Ghemon – From rapper to stand-up comedian

Finally Ghemon for Aelle Magazine, we did it, cool!

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I am very happy!

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That's right, these are closing circles!

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Madonna mia, 30 years later almost!

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It fits!

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Look, let's start right from the end, from the play, from the last thing you did at the public level. You told me that it's all in there anyway!

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It's one of the most rap things I've done in my life, I mean I also wished that everybody, those older than me in your generation, could see it because I went to the theater definitely to tell things about my history, to make people laugh, because it's still a stand-up comedy show, but it's a show that starts by talking about how I started with rap and closes with a rap piece of mine, closes panda rap, it really has a circularity.

And to think that maybe I would come to the theaters of Italy and tell them about something that was, for us, not only niche, but something that was all our own, self-made, that nobody liked, that nobody wanted in the clubs, and today you go to the theater and you tell them to the 70-year-old lady that rap is the ultimate in expressiveness, that it is the ultimate in creativity. The first rule though is not to copy, is to be yourself, that even from nothing you can create something.

If I tell me kid I can be proud.

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There is one thing that has always impressed me about your career, which then we can now say is eclecticism, but it is that search for oneself, for one's own expressiveness.

You started from rap, you decided to learn to sing after that and express yourself with singing as well, then came acting, however not an actorly acting, very sectoral in that case as well, as was the singing in the sense you didn't decide to go to singing because I like opera, it was a singing that goes close to the soul world, as well as the comedy goes in a direction that is stand-up comedy, so as usual the essence of making people laugh, a microphone and the audience.

What is there in this path that you haven't explored yet that you would like to achieve?

It's hard to say now because actually these were three very important areas for me, the stand-up one is still just beginning, although as a listener I've really been behind it for a long time.

The first time that, I had already been watching for two or three years, but the first time I consciously went to New York to the Comedy Cellar, by the way I pulled low, I remember it very well, it was 2012, so anyway I've been following that world assiduously as well for more than ten years and there's a lot to discover there, because beyond the joke then at a certain point you have to figure out not so much what stand-up can do for you, but you what you can do for stand-up, that is, what can you add, what is your point of view.

So for now that and then later on, I don't know, acting would also be a fun thing to be able once in a while also not to be myself, not to always just talk about my story, or to have my own filter, but to also be able to be someone else would be fun.

Which is something that by the way in rap is rare, right?

In rap we are called to tell stories that belong to us, whether they are very close, somewhat less so.

Instead, the beauty of acting is really being what you want and who you want every time.

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It takes a talent between studying, as with everything really.

But that already taught me hip hop, I mean really I come from a family of musicians, there was no one in Avellino when I started except my friends with whom I shared.

I joking, this is not a good joke, but I was saying that hip hop is like the co-op, that is you.

That is, you are the one who has to create...

We didn't have anything, we didn't have the double-tipped markers, we would go and get the practical, which is the thing to put, let's say, back on the leather shoes, to put the color back on them and we would spill stuff in there that we got at the hardware store, so that we would use that big tip like that to go to tegare.... So it's pure creativity.

Consequently with that attitude, that is, those glasses I wore them in everything I did.

In singing, if I went to San Remo rather than stand-up, I always looked at that, thinking that I could find a way to find my way even if I was at zero.

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Okay, there is one thing that I think beyond this starting from the bottom, gave you rap, hip hop, writing in general, which is the introspective part.

As a rapper, back in the days of Game On Science, you were known for your listening, for your way of making music, for telling yourself quite introspectively.

Did the writing help you with that as well?

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Yes.

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Have you written books about looking at yourself, analyzing yourself and turning around your fears and analyzing them?

Now I'm writing another one, go figure.

But perhaps just to tell the story of the envelope that led me to do the show rather than to run a marathon.

I mean, I start purely from scratch, and if I started from scratch and somehow found the verse, you too in any other field know that you will encounter the same difficulties and also the same gasps.

So I am not writing a handbook to say “do as I do,” however, to share a little bit.

My experience obviously in writing rap has served me and helped me on everything.

It helped me on poetics, it helped me on rhythm.

If I have to think of one thing I find in common between rap, the way I tried to do the melodic part of my music and stand-up, it's always the rhythm.

