by Cesare Alemanni

In 1879, a 16-year-old boy who grew up on a farm in Springswell, Michigan, arrived in Detroit. He didn’t have much money in his pocket but had a remarkable sense for mechanics. At the age of twelve, his father had given him a pocket watch and he had taken it apart to study its gears. It was because of this talent that the young man, not even of age, later became one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.

The 16-year-old boy's name was Henry Ford, and he was destined to found Ford, one of the world's largest automobile companies. In some ways it is THE automaker par excellence, since it is Ford itself, and Henry Ford, who is credited with the paternity of the subcompact car (with the 1908 Model T), that is the first truly "mass-market" automobile, capable of profoundly transforming twentieth-century consumer society.

Why, you may be wondering, am I mentioning Henry Ford in a magazine dedicated to rap's birthday? Well, because in order to understand where Detroit rap (which is the subject of this article) comes from, we must first grasp what kind of city Detroit is, and there's no better way of doing that than starting with cars. For much of the twentieth century, Detroit was indeed the capital of the American (and, by extension, Western) automobile industry. Not only because of Ford, but also because of brands such as Chrysler, GM and so on. It is not, after all, nicknamed Motor City by accident.

By virtue of its industries, for decades Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of industrial workers - those known as blue collar in America and tute blu in Italy. A great mass of internal migrants that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, poured into Michigan's chilly capital city, lured by the promise of a secure (and initially quite well-paying) job. Many of them were, inevitably, African Americans fleeing discrimination in the Southern States (though discrimination was certainly present in Detroit as well, with Henry Ford himself being openly racist).

As a result of this phenomenon, at the turn of the postwar period Detroit had become the Midwest's premier Black Mecca. A metropolis characterized by an extended working class that was highly multiethnic and had a level of economic prosperity that, elsewhere, minorities simply did not possess. In the early 1950s, in Detroit's working-class neighborhoods - those with a large black majority - life began to pulse with two major soundtracks. On the one hand, the martial, repetitive rhythm of the assembly line; on the other, the vibrant sounds of jazz clubs, where the vast community of workers, African-American and otherwise, would gather to shake off the tedium of their factory days.

A number of great jazz musicians emerged from that scene, most notably Yusef Lateef, but above all it was a young African American named Berry Gordy - a Korean War veteran who, after unsuccessfully trying his hand at boxing, had ended up working right at Ford - who began to take his first steps in music truly grasping, better than anyone else, the essence of Detroit's socio cultural situation. That is, the presence of a large mass of industrial workers who felt particularly alienated, and therefore were particularly in need of songs that could entertain them above all.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Gordy built out of this intuition a sound that emphasized the more "pop" characteristics of soul, jazz, funk and rock and roll within tracks designed specifically to satisfy that audience's desire for entertainment.

Gordy's early productions were an immediate and resounding success. And more. In deference to the city's industrial tradition, Gordy decided to serialize them and make them a true entrepreneurial "trademark." Thus was born Motown, one of the most influential record labels of the 20th century, and arguably one of the three most important black music labels in history (the other two being Blue Note and Def Jam). And it could not be otherwise, with a catalog featuring artists such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Rick James and Four Tops, the Jackson 5 and The Temptations (and that's just the tip of the iceberg).

Thanks to the success of Motown, Detroit became the unlikely epicenter of African American music in the 1960s: the capital of soul and funk and everything in between. Its success was also pivotal in accepting into the American mainstream the more traditionally "black" genres of music that, once "segregated" and listened to predominantly by blacks, started gaining popularity among white, generalist audiences as well. Precisely as Detroit, moreover, was turning into a powder keg of socio-racial tensions (the Detroit riots of July 1967 were the first large-scale "ethnic riots" in postwar America).

In the 1960s, Detroit thus condensed into a single city the industrial, musical, and in many ways socio-political capital of the United States and Black America. What could have gone wrong? Many things. The 1970s were marked by a global crisis. Inflation, energy shocks, geopolitical transformations, economic and cultural crises set off the United States’ transition from a postwar social model based on industry and production, to a so-called globalization model based on outsourcing and high finance. Large corporations began to move their production abroad, and blue-collar jobs migrated with them. Within a decade Detroit found itself prey to an unprecedented crisis: companies shut down, warehouses emptied, industrial suburbs turned into ghettos. From a thriving industrial paradise, Detroit became one of the major case studies of post-industrial failure.

Even Motown left for Los Angeles. However, its cultural legacy of jazz and soul, funk and blues remained. And on that, Detroit built its own renaissance - at least musically. Like other post-industrial districts (think of the Ruhr area), Detroit also became home to innovative rhythmic experimenters. Some attribute this phenomenon to the resemblance between the dry sounds of manufacturing and the precise beats of sequencers. Be that as it may, in the vast, now-ruined cathedrals of industrial Detroit, ingredients of new music began to be combined beginning in the 1980s. The pioneers were African American boys whose names were Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson. Their sources of inspiration were, on the one hand, Motown soul and, on the other, the European electronic music revolution, from Kraftwerk to Moroder.

The result was an unprecedented form of dance music that was simultaneously playful and desperate, vital and nihilistic, heavenly and apocalyptic: techno. By the mid-1980s, Detroit was dancing to it everywhere but especially in the huge, cavernous sheds abandoned by industries and at the often semi-illegal parties that would eventually come to be known as "raves."

Again: why am I telling you all this? For the simple reason that without understanding this background, one cannot fully recount (and appreciate) the genius of the late J.Dilla (1974 - 2006) who, in my humble opinion, is the most sophisticated and layered hip hop producer of all time; a beatmaker who is not only legendary but whose sound reflects like a psychedelic prism the myriad colorings of Detroit's historical and musical trajectory. 

Born in Detroit in 1974 under the name James Dewit Yancey, he grew up suspended between two worlds: on one side, the passion, inherited from his family, for the tradition of black music, and on the other, his own shy curiosity, typical of the introverted kid he was, for the metrical and sonic innovations of techno. This unique blend of influences was what helped make Dilla's sound so special: where techno-flavored beats are married to samples dripping with soul, and metrics are at once meticulously precise and completely inaccurate (the so-called "Dilla time" achieved by shifting the percussion pattern on his legendary MPC3000 by mere thousandths of a second), to the point that you wonder whether his beats were generated by an electronic instrument or performed live in a studio by a band.

During his all-too-brief career, cut short at the age of only 32 by a rare disease, J. Dilla brought luster and vitality to the rap scene of an entire city, Detroit, and its black community, at one of the most difficult times in their history (Detroit spent almost all of the 2000s on the threshold of bankruptcy, finally filing in 2013). A one of a kind case in the history of rap, J. Dilla was the artistic "engine" (a word chosen not by chance, this being Detroit) of an entire city and an entire music scene; thanks in part to his influence, this scene has produced over time outstanding names as Slum Village, Phat Kat, Black Milk, Dwele, Guilty Simpson, Elzhi and many others.

Even a more sensational and unique fact, is that in "reviving Detroit," J.Dilla managed to synthesize the musical, cultural and social History of the metropolis that, perhaps more than any other, epitomized the parable of the (Afro)American dream in the twentieth century: from the improvisation of jazz to the leisure of funk, from the romanticism of soul to the dystopia of techno, "it's the Motorcity, babe."

by Gabriele Baldassarre

The right words always come later. I happened to think this on a summer afternoon about eight years ago, when I first read two particularly evocative words, Blog Era. 

That’s right, they always come later; and those two words perfectly captured a series of musical gems scattered in my memory of which, for various reasons, I had never been able to find a common thread. And no shit I hadn't found it, because after all, it wasn't really there. Or rather, not in the drawers I had always been told to search.

I think any of the other authors from overseas who have attempted to chronicle past eras of rap have somehow ended up talking about territorial affiliation. One of the historically most significant and most distinctive features of this culture, which even I, on my middle school nights on Wikipedia, was fascinated by, reading about American cities and rappers emphasizing their origins.

For this reason, tracing the outline of the musical tsunami that flooded the late 2000s and early 2010s was not so easy for a Milanese teenager. For the first time in the genre’s history, the place was a non-place. I had seen in retrospect the East and West Coast of the 90s, experienced as a neophyte the G-Unit, the big New York crews of the 2000s and the first mainstream boom of the South. The most popular artists of the day now came from New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Toronto; then there was the one from New York who sounded like he was from Houston and the one from Los Angeles who wrote like a conscious rapper from the Midwest. The explosion of the Internet and early social media had unified provinces and cities across all fifty-one states into a single place, reachable from my small bedroom. Even though I wasn’t aware of what I was doing, I knew that was the place to listen. Without realizing it, I was living the Blog Era. It was changing the place of rap and therefore it was changing rap, which would eventually change everything around it.

With the popularity of Napster in the late 1990s and all the other methods of illegal music downloading, the worst era ever for the global music industry had begun. No one was buying CDs anymore, and everyone turned to online illegal downloading. iTunes tried to offer a solution that, in hindsight, turned out to be more like an entrepreneurial translation of "try rebooting and see if it works" - and in fact it didn't work. It was a worldwide economic bloodbath, coinciding with a time when rap was slowly climbing the mainstream charts. However, here came into play the factor that has always made and still makes this subculture the most influential in the Western world: rap is cultural terrain led by the segments of the population often deemed the lowest; social places that have historically been the starting point for any cultural change, which then spreads to the rest of society.

In this sense, rap fans were at the forefront of illegal downloading, and artists in the scene were the first to feel compelled to find a response and adapt. Websites such as NahRight, DatPiff, 2DopeBoyz, and many others were born and became the go-to social hubs for fans of the genre. Forget New Music Friday and make it more like New Music Everyday. On these sites, you could find new music everyday to download and put on your iPod. In this scenario, rappers were among the first to embrace this new model of fruition and release free downloads themselves. A new mode that globally popularized a format that until then had only been common in the streets of America, between stalls and corners of liquor stores: mixtapes.

Rap dominated the Internet, and in a sense, the Internet ended up dominating rap. The audience broadened: there were more creators and listeners. As the playing field changed, so did the rules. In short, the music and the way of doing things changed. The mainstream explosion of artists like Kanye, Kid Cudi, and Drake shifted the focus from the street to the human being. Cities were no longer narrated; people were. A switch that was first technological, and then cultural. A two-way revolution that provided thousands of artists with a platform they might never have had by knocking on the doors of radio and television gatekeepers. If you could publish for free and if you didn’t have to talk about the street, anyone could do it. It increased competition and, with it, the quality of those who succeeded. Artists like A$AP Rocky, Tyler The Creator, Mac Miller, J.Cole, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar built their fan bases during this historical period, from 2008 to 2012, with music leaked in blogs and low-budget YouTube videos. The place of rap changed and therefore rap changed, eventually changing everything around it. 

The right words always come later. Indeed, no one ever mentioned the Blog Era until it had already disappeared. I read those two words on a blog that would close just a year later. However, what that place left behind is still with us: today's most dominant artists were born in that era, and the foundations of streaming as a model for music consumption and publication were born there. With the Blog Era, rap became everyone's, and therefore, in a sense, belonged to no one. History shows that what makes you the most popular in the world is often the same thing that will get you killed. We don't know how far away that day is, but we can certainly appreciate and enjoy how much good we still have on our hands today. Anyway, there’s always time for the right words in the end.

by Giovanni Cagni

August 2006; that's the writing on the cover of The Source, America's leading magazine on hip hop culture. Featured beneath is a photo where, posing in front of an abandoned farmhouse - a distinctly country set-up -, are among others Bun B, Pimp C, Scarface, Slim Thug, Z-Ro, Chamillionaire, Mike Jones and, of course, the mythological as well as controversial figure of J Prince. Actors starring in a totally unforeseen and unexpected exploit that is sweeping the state of Texas, and more specifically the city of Houston.

The cover has become iconic today. If it is true, as some argue, that in analyzing a cultural movement, a "classic" can be defined as a product that can either anticipate what will be its later evolution or encapsulate a precise moment in its history, this cover falls squarely into the latter category. In fact, it sculpts in time the year of Houston's dominance on the U.S. scene. It is a moment that is almost forgotten today: if one thinks of the fifty-year history of hip hop, it is customary to consider Atlanta as the Rap Capital of the last twenty years and New York that of the previous thirty, with a brief interlude of L.A.'s dominance during the gangsta rap era. Yet, in the mid-2000s, there was a period of about a year when the U.S. mainstream hip hop world set its sights on the capital of Texas, discovering an almost exotic appeal in its sound and visual imagery: the laid-back, almost sleepy flow, the heavy southern accent and slang typical of the area, the SLAB ("Slow, Low and Bangin'") cars with the essential swangers (elaborate rims sticking out up to 20-30 cm from the wheel) and the candy paint job (a glossy coating, translucent and bright that gives the car a typical candy-like appearance), teeth covered by grillz, typical jewelry popularized by Houstonian Johnny Dang, Purple Drank as a recreational drug, and a slowed-down atmosphere in the background that makes everything - from sound to mood - seems to be in slow motion. Signature style of a movement that in 2004 - driven by Mike Jones' single Still Tippin' - was captivating the entire nation, but whose roots must be sought much further back.

It was indeed a troubled path: until the late 1980s, the city of Houston itself viewed its local rap artists with distrust. The paradigm began to shift with the Geto Boys and their 1989 album Grip It! On another level - the first Texas rap album to gain attention from the trade press - and, in particular, their leading member Scarface, whose eponymous solo track broke new ground in style and attitude compared to what had been heard in the city before. It demonstrated that credible rap could emerge from Houston neighborhoods like the Fifth Ward, South Park or the Southside, and not just from Compton in L.A. or the Bronx in New York. It’s no coincidence that the Geto Boys were the first to break through outside the state of Texas with a record - We Can't Be Stopped - certified platinum in 1992, thus earning acclaim and respect from both the East and West Coasts at a time when these regions didn’t even consider the possibility that someone could rap in the Lone Star State.

Within a few years thereafter, the local rap audience in Houston made territoriality its identifying feature, and the city began to be self-sufficient. In this scenario, local rappers no longer needed to "make it" in the traditional sense of the term, as they were able to comfortably support themselves selling CDs out of their car trunks and performing live shows all over Texas and neighboring states  - often achieving numbers almost comparable to those of major labels. "I wasn't livin' like a rapper, but I was livin' like a doctor," recalls Lil Keke of the legendary Screwed Up Click.

And it was the latter that in the mid-1990s gave Houston rap its definitive framework, as we know it today, consolidating all the stylistic and outline aspects that define it. The independent label founded by the late DJ Screw was pioneering not only because of the revolutionary artistic practice that was the Chopped and Screwed technique (characterized by tracks slowed down from their original speed, to create a distinctive “screwed" sound) or the constant lyrical references to that syrup, a soda and codeine-based purple drank whose sedative effects matched so well with the aforementioned slowed-down music; but also because of the rappers' habit of using melodic, sing-songy flows, up to a full-fledged chanting inherited from the gospel tradition (think of artists like Big Moe, Fat Pat or Z-Ro). Notice how these aspects remain prevalent in today's mainstream rap and as relevant as ever. In addition to this, Screw gave the city of Houston not only a sound, but also an economic model: massive use of self-production, prolificacy as a means of maintaining  audience loyalty, direct sales without intermediaries (each mixtape could reach sales up to 20,000 copies almost all handed out by DJ Screw himself from his home window).

It’s not surprising, then, that when Houston rap exploded nationwide in the mid-2000s, one of the flagship albums was Slim Thug's debut record titled Already Platinum. The title itself embodied an entire mindset: I don't need anything from major labels, I don't need big budgets, videos, or promotion, I'm already "major without a major deal," to use a phrase from the underground label SwishaHouse, which Slim Thug was part of.

Already Platinum - entirely produced by Pharrell Williams' Neptunes, one of the hottest names on the world music scene at that moment - was just one of the several successful albums of that year. Other albums that topped the Billboard chart of best-selling rap records between 2005 and 2006 were Who Is Mike Jones? by the aforementioned Mike Jones, The People's Champ by Paul Wall (who also stole the show on Kanye West's Drive Slow that same year), Trill by Bun B and Pimpalation by Pimp C. Also in 2005, Ridin by Chamillionaire won a Grammy Award and became the most downloaded ringtone of the year - a fact that seems quaint today but was significant at the time.

Ironically, however, the release of that issue of The Source whose cover was supposed to celebrate the enduring reign of Texas rap scene instead marked its swan song. By mid-2006, interest began to wane and the scene gradually returned to its "local" dimension, rooted in the territory that had hitherto characterized it.

The seed, however, had been planted, and it would sprout cyclically in the seasons to come. In the early 2010s, a Harlem up-and-comer named A$AP Rocky emerged as the most interesting new figure the East Coast had produced in recent years, proposing a sound and aesthetic that hands-down took inspiration from Houston, that very Houston that had been ignored - if not mocked - from New York for decades. In today's music scene we can find elements of slowed down, screwed tracks, not only in mainstream rap from any region but also in pop and electronic music. Even the Italian scene felt the Texas influence when, in the mid-2010s, a trap wave came making use - perhaps without many exponents being aware of it - of constant references to that "syrup" cleared in H-Town decades earlier.

With the spotlight off, Houston rap was able to return to the status quo it was accustomed to, to that independence that was almost a boast and an added value for its audience. An independence that doesn’t fail to touch on peaks of self-referentiality. An emblematic episode was when Drake, during a live show in Houston, attempted to make a brief tribute to the city by playing the beginning of Z-Ro's Mo City Don - a song largely unknown outside Texas and neighboring states - and found himself forced to wait for the entire arena to finish rapping the whole song in unison, word for word.

Today, the Houston hip hop scene - with the exception of Travis Scott, whose made-in-Texas-superstar status is second only to the unmatched Beyoncé - continues to live by this attitude with artists like Sauce Walka or Maxo Kream, who carry on the peculiar tradition of hometown heroes for whom gaining notoriety outside their borders is useful but not essential.

A philosophy that can be aptly summarized quoting a bar from a Texas rap legend like the late Pimp C:

by Naomi Kelechi Di Meo

Chicago, along with its rival cities, has long been a prominent force in the promotion, transformation, and popularization of numerous musical genres that continue to dominate the digital charts today. The struggle and fame of its inhabitants have endowed it with the responsibility and privilege of reinventing itself and evolving to more classic beat sounds such as gospel, urban blues and jazz, transforming them into more experimental and avant-garde genres such as house, hip pop, and the more recent drill.

