Marracash: Peace is over

by Maria Grazia Guastaferro

Friday the 13th, 13 tracks, one bubble, peace ended. Not a feat, not a single.

A compact gesture that defies the rules of the music industry and the numbers, without the excuses of the niche and the for the few, indeed defies the numbers without the rules of the numbers but imposes his own, leaves no time even to crinkle his eyes: gentlemen, music does this, good morning.The record, in fact, is a very long feat with himself, the declaration of an evolution. He summons all his selves and they all answer the call, lined up, lined up. By the end of Us, Them and the Others he had told us: maybe I'm free. “From all that introspective stuff,” he will say in an interview, but not to disown it, rather to return more purely and harshly to Hip Hop. Breathing, he is ready. He picks up where he left off. Power slap is a broad-shouldered intro, soaring from the top, a Hip Hop manifesto that does what Hip Hop does, scratching, going the other way, thundering all over the scene, knowing where to dip his pen, with good things don't change, always have, get ‘em “this slap and let's be clear to all: this is a serious record.The Marra who advances in Crash is the one who comes from his filthy south, from the fucking cycle of the vanquished, the same one who shits on our throne and reiterates that Hip Hop is political and remains so, political not in the sense of who votes one side but who chooses which side to be on. This second piece is rapped from a skyscraper, looking down with statuesque wings, but Marra is not just a Wim Wenders angel, he knows this and plummets toward the ground, and it is the Marra of so far so good that in the stragglers have lost manages to take the snapshot of a whole crowd, gathers a choral voice, of lonely men united by a common condition rather than a class, a group. The sbang with which he slams down is the sweet voice of Ivan Graziani. In È finita la pace, the framing changes, from bird's eye view to American-style plan: he looks into the eyes of the people but remains aware of the context. He comes in on the sampling showing the teeth he had already sharpened in Persona singing ”well almost as good as I rap like there's Marracash featuring Marracash" and this time it's true. His singing is also sad sad but it is a Marra-like sad, and that is without ever leaving you without a caress, of those given with the back of two fingers, of intimate consolation without excess and hysteria.Still sad but of a more alienating and even pissed off sadness: the eyes that look at you in Detox/Rehab are the same as the Marra of dreams not yours, who this time, however, goes through the parades of masks without feeling uncomfortable anymore because now he has a place to be, a planet: himself.And loneliness is the answer to including oneself as an obsession, a placid resistance told with some of the album's most beautiful brushstrokes of verse, clinging to Pooh's voice, too Italian and everyone's to not embrace us immediately.

I fell in love with an AI is the hinge of the record, the song in which he indulges in that irony that leaks out in the voice changes, is one of the other Marras who answered the call, provocative, irreverent and without drama, because the only drama is the lack of intelligence, the human one.Factotum and Victim are two songs in the mirror. In the first, a picture, one that is still needed but seems to have become uninteresting and not in trend, of victims who resist accepting themselves as such, who learn to give up everything but dignity. They are the silent mass who do not even have time to flaunt what they do not have because they are busy trying to love themselves despite precarity, and it is the mass to whom the record, implicitly or not, addresses itself. Victim is on the other side of the mirror, telling instead of a trend in vogue, a widespread attitude, and yet here Marracash decides not to lash out at the pen, shows that he is really mature, does not give in to an albeit understandable tease but approaches it with a kindness of his own, another short, two-fingered caress: so change.

From *roie in 2010 to Troi* 14 years have passed. In the meantime, what was bound to happen has happened: the bubble of feminism has burst, which is a bubble because it is often emptied of meaning and substance, it becomes a pretense of asterisks and distances, of rules upon rules that end up harnessing more of everyone and especially everyone, anything but freedom. Music often wallows in it; feminism is the trend. On the one hand the imagery of rap incapable of evolving (except for a few exceptions) on the other a pop music that seems to cling to pink flags more to give itself depth than out of awareness. Marra made it clear to us on the previous record: he should hush up the background noise, blather on about things one does not know. Instead, the thing he knows is simple, trivial, true: he says it without any recourse to this or that symbolism, without putting on battles that are not his own his pen goes straight and hits the nail on the head: there is no masculine term. The asterisk of 2010 has made a leap, and perhaps it is the first time to see it that it seems useful to me, because it accomplishes a gesture of justice. Simple, as justice is, as this necessary piece. And if She is for a woman who does not exist, she actually gives, perhaps in spite of herself, a tribute to the women who know that at the beginning of this millennium there is an important game, that we are in our infancy and we cannot miss it by selling make-up and mascara between a misquoted Angela Davis and a hashtag. It is still the silent mass of her who outside the social bubble knows for herself how to be beautiful, comes to terms with the self and history outside the comfortable and uncomfortable labels that they are and is aware that awareness is the most important and difficult daily political act, difficult because it requires a dose of deep sincerity with oneself, an action of limpid self-analysis even when uncomfortable, painful, the same with which Marra writes Pentothal. Close-up this time, spying on the grimaces that conceal reticence.

The record, however, does not end with bitterness. Before the bubble bursts, there is a happy ending without happily ever after, and the king is the same as quicksand, it took him years without stirring, awareness is the name he gives to the peace that doesn't end. Thus ends the record, Marra finishes the film, lays down the director's camera, lays down the pen. He held it steady, constant for 50 minutes, never wavering, without the loopholes-which in Italy the genre is too full of-that hide rhymes that don't fit well, hanging verses. Gentlemen, Fabio Rizzo did it in the uncomfortable Italian language. This is the level, the flow, the rap game. The peace is over.