I've never tried, although we have a very Italian tradition, our country musically is a melodic tradition that is just hard to take away and that by the way is kind of techie stuff, but it's based on the rhythmic structure of Italian, which doesn't have truncations.

So whenever you want to make a melody in Italian, the melody is always affected by the fact that it is in Italian.

Just as rap, however, had forced me to learn the rhythm, that rhythm I also tried to carry it all the time when I was singing.

As Stanis says inside Boris, it should not have been too Italian.

And I kind of brought that back to me in stand-up as well, because stand-up has to have a rhythm, it doesn't have to go long, breaks are not like rhyming, you have to know when you have to say them, you have to know when you have to stand still.

So anyway in the end hip hop was the most important thing that happened to me in life and here it is still with me.

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Okay, another place to spin this thread, another loop to slip into is sports and running. Obviously you didn't choose a simple sport, I mean running is the most instinctive of all and the most complicated of all, and then you chose the most comprehensive discipline which is the marathon.

You talked before about encountering difficulties in life, the marathon usually you used it just as a metaphor to say it's not those three hours, those two and a half hours, those four hours of your life, but it's the difficulties you encounter in between, how you solve them, the unexpected, the expected that you know will happen, yourself, knowing that you get to the end crying with happiness because you got to the end and you trained ten months to do that thing, to get the zero.

So it means a lot and it's a gesture that you just described in all the other things you did.

And here in some ways the marathon was also a pathway.

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It is true.

I don't know if she sought me out or if I sought her out, I mean I don't know if it's because of a life attitude, because obviously I always liked sports and I had a fondness for basketball.

It just got harder and harder for me to go out, to go to the playground or to get into a game with maybe guys 20 years younger than me who were jumping three times as much and giving it to me.

However, I needed to get out every now and then, and maybe there also comes a time in your life when you need to be a little bit more with your thoughts, but not inside the house but in the space and face them.... Certainly in running this is done.

It was a sport I hated before, I hated it, again I started a little bit by accident.

The suggestion of a guy I very often worked out with in the gym, and then one thing called the other, I realized how good it made me feel.

Then it was a metaphor for everything, as you said, because there's joy, you discover things about yourself that you don't know, there's a learning curve, that is, you start going fast and you say, “fuck but I'm also fast, how is that possible?”

But then afterwards you bump, maybe you get hurt, you recover, or you go running in a group and you realize how fun it is, then there's race day and that's fun too, it's just life summed up.

Of course, there's a lot of confrontation with your own limitations, which is something that sports gives you and that doesn't mean you're weaker, it means you have a perimeter where you can express yourself that becomes clearer and clearer.

And while tightening that perimeter as age passes, you actually find new things in it, a very rich perimeter.

I definitely found there, another time in this show, on a metaphorical level in running, I found there that all the important things in my life have never been sprints, they've always been marathons, so they required time, patience, training, perfecting the gesture and then, perhaps most importantly, trying to worry about my own pace and not other people's pace, which is not an easy thing in the times we live in, since on social media there's always someone else going faster than you, so it's a good lesson.

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And then I see a lot of stubbornness in it that you've shown with your career or careers, if we want to give it different shades even if it's then one.

Yes, yes, however, for me it is one.

Ghemon and Gianluca, they are one person, one career.

For me it's one and running has trained me, let's say, the stubbornness part, because when you're doing a sport, let's say, endurance sport, running, biking or other things, it's raining, it's snowing, it's your birthday, it's Christmas, you have to go out, and that makes you have less of an excuse in other things as well.

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Absolutely. Instead, I have always been very intrigued by the Ghemon ” listener.” We talked to each other several times over the years talking about music made by others, wonderfully made music, by producers from small places, on small scenes, however super, which opened our minds, right?

And you've confessed to us that you're also a hip hop reader, Aelle collector, and that's one of the reasons why we're here and it's good to talk about it.

Surely you were reading “The Source” and “Rapages,” because that looking abroad was also interesting from that point of view.

Yes, of course.

And then at that moment, I don't know, it seemed--like opening a comic book almanac even when you were seeing The Source, maybe, because it really seemed like a world away.

Very nice.