The history of rap in 1990s Chicago is an exciting and compelling journey through urban culture and its socioeconomic challenges that led citizens belonging to a complex political background to use artistic expression as a tool for vindication. A vibrant rap scene that embraced authenticity, struggle and innovation; it is precisely because of this, that the city has given birth to some of the greatest talents and masterpieces of the genre.

The 1990s was a period of profound social and economic transformation in the United States. Chicago, a city with a history of ethnic segregation and socioeconomic inequality, provided a fertile ground for the emergence of new voices that sought to address these issues through music. Urbanization, unemployment, and street violence shaped the daily experiences of young people, fueling their need to express their stories and struggles. Thus, during this decade, Chicago saw the rise of several rap artists who gave voice to the city's experiences. One of the most iconic artists of this period was Twista, renowned for his extraordinary ability to rap fast. His unique style made him a pioneer of chopper rap, a term referring to a specific style of rap characterized by the extensive use of chopper flows or chopper-style flows. These flows place an emphasis on high speed and complexity of pronunciation, as the rapper delivers syllables and words in rapid succession, often overlapping them to create a kind of sonic fusion. This style is known for its technical difficulty and requires considerable vocal and breath control on the part of the performer. The term "chopper" refers to automatic or semiautomatic firearms, thus, in the context of rap, "chopper flows" suggest a rapid and continuous stream of words akin to machine gun fire. This style was later popularized by artists such as Tech N9ne, Bone Thugs-N- Harmony, and Busta Rhymes. While the lyrics may deal with a variety of topics, the primary focus is often on showcasing the rapper's technical skills and creating a fast-paced, engaging beat.

As Chicago's hip hop scene gained popularity, a thriving underground community also emerged. Groups like Do or Die and Psychodrama provided a platform for emerging artists, offering authentic and sometimes raw perspectives on life on the streets in the city’s neighborhoods. Do or Die is a hip hop trio consisting of Belo Zero, N.A.R.D., and AK-47, all from the Parkway Gardens neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The group became known for their unique style, blending gangsta rap with poignant melodies and themes. In 1996, they released their debut album entitled Picture This, which was a major success thanks to the hit single Po Pimp. This song topped the charts and helped propel the group to national recognition. Over the years, the trio has continued to release albums and collaborate with other artists, maintaining a significant presence in the city's hip hop scene.

The originality and courage of these group members inspired other artists to pursue the path of music and immerse themselves into a real social cypher where, even outside of the circle and sessions, new generations of musicians competed for a place within what could now no longer be considered a trend or a phase, but a real cultural fortress: hip hop and rap. Another prominent figure from one of Illinois' most important cities is Common. Known for his lyrical style (conscious rap) and distinctive voice, the artist delves deeply into social, political and personal issues through his music. He has challenged the stereotypes of mainstream rap by focusing on topics such as identity, equality, love and life in urban communities. His sharp lyrics and commitment to addressing important issues have made him a respected figure in the hip hop world. Common has released several successful albums throughout his career, including Like Water for Chocolate, Be, and Finding Forever. His musical style ranges from using soul and jazz samples to incorporating innovative beats, creating a unique sound that reflects his artistic authenticity.

Unlike other cities, Chicago has been able to experiment with hip hop and rap, giving these genres multiple dimensions due to the musical heritage of that area. The producers’ creative use of sampling led to original and innovative beats. In addition, the influence of the Chicago Trax Records label contributed to the fusion of electronic elements in rap music, creating a distinctive style with house and techno influences. Not only that, underground rap and street culture played a central role in this evolution in those years. Cypher and jam sessions allowed artists to test their skills and share their experiences in informal environments. These spaces fostered collaboration and the sharing of diverse cultural backgrounds, resulting in a creative energy that defined much of the scene. Furthermore, it enabled non-White and often impoverished communities to develop a style of dress and attitude that partially allowed these groups to be conceived differently from the existing stereotypes. This phenomenon allowed direct access to the world of white Americans who, with the growth of rap and hip hop, became interested in and passionate about what was distant from them on ethnic and class grounds.

Chicago would never be the same after the arrival of Kanye West on the music and cultural scene. Praised by all as a visionary, Kanye has managed to push rap and hip hop beyond traditional canons by creating a new approach to music-making. Between genius and controversy, Kanye is one of the most influential figures in the contemporary music scene. Born on June 8, 1977, in Atlanta, Georgia, Kanye entered the music business as a producer before emerging as one of the most innovative and prolific artists of recent decades. The artist gained notoriety as a hip hop producer, working with the likes of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

However, it was with his debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004 that he truly made his mark. The album skillfully blended rap with soulful samples and personal lyrics, offering a fresh alternative to the hip hop scene at the time. Kanye's musical career has been marked by his constant quest for innovation and experimentation. His subsequent albums, such as Late Registration, Graduation and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, pushed the boundaries of the hip hop genre, incorporating elements of electronic, pop and alternative rock music. His ability lies in breaking into the mainstream without ever falling into the mundane, incorporating unexplored sounds and musical territories into his repertoire. This is why Kanye is respected in spite of everything: his quest is not based on the incessant desire to make numbers, but on a desire to be eternal. Like others, Kanye’s lyrics are often autobiographical and reflect on his personal experiences, emotional challenges and inner struggles, ranging from mental health, his relationship with God, love and loss while always maintaining a provocative tone. His lyrics have been praised for their sincerity and emotional depth, but at the same time have drawn criticism for their content that is often considered controversial. Although born in Atlanta, Kanye grew up largely in Chicago, which is why he has a special relationship with the city. Growing up in the South Shore neighborhood, Kanye was exposed to a variety of musical and cultural influences, thus shaping his music. As with the rest of America, Chicago carries on its shoulders a complex history between racial, social and class issues. These themes have often been addressed in Kanye's songs, which discuss discrimination, injustice and oppression, drawing on his personal experiences and the realities of the city where he grew up.

Kanye laid the foundation to create a long dynasty of artists who have found inspiration and space in the industry today thanks to him. Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Chief Keef are just a few of the protégés the city proudly claims as its own, especially with the birth of drill, a subgenre of hip hop that emerged in Chicago's urban music scene during the early 2010s. The term "drill" comes from local slang, referring to both the act of firing a gun and a context of persistent socioeconomic and criminal hardship. Drill music is often raw and realistic, reflecting the experiences of urban communities, focusing on themes such as violence, the struggle for survival, and life on the streets. Precisely because of the raw and controversial nature of its lyrics, drill music is frequently the subject of criticism and debate. Some accuse the genre of promoting violence and anti-social attitudes, while others see it as a means of artistic expression that represents the realities of marginalized communities. It serves as a full-fledged cultural manifesto in which critical issues faced by the area are denounced. Chicago is known for being extremely violent, especially for the frequent shootings that have always been protagonists of the street. It is no coincidence that the city is also commonly referred to as Chiraq (a blend of Chicago and Iraq), due to the presence of real warzones in some urban areas.

The evolution of rap in Chicago from the 1990s to the present day has charted a path of growth, change, and profound cultural impact. From a simple musical movement to a powerful form of expression and protest, rap has reflected the city's social, economic, and political dynamics. Beyond music, rap in Chicago has had a significant impact on culture and social awareness. It has inspired art, fashion, and literature, helping to shape Illinois' urban identity. Today, music within the city continues to evolve, taking on new influences and experimenting with new sounds. Through artistic innovation, collaborations, and social engagement, rap keeps proving itself more than just a form of entertainment, but a tool for change and a voice for marginalized communities. We can safely say, then, that rap in recent decades has vividly demonstrated how music can be a catalytic force for reflection, understanding, and social transformation.

by Simone “Danno” Eleuteri

There’s a street with a corner building that you can't even tell, and there’s a thrift shop. Nothing is written on it, not even the name of the band or the title of the record. Or rather, the title is written on the store's sign, in fact it is the name of the store: Paul's Boutique. The Beastie Boys' second record.

The most challenging of all, both for those who made it and for us to listen to, because before that record, the Beastie Boys were something else. They were the ones mixing rap with rock, the easy kind, the one that anyone could grasp, and they were the ones talking shit in rhyme like it was always playtime. They would come on stage drunk accompanied by caged dancers and a giant inflatable dick spraying beer on the audience, let's not forget that. They were the ones who taught a whole generation of kids like me that "fighting for your right to party" was the ultimate goal in life. The formula was as simple as it was successful. Shrieking rhymes in perfect loud rap style, blaring drum machines and guitars like there was no tomorrow. Victory! Up to a point... as following their story closely, you find out that the idea of blending those guitars with rap wasn't so much theirs as it was Rick Rubin's, who had crafted for that record a "cleaner" sound than what the three white kids from NY with gold chains dreamed of.

In the end, they just wanted to rap, the way it was done in the Bronx, with the exchanges and the rhyme routines and all that. And the more you look, the more you realize that those somewhat silly and somewhat gratuitously offensive rhymes, that "beer and girls only" mentality, eventually weren't enough for the three of them, they didn't identify with it. Actually, at that time it wasn’t just the three of them but four: with them was always photographer Ricky Powell, the fourth Beastie Boys, the ultimate Lazy Hustler, a pure dirty New Yorker. For the Beastie Boys are New York through and through. Yet, as much as they embodied a hundred percent the spirit of the Big Apple and were sons of Brooklyn, they were forced to record their second album on the opposite coast, far away from home, in Los Angeles. Paul's Boutique precisely, their most difficult record.

I was 15 or 16 at the time and Licensed to Ill was like a religion to me. I wanted to be the Beastie Boys. I was always looking at the picture inside the cover where King AdRock makes that grimace with his mouth bent down. I wanted to be like that, with the crooked hat and the grimace on my mouth. I wanted to be Adrock. When I heard the new record was coming out, I couldn’t wait - I had to have it right away. So I stormed out of the house and went to the record store on viale Eritrea that is now gone. I asked the saleswoman if they had the new Beastie Boys record, and after some confusion, they handed me the cassette. With that strange cover picturing a corner store, without even any writing on it. I was kind of disappointed to see it, as it wasn't what I expected after the plane crash cover, but it's okay, it's just the cover. The record is going to be a bomb, I thought. There's going to be another Fight for your right, another No sleep till Brooklyn, there's going to be more guitar and more silly genius of songs like Girls… but no, that wasn’t the case. I expected, indeed demanded a record like the previous one. But it was completely different, starting with the intro To all the girls, which was almost the opposite of that Girls track recalled before. I didn't understand. Where were the Beastie Boys burning things in their videos and bringing chaos to the nerds party? Yeah ok.. Hey Ladieeessss… the truth is, I was upset about it. I didn't like that record, there were no guitars, no rock and rap fusion. I didn't understand the cover, and I didn't understand a lot of other things. I was trying really hard to grasp something that would bring me back to the first record, but I found nothing.

However… there were a lot of interesting sounds, damn weird and intriguing to someone like me who had barely listened to about four rap records in total; because that record, produced by the Dust Brothers, is a super collage of whatever break or funk samples you can think of. A perfect example of music for B-Boys. A musical kaleidoscope that can make you dizzy. The very essence of hip hop sampling. It took me a while to understand it; I wasn't prepared. I didn't know the music it was made from - the original samples for that matter, and I wasn't able to catch the quotes and all the references it contained. It floored me, yet at the same time everything about that record fascinated me more and more. Every time one of their tracks started, there were sounds I didn't know, I couldn’t even identify the instruments. It was a mix of crazy ideas that, nevertheless, had incredible consistency. I still couldn't translate the lyrics, but the lyrics were probably never the Beastie Boys’ strength. Their strength was always that healthy desire to have fun making music in every possible way, without being afraid of anything - not even of subverting the formula that had brought them worldwide success. Paul's Boutique was not successful when it came out; it didn’t repeat the numbers of the first record and was considered a flop by industry insiders. But a phoenix rises from the ashes, and from that moment on, the Beastie Boys never stopped.

They took a freefall and produced one record better than the next, played actors making some of the most incredible music videos of the 1990s and beyond. Just think of Intergalactic, the video for Sabotage, or the slow-motion video for So whatcha want. In every video, as in every record, their desire to have fun and play with music shines through. From Paul's Boutique onward, they did everything: they played instruments, they sampled, they self-sampled, they made up fake samples to take the piss out of music nerds, who didn't take the piss anyway because no one ever noticed the fake samples. They went back to punk, made instrumental records, put on the Tibetan Freedom Concert, then went back to an almost-old-school rap to celebrate their wounded city in 2001 with the album To The 5 Boroughs. They have collaborated with everyone from Biz Markie to De La Soul to Cypress Hill to Q-Tip to Nas. While the Beasties have experimented with every possible sound, the most striking thing is how their rap has remained consistent over the years; always the same, despite the changing “musical eras”. While all rappers’ flow and techniques have evolved over time, they have codified that old school style of somewhat shrieky, simple, basic rhymes into their signature style, the Beastie Boys style. Bomb-proof. And anyone who is truly into music, not just hip hop, can't pretend they weren't there. They came to Rome to play, and we went to see them at the Palacisalfa. There was supposed to be a spinning stage but, obviously, in Rome it didn't spin. They made our heads spin though, whirling. They returned to Rome a little later at the Villaggio Globale, a social center. I couldn’t make it; I had a fever and missed one of the most important nights ever in Rome. Just the three of them, together with Mix Master Mike cutting breaks like hell, making rap as basic as at park jams in the 1970s. I know all the stories of those who were there by heart. It still kills me.

Paul's Boutique, the store, has been gone for a long time. MCA aka Adam Yauch passed away in 2012, and the Beastie Boys as a group no longer exist. Ricky Powell, the fourth Beastie, also left us in 2021 to go smoke his jazz cigarettes who knows where. I don't think they will ever play live again. Somehow, it feels like a finished story. There’s a beautiful book and a beautiful documentary that reconstructs it all for those who are curious.

But although it is somehow a closed chapter meant only for memories, for me it remains an open chapter. I always play their music in DJ sets, always search through their songs hoping to find tracks I don't know or maybe don't remember, and I have a deep gratitude to every DJ who includes them in their sets. Because every time I listen to one of their songs, I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. If I close my eyes, I see three New York City kids, one with a strange grimace on his face, having the time of their lives and laughing their asses off while making incredible music come to life.

Long live the Beastie Boys!

by Koki Flores

As I'm taking Marné out to pee, a dry pine needle and a fucking pebble ended up in my right slipper. The random shuffle of my favorite Spotify tracks, which I indulge in from time to time to listen to old stuff that sounds better to me than new one, starts playing Aesop Rock's Corn Maze. I think that for a while, maybe fifteen years ago, Aesop Rock was one of my favorite rappers, with that obsessive way of his of researching words, rhymes, metrics and images, as if doing rap was something extremely scientific and artistic at the same time, like he was trying to invent the wheel.

Actually, it was the wheel - or something like it - that Aesop Rock and a group of artists led by a ginger-white guy from Brooklyn with his own label were trying to invent in the early 2000s somewhere in New York: the label was Def Jux, and the ginger guy was El-P, a genius.

Quote from the genius: "This ain't no made for TV Nursery Rhymes, this is some real we're-living-in-the-apocalypse music shit". With this brutal, Dickian phrase, El-Producto opened one of the Def Jux documentaries found on DVDs attached to some of the label's compilations; one of his many slogans or mantras that, in a few words, made things clear right away by taking a serious, anti-stand. Every so often, I go to YouTube and dredge up the documentary just to hear this phrase on repeat over the Delorean instrumental, and it makes me feel like I'm part of something different from the music reality in Italy in 2023, and it feels good.

Anyway. My life collided with Def Jux in 2003. I was seventeen and had gone to Jaison’s house with some friends to play PlayStation. Jai had found the pirated disc of Tony Hawk's Underground, so he had put it on and we were playing it. As with the joystick I was doing skateboard tricks that only on the PlayStation I could manage to do, suddenly there come from the television two notes of an alien symphony and two voices alternating in a dystopian chorus that, in a handful of words, slapped me with a search for spirituality within a mechanical life, combined with a violent instinct born of the ghetto, of Harlem. It sounds like gibberish bullshit, but it's fucking not.

They were Cannibal Ox, the song Iron Galaxy, the record, a masterpiece of hip hop, a classic of underground rap: The Cold Vein.

To me, that track was the most absurd thing I had ever heard up to that point. It was a step up from everything I had encountered before; I felt it was mine despite living in a boring Roman suburb while they were in New York, on the other side of the world. I liked the street dreams of Nas and co., but they weren't mine; at 17, with no money in my pocket, my father working on construction sites, my mother working for a woman who didn't work, and with all the monsters in my head, I saw myself more in a dystopian narrative than in a street one. It was the music of someone experiencing an apocalypse, precisely. At 17, it made sense.

So, I discovered Definitive Jux (that's the name it took after a legal beef with Def Jam went bad) in 2003, four years after it was founded by El-P and Amaechi Uzoigwe, who is still El-P's manager in the Run The Jewels project. The label was born after the legendary avant-garde hip hop group Company Flow (El-P, Bigg Jus and Mr. Len) had a not quite idyllic experience with the Rawkus label, for which they had released the monumental - and my personal favorite - Funcrusher Plus. Things had not gone their way, so the then 26-year-old El-P decided to go his own way.

The Brooklyn's redhead independent label would never have existed, however, without two iconic figures in hip hop history that everyone should know about, but they don't and that's okay. Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia, who, with their radio show, made rap history by creating an alternative to the commercial and pop channels of the time, hosting artists initially almost unknown but who would later become stars, like Jay Z, Fat Joe, Big Pun, Eminem, the Wu Tang and many others but also niche artists like Godfather Don, Mad Skillz, the Black Moon. The Notorious B.I.G. appeared on their show in '91, a year before he signed with Bad Boy and three before his album Ready to die, just to be clear.

Stretch and Bobbito were among the fathers of counter-cultural rap, planting the seed of experimentation and avant-garde that flourished, among many other parts, especially in Def Jux. The two were also the protagonists of one of the best nights of my life in Milan with a wonderful selecta between rap, funk, salsa, and more - but that's another story.

Returning to Tony Hawk's Underground, after being hit in the face by Iron Galaxy, while playing came on Phantom by such Mr. Lif, who I had never heard of (I was 17, after all), but who had the same producer as the Cannibal Ox’s banger, the redhead guy from Brooklyn. Once I put two and two together, I decided that everything from Def Jux had to be mine, and so it partly was.

