"I like plastic music," Jovanotti said in an interview a few years ago.

It's a pleasure to compete in the charts against winners of talent shows who are thirty years younger than you.

"I like being pop." Jovanotti, who brought out Italian hip-hop, flirted with commerce for years, and it didn't hurt him.

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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2021 has been a good year for Italian pop fusions, if only for the aesthetically serious band Måneskin, which won the Eurovision Song Contest.

Others invested in the continuation of Jovanotti's work, which today bears the strange attribution "cantautorap", a mixture of songwriting and rap that is possible in Italy because Italian rappers, also inspired by K-pop, dare to sing more again and Genres and formations change like hairstyles - and I found out about it when my Italopop love was reignited at the beginning of winter.

Loudly dressed guys

It started with a song by Franco126 aptly called "Maledetto Tempo", damn time, and ended with the pasta overcooking on my stove. At first it had sounded like a ballad. Federico Bertollini, that's the name of the musician from Rome, who, as I learned, named himself after the number of steps on a staircase in the Trastevere district and described himself as a rapper, singing there with an operatic voice. Then he exclaimed "Maledetto" with a sigh, lamenting the damn time, and not just the social situation, but above all the realization that he had grown up and saw all the special moments inexorably flowing away, like pasta water.

At the next opportunity I had put together a playlist of former rappers who, like Franco126, called their role model Lucio Dalla or had completed autotune and sang about their mental troubles; Artists hated by Italian hip-hop media as being garishly dressed guys doing pop for money, which is a serious crime indeed. I tested the playlist in company. She started with Frah Quintale and a song called "Missili", which even became the theme song for a touching Netflix series in 2020. The song is about two people arguing: "I'd like to make peace, but we're launching rockets." And acoustically, the rockets are all fast-paced lines whose rap texture is evident in Frah not needing to breathe.

It was followed by "Catene", a cheerfully fatalistic pop work by Coez (first album: "Terapia", early collaboration with Marracash, one of the great Italian rappers). "Catene" is about someone who drinks too much and calls for a rubber band to pull himself together, a rhythmically elaborate song that makes you want to dance. In the meantime, my friends who were present began to smile cynically, like you now, because each and every one of us remembers Adriano Celentano or Zucchero or lemon ice cream with Paolo Conte, the Germans' senseless enthusiasm for Italy, and because even those who are still glassy When they hear San Remo, they have to be suspicious of this new sound.

But then came Gio Evan, who is actually a poet and in "Joseph Beuys" confusingly, but at least as beautifully as Wanda and sings in the style of the great songwriters of Bologna and about changing the world while sitting in silence.

And now the friends had gotten used to the music, they didn't say anything anymore, just I sat there and wondered why this so smooth, hyper-reflective music got me through the winter so well.

Italian pop, which first got on the radio and from there to Germany, seemed detached from everything political and social in the last years of the old millennium, was sometimes carefree, sometimes bombastic, always upright in its romantic attitude. Italian hip-hop, which was burgeoning in the 1980s, changed perspective with its American models, its specific sounds and struggles for existence. Then came the generation of talent shows. Anyone who grew up with the rough rap of the nineties and didn't want to see their artistic achievements broadcast on television in the form of scores founded a hip-hop group at home, in Brescia, in Salerno, and eventually became a cantauto rapper. And from this experience, in addition to a stylistic curiosity, brought an ironic distance to his own career,a willingness to fail and a gentle longing: "I want to talk to you, but I would choke on my words, so I keep drinking Vodka Schweppes, maybe you'll make the first move."

Female artists also found their way into the playlist, Elodie and acclaimed rapper Priestess, but overall they sounded too balanced, too single-minded for this round of lost men and their outspoken wonder at this world.