italians" of the post-Tangentopoli era — those who think the worst is behind them (or is, at any rate, someone else's problem) and are solely intent on dominating, bullying and elbowing past everyone else, without a shred of guilt ("they feel better about it"). It's the rapper's definitive j'accuse against a cynical, opportunistic bourgeoisie that has done business, corrupted, stolen and climbed the social ladder without scruples ("Like lizards they climb/ And if they lose their tail they just buy a new one"), finding its sole reason for being in wealth, power and appearances. Even as it superficially flaunts ideals and spiritual convictions that are purely for show ("Every man for himself, God for himself/ Hands clasped together in the church pews on Sunday/ Hypocritical hands, hands that do things not to be spoken of/ Or else who knows what the other hands might think/ They'd be scandalized/ Hands that later sign petitions for eviction"). These are the aspiring yuppies who, in the age of the satellite-TV boom, show off their new status symbols ("In a constant escalation with the neighbour they build/ They start from the little lawn and go straight up to the sky/ They've got more satellite dishes on the roof than St Mark had in the Gospel"), living beyond their means and entrusting rivers of cocaine and alcohol with the task of helping them escape the far more miserable reality against which they will inevitably crash ("Wired out of their minds, they powder up, they get drunk/ And then they knead themselves up a tree/ Noses white as Fruit of the Loom/ Turning redder than a level of Doom").

Helping to cement the popularity of "Quelli che benpensano" was also an all-time classic music video, with Frankie hi-nrg and Sinigallia bobbing their heads in a taxi, cruising through a desolate outer Rome amid a parade of new metropolitan monsters: an unusual case of an Italian song from the last millennium racking up over fifty million views on YouTube.

The track, which in 1998 also won the Premio Italiano della Musica (PIM) as song of the year, would go on to inspire countless covers: it has been reinterpreted by Fiorella Mannoia, Caparezza, Jovanotti and Marracash, effectively becoming a new milestone of Italian protest songwriting, albeit updated to the age of hip-hop and set within a far broader scope than the simple protest song. An invective that, in the end, spared not even the self-styled progressives, who had just taken the helm of the country with the first centre-left government to also include former communists. And who knows — perhaps that opening reference to lost innocence and broken promises was aimed at them too ("In many cases it's us who make promises/ Never keeping them, except out of self-interest").

But it's not just that instant knockout single that makes "La morte dei miracoli" shine. Across a tracklist of no fewer than fourteen songs — including an incipit, an "outcipit" and four interludes — Frankie unfurls the full power and fluidity of his political hip-hop, set against the diseased reality of 1990s Italy, with verses that are sharp and subtle, rich in metaphor yet always able to go straight to the point. Lashing out at all the misdeeds and bad habits of a country poisoned by violence and racism. A "court of miracles" of the wretched, poor in soul and body, destined, as the album's title suggests, for death.

Then there's the unsettling parable of "Accendimi", which warns of television addiction in a kind of darker version of Giorgio Gaber's "La strana famiglia". Where the Milanese singer-songwriter played it for farce, having Ombretta Colli (an unwitting future Forza Italy politician) sing: "Hello, hello, hello, we're all turning into idiots/ Hello, hello, hello with Berlusconi or with Rai", Frankie zeroes in instead on the hypnotic, manipulative power of the cathode-ray tube: "I'll tell you what you want, I'll show you who you are/ turn my mouth on and you'll see yourself/ in the world inside the box/ and you can live out a fairy tale/ if you just stay home and never go out". The grim "Giù le mani da Caino", meanwhile, turns its sights on the death penalty and those who support it, moving at a funereal pace dictated by the guitar:

But the criminal has yet to be born

who sees in the death penalty a deterrent

And it often happens that an innocent is wiped out just like that

And you call that an accident?

Executioner with the transparent hood, you live in anonymity

Immune from sin, undisputed lord of your own mediocrity

Orphan of doubt, head in the sand: victim of your own rage

No less harsh are the lyrics of "La cattura," a funk crossover stuffed with beats and scratching, which kicks off right away with a blazing incipit – "I'm alone, hunted like a dog and I don't move, if I bark I die" – followed by a sequence of words as relentless as a thriller:

The adrenaline spikes in a flash

and I fling my jaws open in a silent scream

and the anguish suddenly comes to rest

because death is here, in leather, with a whip

I swallow my saliva and savor it

and if this then must be my hour

I say: please, after you, Madam

And while "Il beat come anestetico" at least raises the pace and the euphoria, with a pulsing, contagious beat, the intimate mantra of "Autodafé" plunges back into a vortex of darker pessimism, punctuated in the refrain by a sample from Ice One:

In bad company especially when I'm alone

Negative like the G-forces in a dive

I take flight, climb, stall and wait for the worst

Which isn't in the fall but in the landing

As Hubert says

Imaginary invalid more than Molière's own

I'm my own gregario and I act like Salieri

And don't ask me why

Because like the Tethered, when I lose the thread you won't be able to catch me again

Also fully successful are disorienting skits like "Cubetti tricolori" and "Manovra a tenaglia", decidedly futuristic for the time. And while "Cali di tensione", with its square beat and scratching, brings Frankie closer to the so-called "scene", "Fili" dares even further, going as far as sampling "Questione di feeling" by Mina-Cocciante, for a new, disenchanted reflection on social relationships.

A cornerstone and the dark heart of hip-hop's golden decade, "La morte dei miracoli" is a merciless snapshot of the ills of Italy at the time - but perhaps of every era. A work that would prove hugely inspirational for the more refined and articulate rappers to follow: we've already mentioned, for instance, Fabri Fibra, but we could also cite, for example, Caparezza and Murubutu, linked to Frankie by a shared taste for speed, verbosity, and the use of long verses and lines that demand serious breath control. A style the rapper picked up from his hip-hop masters overseas: "In part I use the traditional hip-hop method: I take a beat I like and write over it," Di Gesù explained in an interview. "But I'm pretty flexible, the stages don't necessarily have to happen in that order." His rap/spoken-word is a river in flood, verbose and tightly structured, yet never in need of "padding out the runtime": perhaps this too is why it has outlived the various trends and waves of the so-called "Italian rap scene".

Ranked number 39 on Rolling Stone Italy's list of the hundred greatest Italian albums of all time, "La morte dei miracoli" would go on to be reissued several times, starting with the 1998 edition featuring four bonus tracks. On March 10, 2017, to mark its twentieth anniversary, it was reissued on vinyl by Sony Music.

Frankie Hi-Nrg Mc's subsequent career would be marked by a rather sparse output: just five albums in thirty years, none as significant as the first two. In the late 90s, Italian hip-hop floundered, faded, waned, or retreated into increasingly airless, experimental, visionary niches. By the turn of the millennium, the death Frankie had foretold seemed to have sadly come true, which makes its subsequent rebirth - commercially too - a twist with few parallels in Italian music.

Over the years, Frankie has alternated his career as a musician with stints as a TV host, fronting the 2004 season of Brand:new on Mtv and the Street Art programme on SkyArte in 2013. He also indulged in a bit of acting, appearing in Carlo Virzì's film "I più grandi di tutti" (2011).

Meanwhile, his ongoing project of social analysis through hip-hop rhymes has continued with mixed results, showing a progressive and worrying drift toward a somewhat demagogic rhetoric, far removed from the sharp, surgical wit of his early work. Nothing, however, can ever diminish the importance of his role in the evolution of Italian rap, of which he remains one of the undisputed pioneers and masters. Whatever the self-appointed guardians of good taste might think.

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08/09/2024