There was a store in Rome near Piazza del Popolo called DeejayMix. Inside, besides a lot of techno, hardcore and - I think - house cult stuff (genres I didn't give a shit about) there were also some rap records from independent labels like Stones Throw, Anticon, Quannum Project and Rhymesayers.

Labor Days and Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives by Aesop Rock, Dead Ringer by RJD2, I Phantom by Mr. Lif, The end of the beginning by Murs, the Def Jux 3 compilation with the DVD with videos, Ravipops by C-Rayz Walz, Black Dialogue by Perceptionist, were all records I had managed to get my hands on, all records I’m still very attached to to this day, along with the ones I had downloaded from eMule, IRC and Soulseek. I don't remember if I had Hell's Winter by Cage as an original, but anyway I was hooked on it. I also had a couple of Def Jux t-shirts; the one with the skeleton whose head looks like a cartridge brought me good luck and, through an odd domino effect of life, is the reason why I do the work I do today and write what I’m writing here now.

El-P had gathered in those years between 2001 and 2010 all these weird and talented kids, giving them a hip hop vision that was completely different from what was around and that, perhaps because of this, was pointed at as white and nerdy, not very hip hop, "not very black." In Italy, I still remember the fundamentalists of a certain sound who derisively called this music "cookware" because of the distorted drums. All bullshit. Def Jux had its roots in Public Enemy, Boogie Down Production, Run DMC, EPMD; their songs were sophisticated yet dirty, they had a graffiti mentality, aiming to vandalize music and its rules. As El-P's bar says in the track We're Famous on Aesop Rock, their fucking stuff was "classic hip hop bombage dirty with style progress."

Maybe this style progress stuff - along with all the sermons on dystopia I won't go over again - was another of Def Jux's key features that I went crazy over. Maybe this style progress stuff connected in my head, at that moment, New York, a city where you breathe art (arrow symbol: style progress) with “my” Rome of those years where, at an art high school, I was studying artists who were breaking the mold (arrow-symbol-again: style progress). For me, they were like me: them in their post-9/11 New York and me, who felt like I was experiencing 9/11 almost every year. In 2023, my real attitude in everything I do is still like that, a classic hip hop bombage, dirty with a style progress, period.

I add a list of songs, a playlist, a compilation I was going to make for a friend to explain to him what Definitive Jux was. Not all of them can be found on Spotify.

Company Flow - DPA (as seen on tv)

Cannibal Ox - Vein

Mr. Lif - Phantom

Cannibal Ox - Pigeon

Aesop Rock - Daylight

Aesop Rock - We’re famous feat. El-P

Aesop Rock - 9-5ers Anthem

DJ Eli feat. Breezly Brewin, Q-Unique, Godfather Don, J-Treds & MF DOOM - Fondle 'Em Fossils

El-P feat. Aesop Rock - Delorean

El-P - Deep space 9mm

RJD2 - Smoke & mirrors

C-Rayz Walz feat. Breezly Brewin, J-Treds, MF DOOM, Thirstin Howl III, Vast Aire, Wordsworth - The Lineup

El-P and Cage - Oxycontin Part 2

Murs & 9th Wonder - Walk like a man

The Perceptionist - Breathe in the Sun

Cage - Stripes

Cage feat. El-P, Aesop Rock, Tame One, and Yak Ballz - Left It to Us

El-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster

by Federico Maccarrone

There is one story, among the many about Virginia, that deserves to be told and appreciated, not only for how it came about, but more importantly for its impact on the world music scene.

This is the story of a journey in search of peace, a talent show that gave birth to The Neptunes, a house in Norfolk where Timbaland's project with Missy Elliot came to life, and a sibling duo gave rap lessons to the entire globe.

But one step at a time, because before we talk about how instrumental Virginia has been in the growth of rap, we need to understand its socioeconomic history.

Flashback: the story of Hampton Roads, a triangle consisting of Virginia Beach, Newport, and Norfolk reads like a coming-of-age novel; its first act was set in motion by Captain John Smith when, in 1607, he landed at Cape Henry, located right at the entry point to the Chesapeake Bay, which connects the three areas mentioned earlier. This arc that links the three towns proved from the start to be an ideal trading hub and starting point for settlers' inland expansion.

Due to its strategic location, Virginia became one of the nerve centers for the slave trade, widely exploiting slaves on the state's plantations, particularly tobacco plantations. From 1661, in fact, citizens of Virginia were allowed to own a number of slaves, who had no rights and were often compared to "things", as it emerges in literature. This discrimination and rampant racism affected all of Virginia, even reaching as far as Hampton Roads.

The Industrial Revolution spurred the enormous growth of the towns of Hampton Roads: railroads transported coal across Virginia to Norfolk and Newport, transforming them into booming ports and establishing Hampton Roads as a key naval base for the entire state. More specifically, the area between Virginia Beach and Norfolk fostered the growth, during the 1800s, of another important industry: the war industry. Over time, this portion of territory became home to a significant concentration of Virginia's naval and air bases.

This process led to the birth of the New South, the result of the new economic boom, which dragged the South into the modern era of mechanization and mass production, boosting employment opportunities and increasing the attraction of Hampton Roads. The heightened demand for labor thus encouraged a wave of immigration, especially in the white-and blue-collar jobs. The former were engaged in the service sector, while the latter in the many factories in the area.

In this way, Norfolk had become, by 1950, the fifth fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States. Wards Corner, the city’s busiest intersection, was dubbed the Times Square of the South, with over 60,000 cars passing through daily, immensely boosting the area's commerce and strategic importance.

In the 1980s, the population in the Virginia Beach area continued to grow, yet racial inequality remained a major aspect in social reality. At that time, over 60 percent of minorities employed by the city worked in maintenance jobs.

Despite the widespread perception of Virginia Beach as a place where one could seek leisure and lightness, bolstered also by the area's now unbridled tourism, various events suggested the need to reassess this belief. The most notable was certainly Greekfest 1989, when, during a peaceful demonstration, several African Americans were arrested for loud music and similar minor offenses. This incident caused a riot to the notes of Fight the Power, and numerous young African Americans were assaulted and arrested by the police.

After Greekfest, the city tried to create several community groups that focused on minority populations and race relations, but a glaring paradox emerged: while Virginia Beach was ostensibly an extremely  modern and diverse area, it also failed to provide egalitarian coexistence between ethnic and socioeconomic lines.

In spite of this, Teddy Riley, one of the most relevant record producers for hip hop and pop music at that time, fell in love with Virginia Beach, and in 1990 decided to move there with his artistic career after losing most of his family and friends in Harlem.

To understand who we are talking about, just consider some of the artists he worked with - Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown, Jay Z, and many others.

Upon moving there, Teddy's biggest challenge became nurturing an artistic scene that had not yet seen the light of day in Virginia. How this happened, however, is unbelievable: in an effort to probe the artistic potential of some students at a Virginia Beach school, Teddy became the judge of a school talent show.

At this juncture, a duo appeared that, according to him, stood out for complete originality in the way they played and looked. The artists composing this duo were the typical evidence of the saying stating that successful teamwork means that 1+1 no longer equals 2, but 3. These two guys were Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, better known as The Neptunes.

What characterized this producer duo was their transversality: as much as the imprint was deeply hip hop, their sound attracted not only the likes of Snoop Dogg and Nelly, but also numerous pop singers, such as Britney Spears, Madonna, Justin Timberlake and many others. Their impact was so profound that by 2003, the Neptunes had boasted an impressive record: 43 percent of the tracks played on U.S. radio stations were produced by them.

Teddy's discovery of the Neptunes set off a domino effect: Pharrell and Chad introduced a couple of other artist duos to the recording industry who, over time, would become Virginia icons.

Teddy's arrival had turned the light on one of the leading pop and hip hop producers in history along with the Neptunes - DJ Timmy Tim from Norfolk, better known as Timbaland. The son of an Amtrak employee, a railroad transportation company, he formed, along with Pharrell and Magoo - a longtime Virginia rapper who recently passed away - a group called SBI (Surrounded by Idiots).

In the early 1990s, Timbaland began collaborating with a Portsmouth rapper, the daughter of a U.S. Navy member. Her name was Missy Elliot, and she became a pivotal figure in the rap world with albums like Supa Dupa Fly. Her story has now become a cult. Like The Neptunes, Timbaland created a sound so distinctive that he was able to produce the likes of Jay Z, Aaliyah, and Nas in the 1990s; by the early 2000s, he had finally launched himself as a cross-genre producer, reaching pop and Billboard chart-topping productions.

A final piece of this artistic puzzle is a rapper from Virginia Beach named Malice, a well-known drug dealer in the area. Pharrell, in particular, was so impressed by the young man's lyricism and attitude that he decided to start collaborating with him. Although Malice was initially affiliated with another rapper, the sessions were also attended by a young boy, Malice's younger brother, who was constantly captivated by the flow and beats that were being created. Pharrell's attention soon focused precisely on this teenager, who was dabbling and trying to develop his own style. That little boy would later take on the name Pusha T.

It was when the two brothers decided to collaborate, that another hip hop group that would teach the globe how to rap was born: the Clipse.

The narrative focused on street life and drug dealing enabled the brother duo to bring Lord Willin' and Hell Hat No Fury to life, worldwide masterpieces of the genre. Even today, Pusha T is universally recognized as a benchmark for coke rap, achieving a legendary status over the years.

In the hip hop world, this circle of friends has become one of the most important scenes ever, contributing to the creation of what is now known as the Virginia sound. To grasp how this relates to socio-economic reality, one must understand what set Timbaland and the Neptunes apart from other producers: the background of influences that, as previously said, were never confined to one musical world, but rather drew from the sounds of both the East and West Coast. In doing so, each of the aforementioned was unlike any other. This sound was so recognizable that it was appealing to both the rap and pop world.

In short, the melting pot that, from a social point of view, had only been partially realized in the Hampton Roads triangle, found full expression in the music of these artists. However, Virginia Beach had not shed its contradictions: as fundamental as this territory was to hip hop, it was incapable of fostering true equality among citizens of different backgrounds.

And to understand this, it is suffice to consider the closing lines of Malice’s verse in Virginia, one of Lord Willin''s most important tracks: "Virginia’s for lovers, but trust there's hate here / For out-of-towners who think they gon’ move weight here / Ironic, the same place I'm making figures at / That there’s the same land they used to hang n***** at, in Virginia."

Lapidary and cutting, symptomatic of a social malaise where music was the only, true winner.

by Emanuele Mongiardo

Like most people, I became acquainted with Mobb Deep through Shook Ones pt. II, perhaps the first English-language song I ever memorized a few rhymes of. Even before I learned that Queens was the best place to die or that every rhyme Havoc spit was worth at least twenty-five years in jail, there was one other detail that caught my ear: the sound of the gas button at the beginning of the song. It’s maybe because even in my house, before starting the stove, there was the same ticking sound, but that detail made Mobb Deep's masterpiece even more unique to me. As I grew older, I realized the kitchen was not a random backdrop - Prodigy was not brewing coffee for his friends, and the stove was among the recurring elements of a certain kind of rap. That sound, then, became even more fascinating, adding a layer of further credibility to the track: Havoc had been so creative and, at the same time, anchored in reality, that he started the beat of his most iconic song with the sound of a stove, possibly used for cooking crack. However, a few days ago, in an interview celebrating hip hop's 50th anniversary, Hav confessed that the story about the gas button was just a legend: he hadn’t sat in a kitchen in the Queens high-rises with a sampler, it was simply the sound of drum kit cymbals. No big deal: the fact that he disguised that sound so well, to the point of creating a mystical aura around it, underscores his talent even more.

Yet, in Mobb Deep's early days, it wasn’t Havoc who handled the production, but Prodigy. The two switched roles during the creation of The Infamous, when they had to make a virtue of necessity. In fact, affecting the creative process behind their masterpiece was P’s struggle with sickle cell anemia, the disease that would eventually take his life at 42. Prodigy spent his entire life between the streets and hospitals. Constant hospitalizations kept him away from music production machines, so he had passed on his knowledge of sampling and production to his partner. Havoc, on the other hand, had helped Prodigy early in his career to refine his writing. The time spent being treated allowed P to hone his lyrics, making him one of the best writers in the history of the genre. Thus was born the legend of one of hip hop's most enduring and influential groups.

The Infamous allowed Mobb Deep to redefine certain standards of New York rap. Prodigy and Havoc were fresh off the flop of Juvenile Hell, their debut album. Despite the involvement of distinguished producers such as Premier and Large Professor, the album remained impersonal, lacking originality and energy. After this failure, their label, Island Records, dropped them, but Hav and P didn’t give up. What had motivated them was another Queens contemporary, Nas: his ‘94 release Illmatic had stunned everyone, and after listening to it, Mobb Deep realized they needed to improve and experiment with something different. They needed to brand their work with lasting marks. "We made our first album (Juvenile Hell, ed.) at Prodigy's grandma's house in Hempstead, Long Island, away from the crew and away from Queensbridge," Havoc recounted. “All of that had been translated into music; it wasn't us." To make up for it, Havoc took over the productions, and the two locked themselves away in Queensbridge, their true source of inspiration, to write and record.

The neighborhood is still home to the largest public housing complex in the United States and, during the crack epidemic of the 1980s, had one of the highest homicide rates in all of New York City. That violence pervaded the lives of Havoc and Prodigy; the two, for example, met at school after a fight in which Havoc nearly got stabbed.

Mobb Deep's career is steeped in everything going on under the bridge, from rooftop videos to slang, to dun language, that phenomenon whereby Hav and P substituted the 's' for the 'd' in certain words (for example, son became dun, hence dun language). The inspiration came from Bumpy, a friend of theirs with this particular speech defect. The dun language would become a hallmark of QB rappers, including Nas or even Capone-n-Noreaga ("So what u rep, dun?/ Dun, the Infamous, QB houses, where niggas stand out all night and make thousands," in collaboration with Nore, would become one of the most pounding choruses of Prodigy's career).

Queensbridge has been the muse for some of the greatest rappers in history. Nas has been able to tell its story in a poetic way, offering a top-down perspective that renders reality with a more delicate style, typical of those who know how to step away to better focus on what’s in front of them. In contrast, Mobb Deep’s point of view remains entirely internal, documentary: they are on the front lines, fighting their personal Vietnam, there is no room for a register other than the harsh reality described. Any virtuosity remains inextricably linked to their first-person street narrative.

From The Infamous to Murda Muzik, their fourth album, Havoc masterfully condensed the malaise of the 41st side into productions that are as raw as they are minimal, with piano turns made into a mournful background. He’d found the Shook Ones Pt. II sample in a Herbie Hancock vinyl left to Prodigy by his paternal grandfather, jazz musician Budd Johnson (music ran in P.'s family DNA. His father, before turning to crime, was also a jazz musician, while his grandmother had opened a dance studio in Jamaica: a photo of him as a child, dressed as a dancer, would spark Jay-Z's diss track Takeover). Prodigy, on the other hand, turned his pen into one of his beloved fire arms, which would cost him jail time between 2008 and 2011. He could be incredibly airtight and deep within a single bar, while being descriptive down to the smallest detail in the storytelling, especially when it came to shootings and guns (Quiet Storm's image of him closing his eyes, startled by gunfire the first few times his father took him shooting as a child, is photojournalistic, it feels like we are looking at it: "Even my pops too, he taught me how to shoot when I was seven/I used to bust shots crazy, I couldn't even look because the loud sound used to scare me"). Not to mention how he knew how to present himself on the track: the amount of iconic rhymes in Prodigy's opening is countless, no one was breaking down the beat with the same attitude ("I break bred, ribs, 100$ bills," "I got you stuck off the realness," "There's a war goin' on outside, nobody is safe from," "Queens get the money, long time no cash").

If Mobb Deep's perspective is confined to Queensbridge, how can we explain such vast and enduring success? Part of the credit goes to hip hop devotees, who are able to recognize the artistic value of rhymes and productions: their sound and style of writing are timeless, serving as a benchmark up to this day.

However, if Mobb Deep's discography still lives on and generates devotion it is thanks to the sentiment that permeates almost their entire catalog. The sense of anger conveyed by Prodigy and Havoc resonates universally, transcending any geographical boundaries: for listeners, Queensbridge or the stories of the two protagonists and their friends become a conduit for channeling personal discontent into music. While Prodigy’s perverse threat to stab someone with the bone of his own nose is believable, coming from him, for everyone else it serves as a metaphor for the anger and frustration that everyone, sooner or later, faces in life, and that can find an outlet through art. This is precisely the greatness of rap, what makes it unique and what potentially connects American projects to audiences worldwide. On the other hand, behind Prodigy's ill will was not only the indigence of Queensbridge, but also the anger of a man forced to struggle, since childhood, with the excruciating pain of his illness (which he would express in an intimate song like You can never feel my pain) and to wander around hospitals: "I was a pissed off kid because of sickle cell anemia, so I liked the anger of hip hop. That's what attracted me to the genre, that's what made me want to do it. It helped me vent my aggression".

Havoc and Prodigy continued to perform until the last day they could. P passed away in June 2017, a few hours after a concert in Las Vegas: in Catch Body Music, a track from Product of the 80's, one of his best solo projects, he almost seemed to have foretold that end ("Las Vegas P is at the crap tables/ I'm throwin' G's, and I'm comin' up/ Yeah, show you how to win, show 'em where to begin/ But where you gon' end up is in god's plans"). Their legacy, however, remains alive, even beyond Havoc's solo career.

The first season of Atlanta has one of the funniest and most thoughtful scenes in the entire series. Alfred-Paper Boi is recently released from prison after shooting a person. He is sitting at a fast food counter and the waiter, a big fan of his, praises him as one of the last real rappers left - for pulling the trigger. The waiter describes himself as a true hip hop head, mentioning Biggie and Mobb Deep among his listening habits. Beyond the stereotype of the purist fan or, anyway, the one unable to metaphorize violence, that scene gives a sense of how much a certain kind of rap - the kind that can affect reality - coincides with Havoc and Prodigy’s art. Their attitude remained unique but created so many offspring, even in Europe, where groups like Co' Sang in Naples or Lunatic in Paris have interpreted that style. Not to mention Prodigy’s impact on the productions of a New York underground godfather like Roc Marciano, from whom the whole Griselda wave and drum-less rap would derive. As for me, however, and - I think - many others who have remained just listeners, the sound of the gas button still continues to resonate with the opening of Shook Ones Pt. II, whatever Havoc may say.

by Simone "mosi" Motta

Someone once said that if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. Whether it was Nietzsche or some rapper with “crybaby” tattoos on his face, it matters little.

