Abstract
The aim of this article is to explore the development of political rap in Rome as an example of glocalization, i.e. the refraction of universalizing processes (the worldwide diffusion of American hip-hop, including its political sub-genre heir of black protest music and its connection with the Afro-American struggle in New York) through local backgrounds (the tradition of Italian revolutionary music and its relation with the history of class struggle in the country). Furthermore, it will address the current state of the art, trying to draw some conclusions on its future.
1. The DNA of New Yorker rap
1.1. Black music and Afro-American liberation
As prof. Alessandro Portelli told me when I interviewed him, the relationship between black music and Afro-American liberation has always been tight as Western African music was deeply community-driven. Initially the calls for emancipation used to be mostly under Christian symbology in the music known as spirituals, but after the end of the Civil War they had been increasingly more explicit in the derivative genres of gospel and blues. The urbanization subsequent to the Great Migration of Afro-Americans since 1910 from the apartheid system in the South (Jim Crow laws) to the major industrializing cities in the North contributed shaping this new music with new instruments, technical equipment to record and cultural influences.
A new ethnic consciousness emerged after World War I from academic education and widespread lynchings of black soldiers. It led to the Harlem Renaissance, a major artistic and intellectual movement during the Roaring Twenties (“the Jazz Age”) aimed at rediscovering the African roots of black culture, debunking the racist myth of its inferiority.
Socialist ideas increasingly fascinated black musicians from the ‘30s onwards as many (educated) Afro-Americans, subjects of the heavily unbalanced impact of the Great Depression and the emergence of the segregative urban practice of redlining. Consequently, many of them (particularly Paul Robeson) associated themselves with Black Liberation and the Left in general, becoming major targets of McCarthyism.
Nonetheless, after WW2 this new Red Scare could not stop the Civil Rights Movement, as Martin Luther King showed with the promulgation of the Civil Rights Act. This was not nearly enough though for the separatist Malcolm X, leader of the Nation of Islam, whose murder sparked the Black Power movement. The most famous organization was the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party for armed self-defense from the oppression of white capitalism. It was at its peak of popularity during the protests against the Vietnam War in the global framework of the 1968 students’ protests and initiatives like the Free Breakfast for Children program made it spread all over the US. Nonetheless, FBI progressively cracked it down during the ‘70s.
This cultural translation of this movement was the Black Arts Movement in 1965. Expanding from the Harlem Renaissance, it aimed at renewing American art (especially literature) through the valorization of black heritage, in order to empower Afro-Americans for a racial upheaval. Among these artists there were Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets, considered “proto-rappers” since they used to make slam poetry, carrying on the legacy of Western African griots (storytellers accompanied by musical instruments).
It had survived through Caribbean calypso, that in Jamaica had influenced the birth of ska, precursor of rocksteady and reggae. DJs used to play them in sound systems, huge musical set-ups during massive street parties. Along with hosts/entertainers known as Masters of Ceremonies (MCs), they used to compete against each other on whom had the best one.
1.2. Political New Yorker rap
Among the viewers of sound systems there was a kid who would have later moved with his family to the Bronx, the popular neighborhood of New York which was facing deindustrialization, mass building burning and street criminality; the Hoe Avenue peace meeting of all the local gangs cooled down in 1971. His name was DJ Kool Herc and in 1973 he threw a block party, considered the birth of hip-hop. It was the first time drum parts of funk and R&B hits (breaks) were isolated and put in loop, especially James Brown’s records.
Two months later Afrika Baambataa, a prominent member of a Bronx gang influenced by the Black Panthers, formed the Universal Zulu Nation. This organization shaped hip-hop culture on freedom, equality, knowledge and peace thanks to crew battles on the four disciplines of hip-hop.
In 1977 there was a huge blackout in New York and, thanks to the stolen musical equipment, DJs were ready to produce the first rap hits, such as “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five: It was the first conscious rap song about the devastation in the ghettos, that Reaganism was sharpening.
In 1983 two rap fans named Russell Simmons – son of civil rights activists – and Rick Rubin founded the label Def Jam Records to promote a powerful means for desegregation. As the Black Arts Movement advocated, they wanted to assault the mainstream without compromises.
