UOCHI TOKI - Libro audio

"Libro audio" is the fourth album, or the fifth if you count "La chiave del venti", by Napo and Rico (words from the former, beats from the latter) in their most famous incarnation, the rap duo known as Uochi Toki. Is it their coming-of-age record? No, because despite their young age, they'd already matured a while ago. The record that confirms their standing? No, they've always confirmed it. The start of a decline? Even less so. If anything, there's substantial new ground being broken here.

The most important development is that the tracks come together in a new way, as Rico told us in the interview. For the first time there's a kind of concept behind it, which doesn't really lie in the story — since there isn't just one, but twelve — so much as in the new approach.

Rico asked Napo to write lyrics in the third person, or rather, to write by presenting other people's points of view, not his own. To bring to life a kind of rap narrative. A kind of audiobook, precisely.

As the album progresses, the lyrics drift further and further into unreal territory: Napo's autobiographical tendencies blur into Napo's visions, into stories (allegorical? symbolic? hyperbolic? none of the above?) that still deal with men and relationships, still dissected with his characteristic sharpness, but starting from increasingly improbable or implausible contexts.

“Il ballerino” is simply brilliant in its first part (“Unfortunately it's considered more heterosexual to eye up other guys to figure out who belongs in the pubescent-age club than to let yourself be surrounded by girls in tight clothes talking about their past and present relationships”), but it's no less so when it shifts to relationships between children and parents' ability to pit them against each other. “Il nonno, il bisnonno” is also superb, a brilliantly observed cross-section of Italian history (and Italian stories) complete with a message(!), punctuated by amusing vintage samples worked into the mix by Rico. Among the less realistic tracks, the flight of “Il claustrofilo” stands out in particular, one of the songs where the interplay between rapped vocals and sonic texture comes through best.

And so we come to the other component of “Libro audio”. Rico's work here is probably his best ever. Everything feels “harder”, less mediated than the production on the other albums, especially towards the end of the record, when we enter the unreal territory of “Il necromante” or face the sonic machine-gun fire of “La bestia”. Even ferocious samples (Rico told me there's a lot of metal and related genres in this album's loops) make up a base that's flayed, ragged, yet impeccably constructed.

It's hard to pick out just a few tracks, but it's impossible not to point out “Il ladro”, a cold, dirty electronic funk number that even brings to mind Dabrye, one of the best minds in hip hop today. And since by now practically every genre has had “hip” or “hop” grafted onto it (first trip hop, then, among others, glitch hop, hip pop and hip pop-rock), all that was missing was hip prog, a neologism we might venture for “L'osservatore, l'osservatore1”.

That Uochi Toki are the best thing going on the Italian rap scene is so obvious that it almost feels disappointing to close a review with such a banal observation. But it would be even worse not to write it.

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01/06/2009