The fact is that the deeper meaning of this rather overused maxim became clear to me after years of addiction to Instagram stories in which colorful braids swayed in rhythm on my phone screen. On the other side of the black mirror were artists my age, whom I was convinced inhabited a kind of metaverse suspended somewhere between my innermost thoughts and my smartphone, which are then exactly the same thing.

That abyss, of course, was the Internet, that intangible place with sinisterly tangible consequences, where we poured out our fears, dreams and most unmentionable secrets. We may have exposed ourselves too much, to the point that everything we fed into the web began to take on a shape, then a sound, and finally a definite face. If the Internet is the abyss, the Soundcloud generation could only have emerged from it, in the midst of that patchwork of anxieties and disturbances that we access every day.

The Soundcloud rap era falls exactly between the end of the Blog Era and the beginning of the unchallenged dominance of playlists, Spotify, and Tik Tok. It is a unique window of time, as it represents the last moment when a music scene was born with the genuine urgency to say something to the world while everything around became pigeonholed and quantifiable. The Soundcloud generation was the last to grow off the grid, away from the radar of major labels and the dictatorship of algorithms.

Musically, Soundcloud rap is hard to frame; someone once likened it to pornography: you know it when you hear it. On one side, there’s the ethereal sound of cloud rap and lo-fi; on the other, the dark sound and 808s of trap. You have melancholy of emo rap, alongside the intrusive nonsense encapsulated in keywords repeated to the point of exhaustion. On one side there’s the search for melody and catchy choruses, on the other the search for disruptive elements, distorted bass and raw production. It’s all as much rap, as it is rock. Perhaps this mixture of musical influences can be summarized by the word “punk”, or maybe it’s simply the sound of the Internet. The fact is that all these elements are part of the fluid and often self-contradictory scene that conquered the mainstream in the second half of the 2010s.

In short, within Soundcloud rap opposites coexist peacefully: there is room for Lil Pump and XXX Tentacion, Playboi Carti and Denzel Curry, Lil Yachty and Ski Mask The Slumpgod, and even 21 Savage and Post Malone if we widen the circle a bit. After all, it's still pornography; if the Internet has taught us anything, it's that categories are potentially endless, and something that makes me vomit could easily make someone else horny, and vice versa.

But you most recognize pornography when you see it, and the same is true for the artists of the Soundcloud generation. If musically it is quite difficult to pinpoint precise characteristics, aesthetically the common traits are much more obvious: facial tattoos as a flag to wave, indicating disqualification from the world of traditional work, multicolored braids and dreads to add some color to a gray existence of loneliness, and flashy outfits displaying the name of a high-end streetwear brand like Supreme to shout to the world, "I exist." Aesthetic elements that make up a real uniform, an armor reminiscent of a video game skin that makes Soundcloud rappers look more like Fortnite avatars than real people.

Drugs rounded out the picture: xanax, percocet, fentanyl, oxycodone and codeine. Then there are the guns, persistent trouble with the law, and the constant exaggeration displayed on-screen via Instagram. Binding it all together was the visceral bond with fans, who, through social media, commented on the exploits of these protagonists in a morbid game that helped fuel the next madness to post, the next wild mosh pit to jump into, or the next antidepressant to swallow.

It may sound like a platitude, but Soundcloud rap could only have been born on Soundcloud, at the time a sort of Wild West where people were free to upload their songs without the intermediary of a distributor. Anything went: songs with no clear structure, copyright violations, and one-minute tracks with no mix. Furthermore, the Swedish platform was something in between a streaming service and a social network, which incentivized community development.

The two-year period 2015-2016 is undoubtedly the golden age of the Soundcloud Era. In 2015, we saw the release of tracks like MaidenTYO's Uber Everywhere, Smokepurpp's Ski Mask, $uicideboy$'s Paris, Lil Yachty's 1 Night, Kodak Black's No Flockin', and the first chapter of Lil Uzi Vert's Luv Is Rage. But it also featured true chart-busting hits like White Iverson by Post Malone. In 2016, the movement expanded further: Lil Peep released Hellboy, 21 Savage and Metro Boomin released Savage Mode, XXX Tentacion began to make a name for himself along with Ski Mask through the Members Only collective, and artists like Trippie Redd, Lil Pump, and Smokepurrp took off. Media companies like Masked Gorilla, founded by a high school kid obsessed with niche rap, and No Jumper, founded by a BMX enthusiast, emerged strongly.

To summarize that period, just take a look at the iconic XXL Freshman Class 2016 cover: Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Denzel Curry, Kodak Black and 21 Savage are the faces of the paradigm shift taking place within the US scene.

The following year, 2017, marked the peak of that era: after the success of XXL's cypher, several mainstream media outlets began to set their eyes on what was happening on Soundcloud, most notably the New York Times, with an article putting the made-in-Florida scene on the map. XXX Tentacion conquered the mainstream with the success of Look at me, Tay-K hit the mark with the controversial single The Race, and Cole Bennet began to gain popularity with his YouTube channel Lyrical Lemonade, to the point that video clips with the yellow-and-blue lemonade carton logo became synonymous with virality.

In its heyday, however, the seeds of destruction were already visible. Veterans of the genre denigrated the movement by calling it “mumble rap” due to its lack of content and slurred delivery. Instagram-stories and the buzz around an artist became increasingly more important than the music itself; the majors, on one hand, squeezed artists to the point of exhaustion while, on the other, signed anyone with a half-viral song, and - last but not least - artists' complicated relationship with the law and substances only got worse.

The most accurate diagnosis of the decline of Soundcloud rap was made by J Cole in a 2018 track (1985: Intro to “The Fall Off”), where he addressed the army of colored-haired “Lils” as a big brother, trying to speculate on the catastrophic scenario that awaited them in the near-term future. In addition to Lil Pump - arguably the main recipient of the song - there is another artist who epitomizes the distortions and excesses of that period: 6ix 9ine. While it is true that the entire new generation initially benefited from the explosion of meme culture, it is also true that artists like Lil Pump and 6ix 9ine literally drowned in it. The success achieved by such characters led to the rapid saturation of the market: every attention-seeking kid ended up believing that a microphone, a computer, and some controversial antics were enough to become famous.

Amidst this general chaos, as if that were not enough, three tragic events accelerated the demise of Soundcloud rap.

The first event occurred in Tucson, Arizona. It was November 15, 2017, a Wednesday night, and a tour bus was parked near the historic venue The Rock. Inside that bus Gustav Elijah Åhr died from an overdose caused by xanax and fentanyl. To everyone he was Lil Peep, the unfinished star. The second event took place in Deerfield Beach, Florida. In the afternoon of June 18, 2018, a black Bmw i8 pulled out of the parking lot of a motorcycle dealership. Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy died from a gunshot wound that occurred during a robbery. To all he was XXX Tentacion, the brightest star. The last event happened at the end of 2019. On the night of December 7-8 at Midway Airport in Chicago, a team of police officers searched luggage suspected to contain weapons and drugs. Jarad Anthony Higgins died from a seizure caused by oxycodone and codeine. To everyone he was Juice WRLD, the last hope.

None of them lived on this earth for more than 21 years, yet each of them irrevocably marked the history of the Soundcloud Generation by decreeing its beginning and its end. Death sanctified them by crystallizing their music in history, but their passing also marked the end of the short parable of Soundcloud rap.

It all unfolded swiftly and intensely. If it truly was like pornography, what we are left with is post-sex blues and some good music. Or maybe it was something more: the suffering of a generation that became a liberating scream only to meet a spectacular death in the time of a refresh to the Instagram feed. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just a trend, mere exhibitionism, stupid “mumble rap.” Or maybe, that mumble, that mumbling we mocked, was the last stifled cry for help from the network.

It remains a big maybe. In doubt, I uninstalled Instagram and turned up the volume on my headphones.

by Niccolò Murgia

Rhythm and improvisation. The two cardinal principles of jazz tell a lot about the protagonists of this story and about New Orleans, the birthplace of this musical genre. New Orleans is a twofold city: it boasts a rich history and serves as a crossroads of diverse cultures, merging together to create a unique cultural vibrancy, much like the mixture of juices and spices simmering in the pots of Cajun Seafood, one of the city's signature dishes that infuses the streets of Louisiana's main city with that unmistakable Creole aroma.

Rhythm, that of the families who pass down the secret boil recipe for marinating shellfish; the familiar “street story” that U.S. magazines have chewed and spit so many times that it has become fancy, a classic tale of gentrification of customs and traditions. Improvisation, because there isn’t just the New Orleans of the Picayune's food section, the local newspaper; rather, it’s a place where a mongrel, filthy ghetto exists, where confetti from Mardi Gras - the incredible local carnival - continues to be swept up. The typical urban case of dust under the rug between different neighborhoods.

New Orleans, before marinating shrimp and lobster, was left to ferment in a Petri dish where all the United States’ problems developed, years earlier, in a diorama that Americans watched “staring behind glass, open-mouthed,” as Bianconi once wrote. Analysis of such Petri dish yielded these results: systemic racism; the crack cocaine epidemic - before East Coast newspapers labeled it so; giant housing projects that have encompassed mansions, blocks and neighborhoods turning them into ghettos and giving NOLA the grime title of the U.S. capital for homicides per capita.

The most famous of these housing complexes is called The Magnolia Projects, and in addition to being still incredibly relevant, to the point that even Playboi Carti - without ever having set foot in there - dedicated one of his biggest hits to it, it is also the place where the Williams brothers, Ronald and Bryan, were born and raised in the 1960s.

Rhythm and improvisation: the Williams brothers, better known by their stage names - “Slim” and “Baby” - who would later become “Birdman,” grew up according to the dictates of jazz: rhythm and precision for Slim, always careful to stay out of trouble, and improvisation for Birdman, mastering the lessons of Hustlin' 101 in a rapid escalation of robbery, dealing and multiple arrests. The soundtrack is still jazz, but at some point, amid the chaos and the lack of musical harmony, here comes the blue note. In the 1980s hip hop exploded and New Orleans, as a musical city, seized the opportunity, and right at the Magnolia Projects bounce music was perfected - a deeply rhythmic style that would change the city’s musical fortunes and continues to influence some of the most streamed tracks of recent years such as Drake's iconic In My Feelings, produced by local BlaqNmilD.

Upon his release from prison, Birdman finally decided to sync his tempo with Slim’s and look for a way to do business with this new local scene. In 1992 they founded Cash Money Records, a perhaps somewhat corny name that would become the epitome of rap in the States. In 1992, A&R didn’t have Soundcloud or artists' Dropbox folders, so the two brother began scouring all the nightclubs of Louisiana in search for talent or at least some fools willing to be guinea pigs for their project. Their selling point wasn’t record contacts or professionalism - both would come shortly - but rather those wads of cash made on the street they would use to buy each of the first steps of the very steep ascent from Louisiana they were about to take.

The Williams brothers began signing rappers, but their first successful deal came with DJ Mannie Fresh, a local DJ who in a very few months perfected the signature sound of NOLA and Cash Money, unexpectedly turning the label into a cult classic.

Rhythm: the one Cash Money grew up with and that prompted the Williams brothers to take a gamble on a 12-year-old boy with a few speech impediments and his entire torso wrapped in bandages - the bill demanded by his own body after a gunshot wound he had self-inflicted a few months earlier. That little boy rapped better than anyone else in Louisiana and a few years later would become, if not the strongest rapper in the United States, quite possibly the most influential. His name is Dwayne Carter Jr, but you probably know him as Lil Wayne. Improvisation: the one that led to the idea of uniting young Lil Wayne with three other promising rappers from the area - B.G., Turk, and Juvenile - into a group, the Hot Boys, in honor of a crew also from the Magnolia. This move changed the destinies of the Williams brothers, Cash Money, and the entire rap scene.

The Hot Boys' records - as a group and as solo artists - achieved unprecedented success for Southern hip hop, and opportunities be knockin'. After a very long negotiation with Universal Music who saw potential in this group of thugs and stragglers, they signed a deal that would change the music business and the trajectory of world rap forever. 30 million dollars (!) in 1998 upon signing for an 80/20 split in favor of the Williams brothers who would continue to hold the rights to the masters. For Cash Money, this deal was akin to the Louisiana Purchase by the United States in 1803: peanuts in exchange for a dream, credibility, and a promised land.

The thugs had become businessmen, but you can't take Louisiana out of the South, and as record sales transitioned from the backs of pickups to shelves of Target and Walmart, the Hot Boys remained wary of the world outside Louisiana, the scene that had always doubted them, and for months they snubbed sessions with artists of their caliber, such as Cam'ron, the Clipse and others.

They continued to prove correct: their records sold like hot cakes. Though occasional conflicts arose, there was always a silver lining: in 2003, Juvenile slammed the Williams brothers for financial reasons and left the label. Not even time for a boat ride on a bayou that he retraced his steps and released Juve the Great, a platinum-certified record featuring his only chart-topping hit: Slow Motion with Soulja Slim. The last dance came a little later: the Hot Boys fulfilled their contract and released their last record, and Juvenile severed his deal with Cash Money for good.

Without Juvenile, Lil Wayne unquestionably became the breakout star of Southern rap and the label. In 2004, he released Tha Carter, the record that launched him permanently into stardom and made him a recognizable product throughout the States, starting with the now-iconic dreadlocks that were introduced to the world by the project's cover, and ending with that Southern accent that has become a cult. Those last few years had radically changed Lil Wayne, who had abandoned Louisiana and moved to Miami, Florida closer to business and musical opportunities, having now overcome his snobbery towards the rest of the hip hop scene. The Magnolia Projects seemed a distant memory and even Carter opened his own label, Young Money Entertainment, without specifying the exact nature of the relationship with Cash Money, but obviously signaling some degree of separation.

Out of nowhere, everything changed in 2005. Wayne was busy doing an interview in Miami with XXL when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with unprecedented violence, devastating the city and surrounding areas and flooding the Magnolia, the Cash Money offices, and the old homes of the Williams brothers and the Hot Boys. And so, after being a standard bearer for the regionalisms of U.S. rap and living long enough to become a global commodity, the hurricane changed the life of Lil Wayne, who returned to New Orleans to give new hope to the city while, paradoxically, Cash Money took the opposite route and moved to Miami.

Rhythm: Lil Wayne initiated his celebrated “mixtape run”, releasing more than 80 songs in 2007 alone. He began to appear again as the NOLA hood rapper, balancing an increasing demand from stars like Jay-Z and Kanye who wanted to collaborate with him. Improvisation: this reconciliation to the world of mixtapes and musical “slums'' would be crucial for the future of Lil Wayne and Cash Money. A snotty nose now buried by pounds and pounds of new music business dirt, the world's most influential rapper quite surprisingly secured the most exciting hot commodities in the hip hop market of those years: Nicki Minaj (from New York) and Drake (from Toronto).

Both coming from the mixtape circuit that was drawing its last breaths, Drake and Minaj were antithetical to Cash Money's line so far, but somehow represented the perfect synthesis of it, between the strong territorial connotation and the global dream they lived.

It is the fate of a label that became big somewhat by accident, driven by real stars and a striking resemblance between street hustles and major labels. NOLA seemed to be long gone again, as did the problems with Birdman. However, both the city - in Drake's songs - and Birdman - with his famous contractual problems, hints of which an attentive reader must have already found in these paragraphs - would come back.

Meanwhile, as they say in Louisiana: laissez le bon temps rouler. The world's strongest rapper had just signed the two most promising up-and-comers of recent years - let the good times roll: it couldn't be any other way.

by Tommaso Naccari

If 2023 is the year hip hop turned 50, perhaps then it’s fitting to say that 2023 is the year trap turned 20.

For a long time we have been wondering how to define that wave, which - to be fair - originated from the South and swept everyone away only late in the 2010s; maybe it is more effective to do so by presenting some number as a proof that trap is, quite simply, a child of hip hop. 

Thus, with numbers printed in front of our face, maybe the most effective way, though narratively already consumed before it is even typed, is: child.

Trap is the child of what was born 50 years ago in New York, especially of one of the so-called disciplines. If we think about it, after all, a 30-year gap is a fair enough age difference between a parent and their offspring: mature enough to be an adult, yet young enough to be able to share and walk a significant part of the path together. It is no coincidence, then, that their hometowns are so different: while New York City long stood as the home - sometimes even self-referential - of the most influential genre in modern music history, Atlanta is probably the city that - de facto, at least on the East Coast - has taken the scepter of a city that has fervently sought its king and still does so, because the ones it elects always fall too young.

But what happened 20 years ago in Georgia's most important city?

Rap itself was born from the rubble. Not only the social one, but also from the literal destruction of the (dusty, I dare to say) music of the parents of those who decided to throw a party, taking, cutting, grinding, and reassembling the sounds that passed through the house. From the rubble, not collective but personal, trap also emerged. In August 2003, up until the 19th to be precise, T.I. seemed to be one of those talents that everyone saw shine and believed would achieve greatness, but that the reality of the facts returns battered and clumsy, like any Alexandre Pato after the gym. He’s always been hailed as one of the greatest talents in his area, yet, despite promising from the title that he meant business, his first record was what we would unabashedly call a flop today.

Thus, freed from his previous contract, T.I. set out again to plan the release of his second album as an independent artist. There is an unwritten rule that says the sophomore album is an artist's most difficult because it has to confirm what was good about the debut. Now, imagine the weight that can be on the shoulders of someone who completely screwed his first album. What T.I. needed to do, therefore, to prepare his new record, was to “come to terms.” He had to accept the fact that his first record was a failure, but more importantly he had to come to terms with the fact that another failure would only mean one thing, to go back to square one.

There is this little story about the beginning of hip hop that tells us that, somehow, those parties were born to keep people off the streets. In the early days, then, there was indeed a desire for emancipation, but it was definitely not economic (or at least not primarily), it was communal. So, if at first it seemed almost provocative to associate the birth of rap with that of trap, then, analyzing the motivations behind both,  there are even more commonalities.

Listening to Trap Muzik, at times it almost sounds like a cry for help, a desperate lament. Saying that trap music began sonically in 2003 is obviously a mistake (although the roots of the south sound would be the foundation of the genre that would really become popular later) but, in a rhetorical effort, we can see all that is trap in this record by T.I.