In 1988 they produced the platinum black nationalist album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” by Public Enemy, “the Black Panthers of rap”. The Breakfast for Children Program had fed their leader Chuck D who, once grown up, had attended the course “Black music and musicians” by Andrei Strobert, a jazz player involved in the Black Arts Movement.
In the same year, Boogie Down Productions published its second album “By All Means Necessary” after the murder of their producer DJ Scott La Rock. Accordingly, KRS-One shifted from a proto-gansta attitude in the first album to weapons’ promotion only for self-defense, as Malcolm X – present both in the cover and the title – used to teach.
The collective Native Tongues, starring future legends like A Tribe Called Quest and Queen Latifah, welcomed this invitation. They would have written the history of the genre through their Afrocentrism in lyrics and sampling, along with X Clan. Moreover, their jazz-rap sound influenced a lot the duo Black Star, named after the black separatist Marcus Garvey’s shipping company.
However, in 1996 Bill Clinton’s administration signed the Telecommunications Act, that sped up the ongoing process of oligopolization of the music market up to the contemporary Big Three (Sony, Universal and Warner) and its complete financialization. Along with the emergence of streaming platforms, this process has been dramatically shrinking the revenues of artists.
In the case of rap, this has been meaning a constant push for the de-politicization of the genre in favor of commodified gangsta rap and its derivatives, following Adorno‘s theory of standardization: therefore, radical proposals could come almost only from the independent underground. In New York the main representatives have been dead prez, Immortal Technique and KRS-One, who organizes many laboratories based on Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy.
2. Roman rap within a glocal framework
2.1. Italian traditional political music
Italian popular political music had been mostly satirical from the ancient Latin times to the central Italian stornelli. It was after Napoleon’s campaign of Italy (1796-1797) that Jacobin chants spread across the Italian Sister Republics. In the XIX century they evolved into songs related to the Italian independence (particularly about the national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi), following the diffusion of socialist and anarchist ideas.
The end of the traumatic WW1 and the news about the Bolshevik revolution gave new life to revolutionary ideas. The years 1919-1920 are called “Red Biennium” as they saw a massive wave of strikes and social clashes all over Italy: Spartacus Picenus, a songwriter who used to subvert the lyrics of popular songs to make them communist, wrote its “soundtrack”. The fascists cracked this wave down after the 1922 coup, but this tradition did not die and, along with foreign influences (namely Soviet “Katyusha”), it constituted the repertoire of partisans’ chants (e.g. “Bella Ciao”) against the Nazi-Fascist occupation after 1943.
The civil war left a deep wound in Italian society, mitigated by the Economic Boom in the ‘50s. When the growth got stuck during the ‘60s, in the ’70s a period of furious political violence from all actors (“Years of Lead”) broke out. It was during this period that a new generation of leftist songwriters emerged, starting from the group Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI). In the ‘60s it rediscovered many political chants of the Italian tradition, including political work songs (e.g. “Canti delle Mondine”). Moreover, a wave of politically-committed songwriters (cantautori impegnati) such as Claudio Lolli and Fabrizio De André became famous in the following decade on the international wave of Bob Dylan and Georges Brassens.
2.2. Political Roman rap
The conflict intensified when in 1977 a new spontaneous student movement broke out in in contrast with the Communist Party because it was seeking an agreement (compromesso storico) to form a government with the ruling pro-American Christian-Democratic Party, that had excluded the very popular communists from the governments for 30 years. The most famous organization that emerged was Autonomia Operaia, which was behind the occupations of “free radios” and self-managed social centers (autonomous squattings where community-driven activities have been taking place).
The whole movement was cracked down after the murder of president Aldo Moro by far-left terrorists and the subsequent arrests of many leaders and militants at the beginning of the ‘80s. This meant a dramatic decline in influence throughout the decade, following the global rise of neoliberalism. The free radios remained though and the Roman one, named Radio Onda Rossa, hosted in 1987 “Funk theology”,the radio program of two university students on hip-hop.