Aelle, I was telling you this before outside the rooms, I started to understand, by fortuitous chance, because I knew it existed, and I knew it from the radio, I knew it from One Two One Two, maybe from “Friday Reppa” I knew it, that's it, One Two One Two became a long time after it existed, but it was a small provincial town, like many, and of course we're talking about times when the Internet was not there, because this is hard to explain, guys, but there was no Internet, so you needed something and somebody had to tell you it existed.

And to find the first copy of Aelle, in my opinion, took me 4-5 months.

I found it and it was still bimonthly, not coming out every month.

So you have that thing there with you and that's all you have for two months, but I knew all the words by heart, so you were very attached to the information that was there.

It was funny because at that time I was saying, “But will I ever understand what is East Coast, what is West Coast, by listening to a piece?”

Think how much I was--because really nobody was giving it to you, this information.... Then more months go by, you join another dot, you find another number, you buy another record, and you have to give away another one and say, ’Did this one buy his pants a little wider than he should or is he one of ours?“

You talk to them, you create community.

It was a beautiful thing, more innocent but beautiful.

And even today I can't say it's bad because that's what happened with streaming.

I get up and can listen to any song in the world, it's a blessing.

On the other hand, everything goes faster and much less remains.

Here, at that time we had fewer things, however, those that were there remained more.

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Another one of the things about circularity that amazed me is that you're printing, we're stealing your time today from the printing of the vinyl, the play, the stand-up show, and it's another circular thing. 

We were born in the vinylera, the transition between vinyl and CD, and now instead vinyl is printed, which is a wonder.

There is fatigue, you have to go to press months in advance because the printers are...

Do you want to do a business?

Open a vinyl press.

This is safe because it requires us to ...

CDs have become a tiny portion anyway, there is streaming, if one wants a physical thing, one wants, eh, Rai and vinyl, roanno.

Then vinyl is nice to listen to.

I'm doing for my first time the so-called comedy album, which is the album of my stand-up show, so it's the recording of my live show at the Arcimboldi, only the show contained songs and it didn't contain the songs from my previous albums, because even here I said, “Okay, let's not vary, let's not cheat.”.

Then that's just the stuff of shoddy, I don't have to pull people to the theater to see me singing the songs to them first so I make them dumb and happy, and then I make my own jokes afterwards.

It doesn't work that way.

The show has to have music that they don't know, which is a continuation of what I say, maybe a serious continuation of what I say in the funny monologues, and people will be able to come here to see it and not find it until the tour is over.

And so it was, we recorded it, people were not putting the videos online, because I was asking at the beginning not to put them, so it all went on word of mouth and now, just today, we are finishing editing, mixing and coming out at the end of this show.

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Well, but now you have a thousand arrows in your bow, so many skills, writing, rap, singing, acting, the coveted stand-up. What's next? What does Gaemon do when he's not running on the level of expression?

I don't know, this is something that I always think comes from hip hop.

I try to improve a little bit on the things where I feel I'm lagging behind the most, where I feel there's room for improvement, but even if I have to write a rap verse now, still now I say, I do the first thing and I do four.

But it wouldn't be fair that for a month, two months, I would be writing all the time, rebooting my engines to go right, go left.

The thing is, I can stand the bicycle, and when I have warmed up I have no problem, so I commit to the things that I feel at that moment need a little step up.

Also because you are so used to going outside your comfort zone, and that personal comfort zone of yours has become your comfort zone.

So you know that if you're not in perfect balance, you're in the right place, if you're a little unbalanced maybe it's right.

And that gave me a little bit of boredom from time to time to the viewers, but then after that the moment of confusion was passed, came the ’ah, but his stuff is that he always changes, that's his characteristic.“.

Actually, yes, however, the best thing maybe I was told by the people who followed me from my first piece until my last show, the fans who were always there, and we always found the same content, the same person, declined let's say.... Sure.

It is the consistency that I was looking for.

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That's right, because consistency is not right to ask artists, we should ask politicians or those who do in other things.

However, it is also true that your eclecticism is not an eclecticism of seeking something different necessarily, but something different within yourself, a transfacet of your personality, your way of doing things, so it fits.

For those of us following you from the beginning, it was all in the pipeline.

Yes, for me it was.

Then Biotic is an extra wing of the place, i.e., he says, “but you used to only make pizza, now you're put on sushi as well.”.

Like sushi?

Good?

I also occasionally make pizza.

Sure, it fits.

Then good luck with the sushi and pizza.

Long live the wolf