Both Mark Fisher and London DJ Kit Mackintosh associate the use of auto-tune with the sphere of pain. One does so by analyzing Future and all his successors, as well as the howls that are emitted over the beat; the other goes further back, reaching as far as Jamaica, viewing the heavy use of the tool - most hated by those who only superficially observe rap - as the ultimate attempt to dehumanize oneself, to abstract oneself from the body, the true conduit of pain.

Also Trap Muzik is pain. It is a proud pain, as heard in I Can't Quit, a sort of vindication of the artist’s role in society (despite the line “I want to be a musician, pimpin', not a politician” suggesting otherwise) and in the rap scene. But T.I.’s knowledge of the reality of trap, his knowledge of this shit - as he didactically calls it in the album's third track - beautifully comes out in Doin' My Job, the Kanye West-produced track.

Jake La Furia said he did coke-rap before rappers in Atlanta, managing to be far more succinct than yours truly in telling the attitude of an entire city that would shortly thereafter take it all. However, the narrative of drug dealing from this kind of coke rapper, or rather the first trap rapper, differs from that of Clipse, or more specifically Pusha. T.I. doesn’t say - or at least he doesn’t want it to be the primary message - that his role in the hierarchical structure makes him real. It’s a trap, pardon the pun; an actual one.

Imagine you are at Christmas dinner with cousins and various boyfriends. Each of them shares their job: some flip burgers on the griddle to make ends meet, others have hardly made it to 25 (shoutout to NAS). Well, if T.I. were at that dinner party, when asked, “What do you do for a living?” he would say he sells all kinds of substances. But he doesn’t do it with pride, he does it because he has to survive, even if it means compromising his and his community's lives. T.I. would admit that he doesn't know anyone who makes that kind of living who wants to continue doing it.

But why, then, is this record so important to the history of Atlanta? It’s not just about its musical importance - though that’s a part of it. If we look at Atlanta today, we see a city that, like the greatest cities, is beginning to lose its best talents, stuck in a life that we had told ourselves rap would elevate. Think of Young Thug and his thirst for power, think of Takeoff playing dice in a garage.

Trap Muzik is the quintessential manifesto of the misunderstanding dwelling around a city that is the emblem of a certain way of life. Even Grandmaster Flash, in the early days, talked about a message. Admittedly, some of these may seem like musings of hindsights, 20 years later; however, that sense of misunderstanding so lamented, the idea of a cage, is something that - as mentioned above - seems fundamental to trap. The genre, not the place.

You guys don't understand us? Then our music becomes a lament and takes the foundational element of the genre (the word) and transforms it, destroys it, makes it something else. Young Thug teaches. 

With Trap Muzik, then, a city began to turn the cornerstones of a genre upside down. I still remember one of the first articles I wrote for VICE in my early twenties, screaming to the world that 30-year-olds were old. Now that less than 12 months separate me from that milestone, it makes me chuckle to think I was so tranchant. Yet, I am sure that even Atlanta thought in 2003 that it was time to reform that 30-year-old genre called hip hop. All it took was a little time and, in the end, it proved itself right.

by Alessandro Quagliata

I get the impression that just hearing or reading the word “Memphis” triggers something in the minds of those who, for one reason or another, are fascinated by the States.

I'll leave you for a moment before we set off. What does Memphis make you think of?

I'll start: right now, the first image that comes to mind is the various gangsta-social skits of star Ja Morant.

Then others follow, in no particular order, and it is resounding that what all these thoughts have in common is the absence of any shade of positivity, of cheerfulness, of lightheartedness. I think that for anyone who reads the image, the person or the connection associated with Memphis, these are always somehow linked to a dark, somber, even violent imaginary.

I’ve decided to talk about Memphis and the unique flavor it has given to hip hop, not necessarily because I am a fan of the rap that this city has produced and continues to produce. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate myself a 6.5 fan when it comes to Memphis rap: by personal inclination, it’s not my top favorite within all that this magnificent history, now reaching the half-century mark, has given us. I chose M-Town, however, because I’ve always been drawn to the appeal of those doomed cities, the ones that seem to be perpetually stuck in the way they have always been, places where all those theories of environmental determinism find a real fit (“you are the way you are because your environment made you this way,” to wit) and also because, in one way or another, this past year I’ve found myself talking about Memphis with various people quite often.

The first time was with Ernia in October 2022.

His record Io Non Ho Paura was about to be released, and with Esse and Thaurus we created a narrative documentary about the album. The record was largely written during a beautiful road trip through the States, touching on Southern locations often forgotten or ignored by those visiting the U.S. (Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc.).

For the docu, I had extensive conversations  with Ernia, both on and off camera. He travels a lot and is great at telling you about the places he’s experienced. He then gave me a very accurate portrait of Memphis, which had been a stop on his tour.

 I retrieved the recording of our conversation.

“Memphis is the second largest city in Tennessee after Nashville. Nashville is a friendly, bright, smiling city, it's really beautiful, it almost looks fake. They are happy cowboys there. Memphis, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: a dirty, ugly city with a very high unemployment rate. It’s rainy, there are always clouds. It's a mess, it's tough stuff.”

He continues, “On Beale Street they pour in from all neighborhoods. We got there on a Sunday and were the only white people there. All eyes were on us. Everyone was pissed off, all gangsta, everyone! We were chicks in comparison, little chicks. There were a lot of stoned people - there's a lot of the syrup thing going on there, with these syringes without needles, like transparent piping bags. They're like slushies that you shoot in your mouth sometimes.”

Memphis is not only decay, but also a lot of music: “Elvis is not from Memphis but since he was a kid he's lived in Memphis and sucked a lot from the blues, Black Culture, and everything around it. It's a strongly blues city - you can see it right away, you go to places and there's a guy playing, you go to the bar next door and there's a girl singing. There's a stage everywhere you look”.

In New York, two months later, I met James, a 26-year-old photographer who mostly worked in the music industry, originally from Memphis. He was very curious and at the same time very serious, never hinting a smile. He asked me to tell him something about my hometown, and I told him that Salerno is a beautiful and ''edgy'' city (now, I can't recall the exact term I used to convey the meaning of this adjective, but somehow we managed to understand each other), constantly striving to assert its specific identity against its noisy neighbor, Naples.

He said as much about Memphis, adding a description that has stuck with me: “Memphis is a doomed city.” To what, I asked him. “We, down there, don't know how to dream and it doesn’t even seem like we want to. We’re a city with a lot of art but no dreams and no future.”

In a way, what James told me completed the picture.

Memphis is one of the blackest cities in the United States (depending on the census considered, blacks represent between 65 and 70 percent of the population, while New York City is at 24 percent, to give you an idea), which translates, since we’re talking about the United States, into widespread poverty, very high unemployment and lacerating inequalities.

It’s a paradox that one of the blackest cities in America “killed” Martin Luther King, who wasn’t murdered by a black man, but (materially at least) by one of those criminally insane white faces that are so prevalent in America. However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that Memphis was deeply affected by this grief, feeling a sense of failure for not being able to protect a man and a symbol that should have been defended instead, and how.

That little big sense of guilt that will never really go away has been partly mitigated by the establishment of the National Civil Rights Museum, one of the major attractions for those visiting the city today, located just inside the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was staying at the time of his assassination.

All these contextual elements should make us realize that Memphis had all the right ingredients under its belt to produce some great rap:

-       lots of Black culture;

-       a deep and diverse musical history;

-       a very complex socioeconomic environment;

-       visible crime and deviant behavior on the streets;

-       a certain taste for extreme realism.

And in fact, Memphis created its own unique - and above all, influential - style of rap. A genre that, as the saying goes “the sun doesn't shine in Memphis”, will be called horrorcore.

As was the case in so many other local scenes, Memphis’s explosion on the hip hop map followed a typical process:

1.     A DJ in the clubs creates a platform for local rappers, introducing sonic and stylistic innovations;

2.     Local streets and clubs buzz with excitement and ride these innovations;

3.     A group or rapper emerging from this situation begins to make underground hits, eventually breaking into the mainstream in the record field.

In Memphis, assuming the first role was DJ Spanish Fly.

In earlier years, Memphis had become an important center for music, not only artistically but also record-wise: large studios, independent labels, and branches of major record companies had chosen Memphis because of its extraordinary musical prosperity. In the mid-1980s, however, in a downturn, many of them shut down, leaving the city without essential sources of access to the music industry.

In those years, DJ Spanish Fly was fired from the radio station he worked for because he was constantly playing rap tracks, so he started working in a club. “I was playing underground tracks that the radio wouldn't pass on, and if their beat wasn’t that of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, I wouldn't play them,” he told Hip Hop Evolution. Then, he decided to produce mixtapes and sell them to the club for $25, a steep price compared to the historical moment and the commodity being traded (a cassette tape price could range from $3 to $8, no more).

DJ Spanish Fly became a celebrity in town, creating a showcase that wasn’t there before: being featured in his tapes or having their music played at the club was a significant goal for local rappers. If you're there, you can be somebody, if you're not there, you're nobody.

Memphis seemed indifferent to what was going on in the rest of America and created a style of its own, based on somber notes, eerie, dark sounds, deep bass, and tremendously explicit lyrics.

Additionally, since hip hop is not just about music, those years also saw the rise of the gangsta walk - a particular dance, often performed in a circle, that resembles a kind of hip hop rain dance.

DJ Spanish Fly became the spiritual father of many aspiring rappers and producers, serving also this role in the emergence of the most recognizable thing Memphis gave to rap: Three 6 Mafia.

In the early 1990s, the group developed around the personalities of Dj Paul and Juicy J; over time, other several faces and voices would join in, including that of one of the first successful female rappers in history, Gangsta Boo, who was recently celebrated by the current sensation Ice Spice in a track named after her.

Three 6 Mafia pushed the violent, dark essence of Memphis sound to the limit: it was a self-perpetuating circle, as that stuff worked in clubs and on the streets, they listened to the market and took it to the extreme. References to horror movies were continuous, and a taste for the macabre sometimes veered into some sort of “Satanism,” so much so that to this day, obviously in vain, Memphis rappers are still talked about as some kind of satanic cult.

Gangsta Boo even revealed, also on Hip Hop Evolution, that she bought a witchcraft manual to make everything as sinister as possible in her lyrics. At the end of the day anyway, there was no one to be accountable to: the group self-produced their music and sold it in the streets and clubs. Their initial releases were cassettes, then full-fledged CDs starting with their first official album Mistic Stylez. “We invested $45,000 and turned it into $45 million with Mistic Stylez,” DJ Paul would note.

Three 6 Mafia would go on to sell nearly six million records but, at least apparently, they didn't receive the same recognition as other groups or other artists of those years. Their influence, along with that of the city as a whole, would grow significantly in the years to come. Crunk music, for example, which became one of the most interesting things in rap in the early 2000s, developed in Atlanta but originated in the 1990s in Memphis, as often remarked and proudly emphasized by the city's rappers.

Various tributes now finally give credit to what Memphis rap was. Like Travis Scott's NO BYSTANDERS, that features a line sung by Sheck Wes - “Fuck the club up, fuck the club up”-, which is a pretty faithful reprise of the “Tear da club up, n****, tear da club up” from Tear da Club Up '97 by Three 6 Mafia. This phrase, literally spurring to destroy the club, tells us something very interesting about what the group brought to hip hop: an attitude of moshing, unrestrained chaos, a way of experiencing rap music at concerts in a more “rock” and “rage” way, and of which today Travis Scott himself is the most notable exponent, as we were able to witness in his two concerts in Italy this summer.

Memphis rap was pure energy, “aimless” expression, that is, without too much ambition or desire to change the world, which is really a “Memphis thing”: a city that doesn’t envision a future different or better than its present.

On the banks of the Mississippi, it rains all the time: looking at the sky you find no hope for a better tomorrow. Nor do you hope for a better tomorrow if you lower your gaze to the roads.

You get the impression that music is almost the only thing that matters over there, serving as a way to anesthetize a pain to which the city - here we come back again - seems to be eternally doomed.

It rains all the time, but Memphis is never quiet.

Back to my friend Paul, I would boldly offer my own definition of his hometown: a city steeped in nihilism, capable of destroying its own dreams and those of others as well, for even The Dream par excellence died there on April 4, 1968.

Nihilist in every aspect, precisely, except one - because in this city, an essential part of music history was and still is created.

by Federico Sardo

Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx: four of New York City's renowned boroughs are firmly embedded in the collective imagery. But there is another, much less well known.

Staten Island is best known for the free ferry that connects it to Manhattan offering panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty, and to hip hop fans, because - ferries aside - the only thing Staten Island brings to mind are two words: Wu-Tang.

The fifth borough is a mix of middle-class neighborhoods and public housing projects, shot through with heated racial conflict: in the early 1990s in the Park Hill area, fights and assaults on blacks were commonplace, and its housing projects struggled, in a particularly violent way, with the typical problems of poor areas in the United States.

It was in this little-known part of the world’s most famous city that Robert Fitzgerald Diggs lived. Under the name Prince Rakeem (not to be confused with Eric B.'s partner Rakim who had already entered the Olympus of hip hop), he had already attempted a music career under the aegis of Tommy Boy Records, resulting mainly in the single Ooh I Love You Rakeem - a commercial song with playboy lyrics that hadn’t garnered much success. Disappointed by that experience, everything was about to change for him and the history of hip hop. Changing his name to RZA and focusing primarily on beatmaking, he would soon become a legend, putting the fifth borough on the map forever.

The secrets to what happened are mainly three: the talent and innovative ideas related to sampling and production, the ability to create a very strong imagery, and the idea of putting together a kind of supergroup with an unprecedented number of members.

The original Wu-Tang Clan lineup (year of grace 1992) consisted of RZA, his cousins GZA and Ol'Dirty Bastard, and then Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, and U-God. Masta Killa joined soon after (but other names gravitated towards the group as affiliates, starting with Cappadonna, who later joined the formation permanently after ODB's death in 2004, Killah Priest, and groups like Gravediggaz and Killarmy). They were all rapping, with up to eight members on a single track, something never heard of before as well as unthinkable to manage, up to that point. Productions were by RZA, occasionally assisted by someone else, like Method Man and ODB.

Not all of them were from Staten Island, but no matter: the fifth borough became - and always will be - synonymous with Wu-Tang. Some of the members, before their rise to fame, even worked in the harbor restaurant from which tourist ferries depart.

The first act of their ascent to success was called Protect Ya Neck, and after initial difficulties convincing radio stations to play it, it exploded like a bomb through word of mouth. The loudest thing that could be heard at that time in America was this group with a structure never seen before, savage yet stylish, and above all composed entirely of stars, a kind of Dream Team where everyone was a great deal.

The debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), released at the end of 1993 after a tumultuous journey through record industry challenges and not-so-regular work to scrape together the money needed to launch the project, not only fulfilled its promises, but exceeded them beyond all expectations, proving to be one of those records worthy of entering the top 5 of all-time rap for any fan around the globe. The collective didn’t rest on their laurels; they raised the stakes with almost every track bearing the energy of a posse track, and the skills that the MCs had alluded to turned out to be even greater than anyone could have imagined; fueled by a creative environment where everyone gave their best to live up to the others, each rapper delivered verses memorable in their meaning and in the way they were expressed, all with very personal styles. There is the grim, the underworld, the crazy, the wise, the super-technical... This is true not only for the material recorded on the grooves, but also for that discourse of imagery mentioned earlier: one of the most ingenious insights of RZA, and consequently of the entire collective, was to present each member as a sort of superhero, each with a well-defined personality within a context that is once again absolutely unprecedented. In fact, the whole project drew inspiration from the imagery of the kung-fu movies they watched as children, and in the lyrics, videos, photos, and film references that appear here and there, the MC's appeared as shaolin warriors, embodying an Orientalist, martial arts-inspired philosophy (and coordinated image) - painstakingly researched by RZA and later testified to the faithful even through a couple of volumes.

Let's reiterate: a group of kids from the Staten Island housing projects, the kung-fu film aesthetic. By doing so, they moved away from everything seen before in hip hop, creating a new imagery, all their own, one with an irresistible appeal - as the thing was done so incredibly well, both aesthetically and musically.

Even RZA's sampling, that drew heavily from soul music in a raw and gritty way, was something new and different, just like the flow of his fellas. While he might have aspired to produce like the greats of the time, such as Eric B. or Rick Rubin, who used lots of short samples orchestrated in a complex way to create something new, it wasn’t easy for a newcomer in that world, who didn’t yet know how to use the instruments well, at the time still analog. He then began extending loops longer than usual, even making these soulful, orchestrated tracks go full spins for several seconds, generating a somber, almost melancholy effect that surprisingly complemented the dirty, low-fidelity drum patterns he crafted with the drum machine, again used in an almost primal way. It is this unexpected blend that characterizes the Wu-Tang Clan's sound, the hallmark of hardcore rap, and something that in turn has since influenced a host of producers (to mention just one: Kanye West).

But the legend of the Clan had only just begun, and their debut album was followed by a series of memorable projects and unparalleled solo albums emerged: between 1994 and 1996, records by Method Man, ODB, Raekwon, GZA and Ghostface Killah were released in succession. The first two were great records, while the others were, each in their own way, unfailing masterpieces that belong on any respectable rap record list. There remains regret over the lost Inspectah Deck record. On a purely technical level, he was perhaps the most brilliant lyricist in that group of superstars: his album was supposed to be released in 1995, but record-breaking issues caused a delay until 1997, then RZA's studio flooded, and hundreds of beats were lost (also those meant for U-God and Masta Killa's solo records). It was redone all over again, with productions by ID himself and appearances by other rappers, but it would not be released until 1999, stripped of its original magic. RZA still claims that the original would have rivaled Liquid Swords and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx: one of the greatest what ifs in rap history.

Speaking of magic, obviously such a state of grace could only last a few years, and not everything that happened to the Clan in the following decades would be memorable. There were some excellent records (such as the follow-up to their debut - the double album Wu-Tang Forever - or the RZA-signed Ghost Dog soundtrack, and various works by Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, who remain to this day among the best rappers on the scene) and there were also a few missteps, conflicts and ups and downs, a tragic death, and the complicated story of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the record produced as a single physical copy, sold at auction and bought, reportedly for a couple of million dollars, by one of the most despicable figures in the history of U.S. capitalism (Martin Shkreli, the one who got rich by buying a drug patent and raising its price by 5455 percent overnight).