In 1989 there was the last backlash of that political season, i.e. the wave of occupations all over Italy against the supposed privatization of universities (Panther movement). In order to support it the two radio speakers decided to publish independently the first rap EP in Italian (“Batti il tuo tempo”) as Onda Rossa Posse. Inspired by Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, the lyrics addressed many political topics, such as the corruption of the establishment and the repression of extra-parliamentary left.
The university movement lasted only one year, but it planted a seed and many metropolitan cities had set up its raggamuffin-rap posse revolving around its main social center, as Onda Rossa Posse with CSOA Forte Prenestino. Thus, a strong independent network for production and distribution was active on the autonomous path of hardcore punk bands. They got help for their publications even from Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano itself.
In 1991 Onda Rossa Posse had split into two different groups though, both still active: Assalti Frontali and AK47. I have interviewed Kid, a former member of the latter who told me about the political battles they carried on through music. He told me that cantautori (he has worked with Claudio Lolli) and Autonomia Operaia were quite influential on their artistic thought: people used to go in and out as the individualities were liquid and what mattered was the collective intelligence. The aim was to serve the community, bearing in mind the global battlefield.
In the second half of the ‘90s this unity against the mainstream musical market started breaking though. In 2001 the brutal mass repression of no-global protests at the G8 in Genoa shocked also the hip-hop environment. This was a hard blow for what had remained of the extra-parliamentary left and it was forced to go progressively low-key. It was a victory of Berlusconism, the social phenomenon related to former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi who massively promoted right-wing populist contents on his powerful system of mainstream media.
However, after a block party in front of Roman projects Suarez and Supremo73 from Gente de Borgata – one of the most iconic Roman underground rap groups – told me that, although mainstream rappers have been increasingly signing for major labels, underground rappers such as them and Brokenspeakers (particularly Lucci) could always rely on these social centers to perform and promote their music.
The relationship has not always been idyllic as the raw language of rap, especially in terms of misogyny, can lead to feminist contestations. I discussed it with DJ Fastcut, a pillar of this scene thanks to his saga of producer albums “Dead Poets”, which has been increasingly representing a precious independent stage for underground rappers to be noticed.
He explained to me also the fundamental relationship between (Italian) major labels and political rap:
The most political songs in his saga were made by Francesco Kento, arguably the rapper who is connected the most with the cantautorial tradition as well as with his home region, Calabria. He has been bringing since 20 years its message of historical multiculturality based on anti-fascism and anti-mafia, receiving several prizes for the value of his lyrics.
Like Fastcut he is disillusioned about the possibilities of carrying out radical battles inside major labels since, according to him, “market and message are antithetical like water and oil”. The only possibility to take the power back lays at the grassroots level, i.e. his hip-hop laboratories in prisons. In his viewpoint, they supply to the subalterns the tools to realize the structural oppression they face, channeling their feelings on rap bars to have a future beyond jail bars.
Kento is not the only one who leads these kinds of laboratories. Assalti Frontali organize them too in schools and, during one of them years ago, they found my last interviewee, the young rapper Er Tempesta. Nowadays he follows the group on every stage and, after having grown up listening to cantautorato, he is a rapper/educator himself now.
He agrees on Kento’s thought but he also thinks that a new season of musical political commitment has started after Covid. In 2021 indeed a trap group from different parts of Italy called P38 published “Nuove BR”, a relatively popular underground independent album. It massively employs the aesthetics of ’70s left-wing terrorism, a sign that Italian leftist memory is not dead at all among the youth, including him.
A new wave of antagonist music could then re-emerge from the independent market, giving a soundtrack to the opposition to the right-wing Giorgia Meloni’s government and the slaughter in Gaza. The great success of Macklemore’s pro-Palestinian song “Hind’s Hall” showed that it has an important discographic potential.
Conclusion
As this article has shown, both in New York and Rome political rap is the latest development of a long tradition of protest music, whose intensity has followed the history of their local societies’ collective effervescence in the global geopolitical framework. This phase of international tensions which climate change and the recrudescence of social polarization have been worsening, related to the dissatisfaction about liberal globalization, could then could trigger a new wave of protest music from independent labels, conquering once again positions in mainstream music without compromises.
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