These stories could fill an encyclopedia, and there’s simply not enough space here to cover everything. After all, over the years, the Clan's mythology has been carried on by numerous books, essays, and memoirs, by one of the first streetwear brands to be born out of a music group (Wu-Wear), even by fictional TV series (Wu-Tang: An American Saga), and by a wonderful docuseries entitled Of Mics and Men. The latter, though not easy to find, is highly recommended, since it pretty much tells the whole story, as much as you can do in four hours, and it also makes you see and hear it.

The fact, then, is that we are talking about the Wu-Tang Clan on hip hop’s 50th birthday, a culture whose current state is, legitimately, at least debated. And I don't feel like talking only about those glory years without even mentioning the fact that the situation is markedly different today. In a recent article in theDefector, Jason England wrote, “I've been with it almost every step of the way, and have witnessed hip hop less as conqueror than conquered. At best, it was absorbed into the world - and here the “world” means mainstream America. Hip hop assimilated. And that always comes at a cost. Hip hop at 50 is dealing with that cost; it has reached its midlife crisis. It took the corporate job, bought the Ferrari, left its family, and hit the dating apps. It found new crowds, and is still going out to the clubs, but no one has the heart to tell it that just maybe it isn’t the coolest motherfucker in the room anymore. It has also done the lamentably cliché thing of veering conservative as it aged”.

It can certainly be debated, but I believe that it’s hard to deny the legitimacy of these doubts. Hip hop, apart from the moral panic linked to some of its specific branches, no longer scares anyone, not even in Italy. Even we have managed to assimilate it into our pop culture, an operation that might have seemed impossible. It has lost its subversive charge and has become part of the realm of entertainment. In terms of image, values, and cultural references, contemporary rappers resemble influencers more than GZA or any of his peers.

Thinking back to that Wu-Tang Clan takes us light years away from what hip hop has become, perhaps back to its artistic and aesthetic apex: the nine dudes obsessed with kung-fu who burst onto the scene in 1992 were terrifying, charming, stylish, dangerous, real, but above all creative. They rapped about money, but also about values, drugs and violence, nightmares and dreams, ideals and life, and never in a moralistic, stereotypical, stupid or banal way, but always in a cool way. Both technically and aesthetically. They told what they saw, nothing beautiful, but with the tools of street poetry; they showcased extraordinary writing skills, such that they possibly represented the creative pinnacle of the most globally important subculture of the last half century. Perhaps we should consider restarting from here, interpreting that epic in a way that is also paradoxically pedagogical; and perhaps, that is what Ol'Dirty Bastard meant on the Grammy stage in 1998 when he declared, “Wu-Tang is for the children,” and also for the 50-year-olds.

by Gabriel Seroussi

Brooklyn is a city within a city. Officially founded in 1834, it had already become the third most populous urban center in the United States by the end of the Civil War. Just over a century later it was in ruins, wracked by a massive job loss with few comparisons in the country. Today, however, it stands as a global brand, a glorious and complex metropolis made up of hipster neighborhoods and projects that are still far from gentrified. It’s within this diverse landscape that the last relevant art scene in New York rap was born and flourished: the Brooklyn drill.

American rap essentially was, for the first four decades of its history, impervious to the outside world. In the global village of music, U.S. rap exported itself, its sound and aesthetic, yet internally it proved self-sufficient. With its ostentatious snobbery, New York City was the most intransigent, the most resistant to any external agent - even from other American cities. However, by the early 2010s, something had radically changed.

The traditional identity of New York rap had lost its appeal among  the new generation of artists. The reference point had become another: Atlanta. The Big Apple was forced, for the first time in rap history, to play a supporting role. Consequently, Brooklyn also suffered the downsizing of the city's music scene. In the early 2010s, aside from the outlier Joey Bada$$, the city's largest borough had offered distinctly underground groups such as the Flatbush Zombies, The Underachievers or Pro Era.

In 2014, however, something happened. On August 1, a 19-year-old boy from East Flatbush posted a video of a song on his YouTube channel. The boy's name was Bobby Shmurda and the song was called Hot N*gga. Within a few weeks, the video went viral and Brooklyn seemed to have found its new star. But in early November, Shmurda was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, drug dealing, and firearm possession. The very brief parable of this artist was nevertheless significant. Hot N*gga explicitly chronicled the darker and more violent side of Brooklyn; the author was an active member of GS9, a gang affiliated with the Crips, and the song’s virality was also due to the Bobby Shmurda dance featured in the video. Although not a drill track, Hot N*gga was definitely the origin of everything, making thousands of Brooklyn kids believe they had a story to tell.

And indeed, there was no shortage of stories. Not because Brooklyn hadn’t been told enough in the past, but because in a city in perpetual metamorphosis yesterday's storytellers quickly became obsolete. By the 2010s, very little was left of the 1990s Brooklyn that had entered the collective imagination of hip hop.

That Brooklyn was known as Black Brooklyn, that is, the east-central part of the borough, a set of ethnically homogeneous and economically depressed neighborhoods. This area has since been eroded by a massive process of gentrification. Many communities have been forced to move to increasingly peripheral areas, resulting in a much more complex and diverse geography.

Despite these changes, the disparities in opportunity and quality of life between black and white areas have remained vast. Additionally, over the past three decades, Brooklyn has also become a destination for other immigrant communities: the Latino and Caribbean communities above all. The latter have become an integral part of the fabric of old Black Brooklyn. And finally, what has also changed is the nature of crime. Today, Brooklyn has 375 active gangs in its territory, divided into neighborhoods and affiliated with larger criminal organizations such as the Bloods, Crips, and Latin Kings. The ubiquity of this phenomenon in New York City is relatively recent, belying the city's historically distinctiveness in the national criminal landscape.

Bobby Shmurda grew up in this new Brooklyn and was the first to narrate it using formulas far removed from classic New York rap. On the trail of Hot N*gga, an art scene thus emerged that cannot yet be labeled Brooklyn drill, but in fact laid its foundations. This scene lacked a definite sonic or stylistic identity. What united artists like Bam Bino, Rah Swish, Money Millz, and Curly Savv was more of a background: they were all very young gangbangers, affiliated with and protected by their respective gangs.

Actually, there is another commonality among these artists: most of the tracks produced by this scene were recorded on type beats found on YouTube or Soundcloud. And it is in this circuit, among hundreds of thousands of more or less homemade productions, that some Brooklyn rappers discovered a fresh sound emerging across the ocean, in England - one that no one in the United States had yet experienced. Thus was born the Brooklyn boys' fascination with UK drill. This sound developed in the early 2010s in England as a meeting point between Chicago-made drill and classic sub-genres of UK rap: grime and road rap. This strange mixture of sounds led to the creation of somber beats, characterized by bass lines produced with Drum 808s (thus much more powerful), pitch alterations in the drums (known as slides) and delayed snares (a sort of echo in the snare drums, we might say).

However, it wasn’t only thanks to the YouTube algorithm that UK drill made its way into the hearts of Brooklyn kids. From jungle to UK garage to grime and UK drill: Black music in England is largely the product of immigration from the West Indies, former colonies of the British Empire in the Caribbean. The syncopated rhythms that distinguish these genres were thus familiar to Brooklyn kids, as almost all the pioneers of Brooklyn drill are of Caribbean descent; from the cradle, Caribbean culture and music have been integral parts of their lives, influencing them if only unconsciously.

Then, in December 2016, the first track that can be put for all intents and purposes in the category of Brooklyn drill was released: Suburban by 22Gz.

All the elements are there: 22Gz is a member of Blixky - a Bownsville gang affiliated with Gangster Disciples-, the production is by AXL Beats - a young British producer destined to shape Brooklyn drill history - and, in the song's video, the boys perform the Blixky Twirl - the walk that identifies their gang.

The song became a street hit and changed the unwritten laws of New York hood politics. Drill music turned into a battleground from which there was no escape. Following the success of Suburban, almost every gang in conflict with the Blixkys produced their own diss tracks to 22Gz: Kooda B came out with Blixky Funeral, Young Costamado dropped Folk In The Trunk, Leaf Lzz released No Twirl Zone. Two artists crucial to the evolution of drill in Brooklyn emerged through diss tracks against Blixky: Sheff G (with No Suburban) and Fivio Foreign (with Blixky Inna Box). These two are credited with revisiting the classic drill flow that the very first generation of Brooklyn rappers had imported from England along with sound. Thanks to them, Brooklyn drill matured, developing its unique identity and gaining more independence. What was lacking now was a leap in quality at the audience level; it was required a figure who could sublimate the best qualities of Brooklyn drillers by combining them with an unmistakable stage presence and voice. The right rapper at the right time came from the same gang as Fivio Foreign (the Woo), his name was Bashar Barack Jackson, aka Pop Smoke.

In 2019, it’s thanks to him that the Brooklyn drill was established internationally. Welcome To The Party and then Dior, featured on his mixtape Meet The Woo, pulled the genre into a new dimension.

Who could have imagined that the sound that would shake New York out of its torpor would come from Europe? That the Brooklyn of Biggie and Jay-Z would be represented by guys affiliated with the Bloods or the Crips? That gangsta walks would become Tik Tok trends?

Yet, Brooklyn drill proved all this was possible. In a rap game now fully integrated into the dystopian entertainment industry, Brooklyn kids carved out their own space by doing the simplest thing of all: what they liked, the way they liked it - stealing beats online and insulting rival gangs. The oldest recipe in rap history. A musical genre that has always been able to unite the infinitely small with the immensely large by making visible, understandable (...and therefore sellable) stories that would otherwise be forgotten. To quote one of the most inspired songs by Italian rapper Ensi: Tutto il mondo è quartiere (All the world is neighborhood).

by Andrea Signorelli

This is one of the first questions many people would ask to Westside Gunn: why - in the early 2010s, when even in New York it had been abandoned by everyone who aspired to success - did you go all in on such a classic, street, almost boom-bap sound? The answer from the founder and creative mind behind Griselda - in a video-interview given to Complex along with his two associates Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher - is simple: «Buffalo was not New York. Buffalo never changed».   

From a certain perspective, this is the clearest answer that can be given. The hometown of the three historical members of Griselda could be considered as a province in its own right: with a population of 270,000 inhabitants that has been dwindling for decades, attached to Canada and with a icy climate, Buffalo is more than 600 kilometres away from the Big Apple and isn’t close to any important U.S. metropolises (it is, however, less than two hours’ drive from Toronto).

One of the poorest cities in the United States (sixth in the ranking for the highest percentage of inhabitants living below the poverty line, around 30%), with whole neighbourhoods in a state of total disrepair, Buffalo has never been on the hip hop map despite the relentless work carried out by the local legend Dj Shay (who died in 2020 at the age of 48). Cut off from the mainstream and isolated from the major centres, it’s not surprising that the local rappers have remained more attached to a bygone sound.

And all of this is all the more true in another crucial respect. Although their success is relatively recent, the members of Griselda are of an age that puts them closer to Nas and Mobb Deep than to the new generation of New York rappers from the Brooklyn drill and environs. Conway and Gunn were born in 1982, Benny is only two years younger. In many ways, Griselda has not rediscovered a sound that directly recalls the classics of an earlier era: they themselves are part of an earlier era and have carried the sound forward (although Benny the Butcher initially sought his fortunes by following the sound of the moment, as it can still be heard on 2009’s Tana Talk 2). 

Given their no longer youthful age, it is also not surprising that, in order to search for the origins of the Griselda collective, you have to go back quite a long way. Indeed, you have to go directly back to their childhood: Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine are actually half-brothers on their father's side and have shared their entire existence with their cousin Benny the Butcher and the latter's brother, Machine Gun Black (killed in an armed ambush in 2006).

«I did all of that with them. Literally. Same bathtub. Slept on the same bed. Wore the same clothes», Gunn recounted in an interview. «So it’s just like we was always close. That’s why it’s like Griselda is so strong, because it’s not a made-up group. [...] How can rap or something like that break up something that’s been together [all] our lives?».

Grown up in the tough east side of the city, their adolescence follows the most classic of scripts: rapping and drug-dealing. To these activities, Westside Gunn - who is the most passionate about the world of fashion and also stands out for his constant references to contemporary art - complemented the one of clothing designer. It is actually from this activity that the name Griselda was derived. To be precise, Griselda by Fashion Rebels (which can be heard on the tags inserted in many of their tracks): a clothing brand founded by Gunn in 2005 and named after the Colombian drug trafficker Griselda Blanco.

Although both Benny and Conway (who went by the name Kannon) were meanwhile making a name for themselves in the Buffalo underground scene, the only work from that era that is readily available today is a collection of the recording sessions Gunn made between 2003 and 2005: Flyest Ni**a in Charge vol. 1 (where we also find the massive presence of the others). At the time, it seemed in short that Gunn had found its own way. However, the journey suffered an abrupt derailment in 2006, when he was arrested for gun possession. Released in 2008, he ended up back in jail less than 24 months later.

Released for good in 2011, Gunn had clear ideas about what he wanted to do: be involved in music, but more in the role of executive producer than rapper. Indeed, as a “curator” (a term he uses that evokes the art world). And it was on Conway that his energies were obviously focused, while Benny went his own way by collaborating with the aforementioned DJ Shay.

But even this trajectory was brutally derailed in 2012. Conway, who at the time was shuttling between Buffalo and Atlanta (a city far away, but to which the two brothers had been constantly travelling by bus since their teenage years), was back in town for a collaboration with French Montana (then at the height of his underground success with the Coke Boys). While behind the wheel, he was ambushed by gunmen: bullets hit him in the shoulder and neck, leaving half of his face paralysed.

As he has recounted in several of his songs (including God Don't Make Mistakes from the album of the same name), at that stage Conway was convinced that the paralysis in his face would forever prevent him from pursuing his career. And it was this, in turn, that convinced Westside Gunn to pick up the microphone again: «If Conway would’ve never got shot, it wouldn’t be no Westside Gunn the rapper», he told The Ringer.

But rap has changed drastically since 2005, when crews like G-Unit were still demonstrating how to achieve huge commercial success while maintaining a classic New York attitude. Not so in 2012: trap was already dominant and hip-hop's centre of gravity had definitely shifted south, completing a journey that had been underway for quite some time.

However, Westside Gunn seemed to understand one thing: when everyone is going in the same direction, a space inevitably opens up for those who decide to go in the opposite direction. Not trap, not soundcloud rap, nor any other sound that could be associated with those years. But a dirty and minimal sound, in the style of the nineties, which was handled from the very beginning by the person who would become Griselda's in-house and highly recognisable producer: Daringer (on the productions, however, we already find a legend like Alchemist, an important underground name like Big Ghost LTD and others).

Besides the sound, Gunn had another intuition. Consistent with his choice of music, he did not care so much about numbers, but focused on a niche of fans eager to buy official Griselda merchandise and especially their limited edition vinyls, sold in seconds at often insane prices.

2012 saw the first real release of the newly formed Griselda Records: Westside Gunn’s mixtape Hitler Wears Hermes vol. 1, a name that - while obviously reminiscent of “The devil wears Prada” - earned him criticism he didn’t care about in the slightest, continuing that saga until its tenth chapter last year. In 2014, Physikal Therapy was released, marking Conway’s return after rehabilitation. In the same year, Benny, who had remained constantly active in all the previous years, began to release his mixtapes for Griselda as well.

Between an homage to Basquiat and a wrestling quote, between an NBA allusion and the inevitable references to the life of a drug dealer (without forgetting the ever-present BRRRRR and TUTUTUTU adlibs), Griselda’s rise towards the critical and fan success began: a rise made up of a disproportionate number of mixtapes, featuring projects (including the mini-ep of Conway and Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, a key reference point for the crew) and official records.

If we were to isolate a few of these early works, one would probably have to mention Westside Gunn’s Flygod (2016), Conway’s Reject 2 (2015) and, a little further down the line, Benny’s Tana Talk 3 (2018). To be fair, it is complex to single out a few precise albums and mixtapes, due to their disproportionate quantity and the difficult availability of the very first ones. Complex and perhaps also pointless: what matters is in fact that, between 2016 and 2018, their imprint began to make itself increasingly felt, leading Gunn and Conway to briefly sign with Eminem’s Shady Records, while Benny followed Gunn by relying on Jay-Z’s management company: Roc Nation. Meanwhile, the collective was expanding: the official debut album of another artist from Buffalo, Armani Caesar, was released; a gifted rapper as Rome Streetz (his Wasn’t Built in a Day with Big Ghost from 2023 is excellent) and a now household name as Boldy James were welcomed. 

It was during this phase that probably the best Griselda record was released: the collective album WWCD (2019), which not only represents the peak of their sound (also thanks to the contribution of a top-notch producer like Beat Butcha, on whom Daringer relied heavily) but also shows the characteristics that distinguish the three rappers.

Even though all three of them are undoubtedly gifted, it is clear that Conway is the most technical one, gifted with uncommon mc and punchline skills. Westside Gunn is the most eccentric, the one who holds the creative ranks of the project and the one who seems to feel the role of rapper more and more confining (in fact, he announced his retirement; we’ll see about that). Benny is probably the most complete, who combines his skills as a rapper with those of a storyteller and is able to give shape to the most complex projects. These are differences that Conway himself summarises in a few bars from the track 6:30 Tip Off (2021): «They say West is the brain behind it and Benny is the star / But let's not act like Machine ain't the silliest with the bars».

A perfect resume, that, by the way, sounds like the coronation of Benny the Butcher as the element with the most potential. Despite the slight misstep of his official 2020 debut album Burden of Proof (in which he unsuccessfully tried to move away from the classic Griselda sound), it is actually clear that Benny is probably the most conscious and all-round artist in the collective, as shown above all in an excellent work such as Tana Talk 4 (2022).

The same cannot be said of the other two historical members: by now, Westside Gunn is so out of control that many of this works seem to strive for originality at all costs and as an end in itself (it doesn’t help that he often relies on a very distinctive producer as Conductor Williams); while Conway, in an attempt to broaden his appeal beyond the underground, has modified his sound without finding a convincing direction (as it is particularly evident on the latest, very poor, Won’t He Do It). 

Despite being called upon to collaborate with every major artist (one need only mention Kanye West) and despite their very obvious influence on the underground and beyond, perhaps Griselda's best days may be behind them. But one thing is certain: the impact this crew has had on the global hip hop scene, and the way in which they have revived a certain type of sound and approach to rap, is luckily destined to last for a long time to come.

by Michele Sugarelli

Founded in 1888, Compton is one of the oldest cities in Los Angeles county. According to the myth surrounding its foundation, the pioneer Griffith Dickinson Compton ordered part of the city to be used for farming, setting the stage for the creation of the Richland Farms area, now the territory of the African-American cowboy community known as the Compton Cowboys. The large residential lots provided enough space for residents to raise and feed a family through cattle breeding.

For the first fifty years of its history, Compton had remained a quiet, predominantly white suburb, home even to the Bush family, albeit for a short time. Although it wasn't located in the South, where during the forties and the fifties the racial segregation was still in force and the legacies of slavery still determined the lives of the citizens, in Compton too white supremacist gangs such as the Spook Hunters terrorised blacks and Latinos throughout the county.

The Supreme Court's ruling of 1948 that had sanctioned racist housing practices and the subsequent Watts Riots of 1965, a few kilometres from Compton, led to a demographic transformation of the area over the following few years: the white population started to diminish, while the minority presence rose. The farms attracted black families who had begun to migrate from the agricultural South: although Compton couldn't sustain large-scale agricultural practices, it still gave the families the opportunity to work the land.

The 1970s saw the rise of the Crips and Bloods gangs, fiercely rivalling each other, opposed and violently repressed by Los Angeles police, to the extent that in 1990 Compton recorded an incredibly high homicide rate of almost 90 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. It was in this scenario that rap began to tell what was happening on the streets and what the prospects were for an African-American youngster born and raised in Compton. In 1988, on their record Straight Outta Compton, the NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) recounted in rhyme the police violences and the dynamics within the gangs, giving way to one of the most enduring and successful streams of this genre, gangsta rap.

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (KL) was born just a year before, in 1987: at the age of eight, while walking with his father to the flea market, he saw Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre on the street, shooting the video for California Love. 

Kendrick Lamar’s musical journey and the symbolic role he plays for the African-American community undoubtedly make him one of the most interesting artists on the contemporary rap scene. The main features of his character distinguish him from the other contemporary great interpreters of the genre: little room for the look, almost total absence from social networks. The theme of the neighbourhood, Compton, is central to his work, especially in his first records, and it is not intended just as a precise geographical location, but rather as a community marked by racism and poverty, where one often ends up in jail and where the few alternatives are illegal economies and street life.

For Kendrick, however, the neighbourhood experience has undoubtedly also been a strength. His capacity to overturn the neighbourhood game complying with the need to really recount Compton and its people gave Kdot - KL’s first stage name as a rapper - that “credibility” that few artists of his generation have. And it is not a matter of street credibility in terms of the number of crimes committed, or years spent in prison, but of the decision to remain firmly rooted in his community, pursuing a successful musical journey that has become the symbol of a collective redemption. 

His music is a raw, but at the same time poetic account of the everyday life among the projects, a mad city where people still die because they are black. On his records we can hear the voices of authentic community figures such as MC Eiht, an historic rapper from Compton, who appears in the very m.A.A.d. City track, or clips of phone calls with his friends and relatives. Moreover, many of his songs are storytelling of street experiences, lived by Kendrick and his friends or his family, as in Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst, where Lamar recounts the stories which led him away from gang culture and recounts the spiritual rebirth that allowed him to escape from the streets.

A symbol of his closeness to the neighbourhood and its inhabitants is the iconic cover of To Pimp a Butterfly album, a photoshopped image which depicts the rapper and some friends while clutching wads of dollars in front of the White House, with a dead white judge at their feet.

The musical journey that has led Kendrick Lamar to this record, an instant classic of the genre, drew strength from several artists who grew up in the same territory as him. Jazz trumpetist and producer Terrace Martin oversaw the whole production process of the album, involving musicians such as Thundercat on bass, Robert Glasper on keyboards and Kamasi Washington on saxophone. 

The success of the record breathed life into the new jazz scene in Los Angeles and elsewhere, allowing the solo projects of the aforementioned artists to receive more attention precisely because of their previous collaboration with Kendrick.

The same mechanism occurred with the whole TDE (Top Dawg Entertainment), KL’s independent label and musical family, which since the mid-2000s has gathered rappers, producers and musicians around the studio Antony Tiffith set up in his house in Carson, 10 miles from Compton.

Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q, SZA, Sounwave. Dave Free and others found an alternative to street life in the afternoons spent in producing music at the TDE studio and, also thanks to the huge success gained by KL with his first two major releases, managed to find a relevant space within the music industry as well. An independent project, tied to the territory, made up of Dawgs - dogs, but meant as “friends” - each one pushing for the success of the other’s projects, this was TDE, almost unique in the music industry at the time and therefore the epicentre of special attention and interest.

But the Compton in which Dot had grown up was also a city which had been deeply affected by the riots that erupted after the beating of Rodney King, the first example of police violence to be caught on camera and televised within hours. What followed were five days of rioting, over 2000 injured, 63 dead and a billion dollars in damages, in an atmosphere where harassment and violence by police officers towards members of the African-American community were commonplace. But the beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots, as well as other episodes of institutional violence and the subsequent responses of racialised communities, are direct consequences of the social issues that still permeate the United States today. And KL’s music is the loudspeaker for these issues, in a journey that serves the artist himself to analyse the context in which he grew up, the systemic violence against the African-American community and the contradictory relationship with economic success and fame; a change that is difficult to metabolise for a boy raised in a family abruptly accustomed to moving in and out of the social security system.

In 2014 Kendrick was in South Africa for a small tour that took him to the African continent for the first time, where he visited Robben Island, the island where Mandela was imprisoned, and where he had the opportunity to interact with the original land of the African Diaspora. Encounters with the African continent and its people were important steps in Kendrick's journey, which he picked up on again in tracks such as Momma, and by welcoming several South African artists to the Black Panther project, the soundtrack of the homonymous Marvel movie created with the entire TDE.

The murders of Travyon Martin, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice and George Floyd, followed by riots in major US metropolises, marked the birth and spread of the Black Lives Matters movement. With the famous verse «[...] and we hate popo, wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho», one of the songs sung during the demonstrations that became a symbol of the movement is Kendrick's Alright, produced by Pharrel Williams, whose refrain is «[...] we gon be alright». It is an atypical song for a context in which police in riot gear are confronted, but in fact it is no coincidence that KL was chosen as the rapper to symbolise the pride and sense of revenge of the African American community.

In his last two albums, Kendrick has slightly shifted the narrative focus towards a less community- and neighbourhood-centred introspection. In DAMN there is an analysis of the relationship with God and spirituality, but there is no shortage of references to Compton, such as the line from Element quoted in the title of this article, or statements about the changing of the american political scenario, which has witnessed the advent of Trump in the White House.

In Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers, Kendrick tries to lay bare his weaknesses and traumas starting from his family events: he makes it clear that he is not our saviour, that he doesn’t have the answers to the issues of American society, that he is perceived as a Mr. Morale and he doesn’t want to play that role, while still dealing with so many problematic issues in his existence, from his relationship with media exposure and success to that with women. A journey of rhyming self-analysis that confronts the listener with the same questions and contradictions which Kendrick, by choice, has not the duty to solve.

by Francesco Tirinnanzi

L.A. 2015: Kendrick came out with To Pimp a Butterfly and definitely established himself as one of the best lyricists of his generation; artists like YG, Schoolboy Q and Nipsey Hussle also contributed to represent the West Coast in an industry increasingly saturated with the Atlanta sound. Despite their great innovations, all the rappers of this generation maintained the same stylistic features inherited from Dr. Dre and the big ones from the past, giving the scene a renewed identity, but still firmly on the tracks laid down in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

On the streets, however, the atmosphere had changed. The influence of the gangs on culture remained visceral, but the figure of the gangbanger was totally different. Where once we were used to seeing khaki outfits and Chuck Taylors, the younger guys were now flaunting a total detachment from those who came to be called old nigg*rs. The low riders were replaced by sports cars, preferably exotic ones, Chucks became Maison Margiela and Old English bottles were substituted by double cups of lean. At the forefront of this revolution we can find Drakeo The Ruler and the Stinc Team.

Drakeo and his brother Ralfy The Plug grew up in South Central on Naomi Ave and 32nd Street in the 100’s, a neighbourhood controlled by various sets of Crips. As teenagers they decided not to affiliate, even though many of their friends were from some of the gangs in the area. The two formed their own crew, which initially took the name of Too Greedy Family. TGF was an atypical crew for L.A.: in fact, it gathered under the same banner both affiliated and unaffiliated friends, sometimes belonging to different sets, but with a common goal: to make money any way they could. Among the various activities they engaged with, the flockin’ would be the one for which they would become best known. Typical of South Central, and L.A. in general, it consisted of burglaries at private homes. TGF particularly focused on Asian communities, because of their habit of keeping large amounts of money and valuables in their homes: thus the Stinc Team was born. In fact, the crew took their name from the pungent smells of chinese cuisine, a full-fledged ironic and not-so veiled tribute to their victims.

Those were the years when Drakeo began rapping and it was immediately clear that he had something special: in fact, he created a unique style made up of metaphors and alliterations bound by an unprecedented, nonchalant yet at the same time menacing flow. This style was christened “Nervous Music” by Drakeo himself, because «[People] want to kill me. I can’t be driving around in $100,000 cars on the run, listening to soft-ass [music]». Pippy Longstocking became the term to describe firearms with extended magazines. The Meet & Greet with Mei Ling was a reminder of his flocker activities. Drakeo doesn’t drink lean, Drakeo «mud walks through Neimans», i.e. he steps on the puddles of lean that fall from his glass as he walks through Neimans & Marcus. The “lingo bingo”, namely the slang, and the metaphors in his tracks are endless and indecipherable to the inattentive listener, nothing he raps stops to the most obvious meaning, in every line there is an obscure reference or double-meaning to be unveiled. Drakeo flaunted his non-affiliation, in a rap scene like the Los Angeles one, where the standard was to represent a set enjoying its protection and the backing of the industry: «we from the Stinc Team and don’t do big homies». He gave himself the stage name Bully Breaker and made his attitude clear in every song: «wake him up, shake him up, chopper make him go Ugh, May Day, man down, I guess he thought he was Suge, run up on Drakeo yeah I wish a n*gga would», he rapped in Impatient Freestyle.

It was a real breath of fresh air and the whole town noticed it, especially Dj Mustard, who wanted to take a track from Mr. LA. Thus, he contacted Drakeo and convinced him to do a remix of Mr. Get Dough, which had managed to become an absolute hit in the city with a street video. Drakeo reluctantly removed his partner Ketchy The Great’s verse from the track and agreed to proceed with the remix. This collaboration would lead to the debut tape of his career, released for 10 Summers Records: I Am Mr. Mosely.

It was at this point, however, that he made an out-of-the-box choice that would strongly characterise him in his whole journey. Suggested by his brother Ralfy, he used Mustard as a springboard for an independent career, choosing not to sign a contract with him or any other label. On the strength of his style and the visibility he gained, he started releasing mixtapes independently. This obviously irritated Mustard and it was here that the first hostilities and boycotts from some of the artists affiliated to 10 Summers began.

Nothing, however, seemed to stop Drakeo's rise. Tape after tape, he gathered more and more fans and managed to forge relationships with other up-and-comers of his generation who were not tied to the old guard. This is how the partnerships with Shoreline Mafia and 03 Greedo were born. The former are a collective with a street soul, but one that embraced the more party and drugged out aspects of Los Angeles life, stringing together hit after hit until signing with Atlantic. The latter, on the other hand, is a Watts-based rapper from the Grape Street Crips with a hallucinated, psychedelic emo gangsta style that mixes more traditional rap with absurd melodies and harmonies over a selection of beats that were unusual by Californian standards. These collaborations with the other key players of the new Los Angeles scene served to cement Drakeo and the Stinc Team’s position as absolute innovators and a force to be reckoned with for anyone approaching West Coast rap. 

March 2018: the rise came to a sudden halt. Drakeo was arrested on murder charges in connection with the 2016 killing of an Inglewood Families Bloods (IFGB) OG. Twelve members of the Stinc Team, including his brother, were arrested with him. The charges were serious, the District Attorney considered Drakeo as the instigator of the murder and wanted to nail him as a gang leader, identifying the Stinc Team not as a crew of artists, but as a full-fledged criminal organisation. Under California’s gang laws, Drakeo could face the death penalty, if this theory were to be confirmed. 

While incarcerated, he managed to record a whole album using the prison phone service: Thank You For Using GTL. It was described by Pitchfork as the best project in his career and the best album ever recorded by an artist in prison. This achievement was also accompanied by a tragic event: on March 31st, 2019, Nipsey Hussle was killed outside his store on Slauson Ave. The incident affected Drakeo, who for the first time mentioned in a letter his intention to permanently move away from Los Angeles if he were to be released from prison, as he saw the incident as a clear demonstration that the city had no respect for anyone. 

After three years, 18 months of which spent in solitary confinement, and a retrial, the trial stalled and Drakeo was persuaded by his lawyers to accept a plea deal proposed by the new District Attorney in order to save himself from the death row.

November 2020: Mr Mosely was surprisingly released. Fans had given up hope, Drakeo didn’t waste any time and locked himself in the studio. During the following year, he released the most important projects of his career, the beat selection was impeccable, the punchlines killer, his flow was even more icy and menacing, he didn’t spare any of his enemies both in the industry and on the streets. His former collaborators were gone: 03 was serving a 25-years sentence in Texas and the Shoreline Mafia had disbanded. However, Drakeo’s music had inspired a generation of new Californian artists who had taken him as a reference: Bris, Young Slo-Be, DaBoii, R3, Zoe Osama, Tru Carr, the Blue Bucks and may others had grown up with the Stinc Team and their model of independent business. The ultimate co-sign came when Drake gifted him with a beat and a chorus with two open verses. A collaboration of this magnitude is a game changer for any artist, for Drakeo it was yet another confirmation that the old guard had had its day and, like it or not, it was now time to open the doors to the new L.A.

Despite the success, Drakeo seemed unable to shake off street politics. Every occasion was a good one to provoke and throw more or less veiled threats, and it seemed that the solitary confinement, the beefs and the boycott he felt from the industry had now taken control of his thoughts. 

In February 2021, Ketchy The Great lost his life in a car accident and the enemies of the Stinc Team greeted the news with jubilation and celebration. The beef got increasingly tense and Drakeo decided to silence everyone once and for all, by recording a track and immediately releasing an accompanying video: IngleWEIRD. In Los Angeles, the term “weirdo” does not mean “bizarre”, but it is considered an insult on a par with “mark” or “buster” meaning imposter, fake - in gangbangers circles, it is considered an insult that, when directed at someone, has only one kind of reaction. The song is an open diss to all of Inglewood and posts began to circulate on Instagram with some OGs from IFGB declaring the city a no fly zone for the Stinc Team.

Mr. Mosely’s fame continued to grow, so much so that he managed to do a sold-out tour in honour of Ketchy and finally played in front of an audience of tens of thousands at Rolling Loud in Los Angeles 2021. The scene was that of a coronation: the entire Stinc Team was on stage and a smiling Drakeo definitely declared that it was time to show the world the real LA.

December 2021, Once Upon A Time In L.A. Festival: Drakeo was in the line-up, arriving just before the start time of his set with a dozen people, along with his inseparable brother Ralfy. As the group made their way to the stage, YG, who was also scheduled to be in the line-up of the event, arrived at the venue. Along with YG, around seventy people entered the venue and tried to snatch a necklace from a member of the Stinc Team. A scuffle broke out, with Ralphy and Drakeo at the forefront.

It was chaos.

For those present, the scene that unfolded shortly afterwards was appalling, Drakeo was hit in the neck with a knife, he continued to defend himself and fight off the assailants, but eventually, exhausted, he was forced to slump on the ground. The event was immediately cancelled. 

Drakeo The Ruler would die in hospital four hours after the incident, the victim of a staged murder. It was the first time in rap music history that a rapper died at one of his own concerts.

Early 2023: Ralphy has taken over the legacy of the Stinc Team and, he released in a year more videos and projects than any other artist in California. After serving five of the twenty-five years he was sentenced to, 03 Greedo was surprisingly released from prison. In the first interview he gave, when mentioning Drakeo and the way he had passed away, he became serious and insisted on changing the subject, as he hadn’t yet been able to metabolise the tragedy of his Evil Twin’s departure. Despite the industry’s boycott of such an innovative yet at the same time controversial artist, 03 continued to pay homage to him in every interview he gave, culminating in a full-fledged tribute at his first two shows back on the scene. 03 invited Ralphy on stage to perform a few of his brother’s verses, giving the fans both a moment of closure and the opening of a new era, where Drakeo’s aura still hovered cold and menacing over all of L.A.

On that night in December 2021, L.A. lost one of its greatest innovators, a street rapper whose imagery, technique, flow and delivery completely broke away with the stereotype that had dominated the West sound for the past thirty years. An artist who would finally give the city a chance to be a central hub of hip hop culture once again.

LONG LIVE THE RULER

by Marta Blumi Tripodi

If you’re a fan of hip-hop photography, you have undoubtedly come across a now iconic shot. First published in the September 2000 issue of Vibe - the equally iconic Black music and Culture magazine founded by Quincy Jones - it was a group picture portraying an array of up-and-coming musicians, rappers and producers. Some were already famous, some less so, some perhaps would never have become so; they did not share the same crew, they came from cities and realities far removed from each other and they didn’t even formally do the same job. What they did have in common, however, apart from a great friendship, was a sense of style and sound that neatly distinguished itself from the canons of the time, predominated by futuristic looks and synthesised sounds. From left to right, the picture portrayed rappers Talib Kweli and Mos Def (today also known as Yasiin Bey); poly-instrumentalist and Roots member James Poyser; neo-soul diva Erykah Badu; the brilliant Questlove, drummer, producer, populariser and founder of the Roots; D’Angelo, the soulman par excellence;  Q-Tip, rapper and founder of the A Tribe Called Quest; the R&B singer Bilal; and, in the front row, crouching in front of their associates, rapper Common and the beloved super-producer J Dilla. Together, they made up the Soulquarians, a collective who, after having elected Questlove as the captain of all operations, set itself the goal of carrying out a constant and avant-garde experimentation in terms of contamination. Above all, however, they had one aim: to break down the boundaries between the various subgenres of black and hip hop music. 

At the time, the difference between one branch and the other was very clear, not so much in terms of fan bases and collaborations - those who listened to rap tended not to disdain R&B, soul and jazz either, and it often happened that members of the respective scenes met for some collaborations - but in terms of approach to work. In the late 1990s, for instance, it was very rare for rappers to take the stage with a full-fledged band, and the presence of musicians was not even contemplated also during recording or writing sessions in the studio. The few ones who had tried to move in this direction, such as Guru from the Gang Starr with his Jazzmatazz projects, never managed to break through on a commercial or an imagery level. The only really notable exception was Lauryn Hill, who well represented the famous example of the bumblebee which is theoretically unable to fly due to its physical conformation, but since it doesn’t know that, it flies anyway. On paper, a project designed to bring hip hop fans closer to those of played black music was deemed a failure, but then the overwhelming and spontaneous success of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (20 millions copies sold worldwide, ten nominations to Grammy Awards including five wins) proved that making multiple dimensions coexisting wasn’t utopian. Perhaps, if she had not retreated into her hermitage and had continued to move in this direction, we would be writing a different story today, but the fact is that after the uproarious exploit of 1998 she decided never to follow up on that record and to release a simple MTV Unplugged as an alternative, and the experience ended there.

Of course, that wasn’t the only interaction possible between rap and sung music. R&B vocalists, as dispensers of catchy refrains, had it a little better when it came to flexibility and open-mindedness of audiences and industry insiders; however, even when they worked on their solo projects, the likes of Ginuwine, Faith Evans or Brandy often wrote directly on the beat, without an interaction with a real music band. The beats in question were produced by hitmakers who specialised in that kind of operations and in those days were revered as superstars, even if names such as She’kspere, Jermaine Dupri o Darkchild are almost forgotten today; as producers, they would have had all the skills to cooperate also with rappers (indeed, they would have come up with some very interesting and original stuff), but by dint of being associated with softer projects they ended up losing the street credibility needed to move in that sphere. In the general perception, in fact, R&B was considered a genre to make women happy, or at best to hit on them, so much so that there even was a strand of songs designed for this purpose, called bedroom hits. Finally, there were soul lovers, who hung around in the same milieu of jazz and gospel musicians, but after the glories of the 1970s had been reduced to a small niche. A niche of intellectuals with an absolutely marginal audience, as the record companies of the time deemed it; and that was exactly where most of the Soulquarians and their fans came from. 

Throughout their years of activity, a scant handful at the turn of the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the Soulquarians worked together on seminal records such as Common’s Like Water for Chocolate, D’Angelo’s Voodoo, the Roots’ Things Fall Apart, or Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun. Unfortunately, however, despite the good will and visionary goals of iltheir founders, their collective journey ended before they even had a chance to record an album under their name. On the one hand, the problem was the rather poor sales of some of the records they had made at the time, like Common’s Electric Circus or Bilal’s 1st Born Second, which convinced the record industry not to invest on the project. On the other hand, according to a metropolitan myth propagated by Questlove himself, the beginning of the end was precisely that photo shoot (and the accompanying article) published in Vibe: before that - he would later explain - they were just a group of friends working together spontaneously, without even a proper name or hierarchy. Journalist David Bry, on the contrary, had headlined the article with the nickname Soulquarians (which only Questlove, Poyser, D’Angelo and J Dilla used informally and as a joke) and he had implicitly affirmed that it was Questlove’s supergroup. «I was in Chicago when I saw it [the issue of Vibe e.d.], and I said, "Oh shit. This is bad"», the concerned person would later recount. «The next thing you know, every phone call that came in people were saying, "Yo, man. It looks like I'm working for you. I'm not an Aquarian. I'm my own person." Literally, that's when it all fell apart». In short, yet another demonstration that the only true supergroup in hip hop that has stood the test of time without ego problems or internal diatribes is and will remain the Wu-Tang Clan. 

Despite the somewhat troubled end to the Soulquarians’ experience, however, the contamination between the hip hop, jazz and soul scenes gradually began to take hold in the years that followed. To be clear, it hasn’t been a quick and painless process. Alicia Keys is well aware of this: today her strength is universally considered to be her ability to combine piano with hip hop beats, but at the time of her debut in 2001, she was forced to change her record company because the producer in charge of her project (the aforementioned Jermaine Dupri) thought she was too sophisticated for the market and wanted to push her away from piano in favour of catchy ditties and ballets. As in the case of Lauryn Hill, Dupri was proved wrong and the success was overwhelming: 12 million copies sold for her debut album Songs in A Minor (2001) and five Grammy Awards, plus a handful of street singles including the remake of Nas’ NY State of Mind  (renamed Streets of New York) and the one of Biggie’s Juicy (Juciest). A triumph that opened the door for another pianist/soulman, John Legend, who in 2004 released his debut album Get Lifted, produced and heavily supported by Kanye West. Similar experiments were repeated on this side of the Atlantic as well, with a very young Amy Winehouse collaborating with Salaam Remi (with whom she would record a very personal remake of Nas' Made You Look, entitled In My Bed) and Mark Ronson. Today, the landscape has completely changed: not only the audiences of hip hop, R&B, soul and jazz are often indistinguishable, especially in their younger segments, but it is often impossible to assign a specific genre to an artist or an album. Is Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly a jazz or a rap album? Is Anderson .Paak playing hip hop, soul or funk? And when it comes to Italy, is Madame a singer or a rapper? Finally, there is great chaos under heaven: from contamination and hybridisation only fruits of extraordinary taste can spring. But it has been a very long road to get here.

by Marco "Ted Bee" Villa

There was a time, in the mid-2000s - or perhaps it would be better to say a particular year, 2004 - when the New York scene was dominated by a competition, fortunately only stylistic - a one of a kind case in hip-hop -, between two collectives that have strongfully influenced rap all over the world, including in Italy. 

On one side were the Dipset, or Diplomats, a crew from Harlem, active since the late 1990s and originally part of Jay-Z’s stable, made up of Cam’ron, Jim Jones and  Juelz Santana. On the other side, The Lox, or D-Block, made up of Jadakiss, Styles P, Sheek Louch and J-Hood.

In September 2021, these two groups came back to challenge each other, in the truest sense of the word, in a two-hour battle organised at Madison Square Garden and readily available on YouTube, where they alternated between historic tracks and freestyles, thrilling and bringing a few tears to the eyes of the older fans. For the record: the unanimous verdict was that The Lox were far more convincing.

Going back to that magical era, which yours truly considers a kind of golden age, if only because it was the one in which he took his first steps in rap, The Diplomats truly represented a formidable innovation and a point of no return.

Harlem has always been an artistically vibrant neighbourhood. Just think of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural movement dating back to the 1920s. The destination of major waves of post-World War II immigration, especially from Latin America, Harlem was also one of the first areas where young people began dancing in the streets. In the nineties it had the reputation of being a dangerous and infamous area, but today, partly due to an intense process of gentrification, it is changing its face with the consequent increase in jobs and reduction in crime.

Jim Jones’ On my way to church, Cam’ron’s Purple Haze, both from 2004, but above all Juelz Santana’s What the Game’s Been Missing! defined a new way of rapping, intended precisely as new flows and new metrics, marked by broken syllables and words. The person who has been able to treasure this lesson more than anyone else in our country is undoubtedly Marracash, who explicitly recognised Santana's album as one of the works that inspired him the most at the beginning of his career. I remember, moreover, that to the beat of Crunk Muzik, present both on Jim Jones' album and on the group’s Diplomatic Immunity 2, Marra wrote the verses of Il gioco, a song featuring Inoki on Roccia Music, the one that goes: “Io sono uno di voi, uno fra tanti, ma uso le stesse armi dei giganti del marketing...”. Beyond these personal memories, that anthem track sketched a full-fledged manifesto of the three rappers‘ style, not only in terms of the verses, in which one can recognise the well-rehearsed use of ad-libs and onomatopoeias (’bang bang’, ‘boom boom‘, “ta ta”) or even both combined (’woop, woop, wham, beep, beep - that's the cops‘) and Latin words (’loco‘, “te matan” or Jim Jones’ immortal ‘ok, muchacho’), but also in relation to the video. How can we forget Jim Jones' chain, Santana's bat or the gesture accompanying the final verse of the chorus “High like space, .45 on waist”.

Personally, I was on the other side of the fence at the time, preferring The Lox. An acronym for 'Living Off Experience', the trio began to make a name for themselves in the late 1990s thanks to their collaborations with Puff Daddy. They even featured on his maxi-single I'll be missing you, which saw the rapper and producer pay tribute to his late friend Notorious Big on the track We'll Always Love Big Poppa.

All with New York connections, Jadakiss in particular comes from Yonkers, a city bordering the Bronx and famous for being the birthplace of the Tanglewood Boys, an Italian-American crime syndicate that was finally crushed in the mid-1990s.

After years in which Jadakiss was in a high domande as a featured artist, from Jay Z (Reservoir Dogs) to Notorius Big (Last Dayz) and Noreaga (Banned from TV), 2004 was the year of his solo consecration with the album Kiss of Death, which featured notable collaborations such as Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg and Mariah Carrey, as well as productions by Neptunes, Kanye West, The Alchemist, Swizz Beatz, DJ Green Lantern - in short, the cream of the beatmakers of that era. The sixth track on this record, Why, deserves special mention: it features Anthony Hamilton on the chorus, in which the phrase "Why Bush knocked down the Towers" stands out - a line  later taken up by Immortal Technique, another New York rapper and activist with Cuban roots, in the track Bin Laden. As if the message were not clear enough, in the video clip a man holds up a sign that reads "Buck Fush", spoonerism for "Fuck Bush". For these reasons, the song was banned from some radio stations or played with the offending verses mutated. After all, these were the years following the tragic attack on the Twin Towers, and it was impossible for New York rappers to ignore this event. A somewhat rhetorical hymn to the Big Apple such as Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind, with its Horatian afflatus of nihil urbe visere maius, was thus countered by another series of rappers who did not mince their words when addressing politics and recounted the contradictions of a city that wasn’t just the concrete jungle where dreams are made of.

The same year, Styles P did a remix of Locked Up by Akon, a Saint Louis singer of Senegalese descent who was about to become one of the biggest hitmakers of the second half of the decade. 

It shouldn’t be forgotten that, since 2000, the D-Block has been part of the roster of Ruff Ryders, a label that gathers the likes of DMX, Cassidy and  Swiss Beatz. Through this membership, Jadakiss and associates have further enhanced their status in the rap game. Their participation to the compilations produced by the label, above all the immortal Ready or Die mixtape cycle, helped define the iconic imagery of The Lox.

As for Dipset, their rise was as fleeting as their decline. By about 2010, public tastes were shifting towards the southern sounds which the crunk muzic of the Harlem boys had somehow influenced and which in turn would soon inspire the explosion of trap.

The Lox's own production, particularly that of their most representative member, Jadakiss, tended thereafter to be less prolific and, more importantly, less incisive.

For those who were there, it remains one of the most exciting periods in hip hop's semi secular history, when perhaps words and concepts mattered more than they do today. For those who were not there, it is all there and they can go and catch up because many of those lessons still apply today.

by Daniele Benussi

Hearing the word “Bronx”, most of us would probably first think of five or six things: grey high-rises, a couple African American gangs at loggerheads, drugs, a few basketball courts carved out of the asphalt, a handful of guns, the relentless beat of certain music, and in the air, gloomy and muffled, a siren that never stops wailing.

Yet, it wasn’t always like this. There had been a time, at least until the end of the 1950s, when the Bronx was inhabited by white, middle class people who worked in the city and then came back at night right there, in those high-rises, to look after their families and nurture their dreams. In short, a quiet place, one of the many residential neighbourhoods where the boundless army of little ants contributing to the unstoppable growth of a metropolis such as New York consumed their existence.

Then things changed, and the 1960s came and made the Bronx hell.

After several attempts, the project for the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, a highway that would cross the entire Bronx from east to west, connecting it to the centre of New York, was approved, and the work was devastating. The neighbourhood became an open-air construction site, houses were devalued and within a few years there was the so-called ‘white flight’: 300,000 people emptied the Bronx and moved elsewhere, leaving the buildings deserted and a myriad of shops without jobs.

The neighbourhood was repopulated, taking advantage of the plummeting prices and vacant houses, by blacks, Hispanics, human leftovers from Vietnam, and all those people who were trying, with immense difficulty, to carve out a place for themselves in the great American maelstrom. The degradation increased, as did violence and shady dealings. The first gangs began to form and, because of the devaluation, old homeowners began to set fire to their houses, in an attempt to collect on insurance policies.

Soon the Bronx became a ghost, a burning ghost.

Among the families who arrived in the neighbourhood in the early 1970s, there was one, the Campbell family, immigrants from Kingstone, Jamaica, who settled in an eighteen-storey building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. There were eight of them: mother, father and six sons, the eldest of whom was Clive, a big boy almost two metres tall, who would soon be destined to change the history of music forever.

Yes, because if there is one thing that a Jamaican takes with himself when he leaves his country, it is precisely music, his music. And Clive had grown up with music, listening to his father’s records and accompanying him from a young age to ska concerts and dancehalls all across Kingstone, where he was enchanted by Jamaican Djs and their toasts, the speeches with which they kicked off the events.

Upon arriving in New York, Clive, with his handsome physique, immediately began to excel in sports, so much so that his peers nicknamed him “Hercules”. “Herc”, for short. 

Outside of school, however, like so many of his Bronx peers, Clive enjoyed graffiti and soon he joined a crew of graffiti artists where he began calling himself “Kool”. “Kool Herc” thus became his full nickname.

But there was another moment in his days when Herc was neither at school nor on the streets, but at home, surrounded by his records and his music, with which he dreamed of one day getting to throw a party like the ones he had seen as a child in Jamaica. And within the four walls of his bedroom he indulged, a little in memories and a little to the strong desire to take on a future that in the Bronx seemed a really, really futile reverie.

But there was a problem: in New York that music didn't interest many people, Bob Marley wasn't Bob Marley yet and Jamaica mattered little or nothing. Too much lightheartedness, too much saltiness. The African-American boys had other tastes, street life pushed them to seek more decisive rhythms, they walked differently and their accents were untainted. But even the music of their parents wasn’t enough for them. They needed something new, something that belonged only to them, the boys from the Bronx. Something had to be invented to suit their taste.

So Herc stood there, still in his little room, and started doing a weird thing with vinyl, a thing with needles.

He tried to locate the most rhythmic and danceable moment of his favourite songs and isolate it by lifting the needle of the turntable and repositioning it each time at the beginning of the part he was interested in, playing it one, five, ten, twenty times in a row, and thus making a new song out of its best segments, which he called: break. The first song he got his hands on was Give It Up or Turnit a Loose, by James Brown, and what came out was something even he didn't expect. It was dynamite.

Over the next few days he bought new records to mix, perfected his break technique, and began to feel like letting someone hear it. One night he called his sister, Cindy, who was little more than a child at the time, into his room. It was early 1973. Hey Cindy, listen to this. Herc started to play the vinyl from the chorus, and then, as he had been doing all those months by himself, he did that thing with the needles: after the desired break was over, he began to lift the needle and put it there, in that spot, for five minutes. Cindy listened for the first two, then she couldn't contain herself any longer and started dancing like crazy.

Clive, what have you come up with?!

A few months passed. Spring 1973 arrived. Herc bought his first sound system and kept on mixing other music, black music, the one that wasn’t played on the radio: soul, jazz, funk, and his dream grew, was fed. Herc would take the tracks, pick out their highlights, isolate their bass and drums, and then off it went, on a loop, until it became something else, something so overwhelming that it was hard to stand still.

But that wasn't all. Thanks to the new system, Herc realised something else: with two turntables, and two identical copies of the same vinyl, he realised that he could handle them both, lowering the needle of one while raising and repositioning that of the other, and thus completely zeroing out the pauses between breaks. Now his tracks were truly new songs.

In that small room in that high-rise at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, something Herc himself couldn't even imagine was being born: hip hop.

Only one thing was missing for the official birth to take place: the first event. But as per now, all was still confined to Herc’s room. No one other than his sister Cindy had heard his technique, and above all there was no guarantee that others would like to listen to that stuff. Herc had gotten his hands on the best tracks of the sacred monsters of black music, and he wasn’t at all sure that people out there would appreciate such a move. And then dancehalls, toasts, DJs: all Jamaican stuff… Who could tell if it would work out in America as well?

Herc had just turned eighteen, the Bronx summer was scorching and soon, like every year in august, it would be time to organise the back-to-school party.

Then, Cindy came up with an idea. On a July evening she slipped into her brother’s room, who was playing, as usual

Listen Herc, this stuff is dynamite, it can’t stay in here any longer, and I’d like to redo my wardrobe for the fall… Listen, what if we organise the party here?

Here where?! What’s that got to do with the wardrobe?!?

Here at our place, in the courtyard: I’ll organise everything and you will play your tracks. Whoever wants to come will have to pay for the ticket. Fifty cents for boys and twentyfive for girls. You’ll see if we don’t both get a new wardrobe… I already told Dad, and he’s agreed! 

Herc felt a chill, paused for a second, glanced at his records, and then turned to his sister.

Shit…Let’s do it!

Cindy immediately ran to her father, and together they began to prepare the tickets for the event. They wrote them by hand, using a marker and a black pen. Among the special guests, Cindy listed some of her brother’s friends, who would take up the microphone during the party and repeat some improvised lines during his tracks, never imagining they would be remembered as the first MCs in history.

In the weeks that followed, these tickets, handwritten by Cindy and Mr. Campbell, were bought by three hundred people, including, besides Cindy and Herc’s schoolmates and friends, also a couple of onlookers and music lovers, who decided to attend the event because they smelled something revolutionary in that invitation. These were two characters who were literally enchanted by Kool Herc’s artistry that night, so much so that from that moment on, they decided to make it their own, becoming what we know them for today: Afrika Bambaataa and GrandMaster Flash, but that is another history.

What matters here is that on the evening of August 11th, 1973, at 9 pm, in the recreation hall of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, West Bronx, DJ Kool Herc stood in front of those three hundred people with his turntables and, by pronouncing the first toast of his life, kicked off what will always be remembered as the first hip hop event in history.