Caleydo and Bassi Maestro embrace Gino Paoli and Lucio Dalla

Who are the songwriters? Gino Paoli, master of melody and the existentialist storyhas repeatedly provided an answer that does not have to do so much with the writing technique, but more with the feeling that animates certain songs. Singer-songwriters chase the truth, reject poetic and artificial languages, seek the essence, want to describe reality directly, without filters. What does it remind you of? Oh yeah. On the link between rap and songwriting there is a debate, between convinced supporters and radical opponents (here the opinion of Ivano Fossati), which has been going on for years and which at a certain point, after sampling, quotations and evolutions of language, culminated in Marracash winning the Premio Tenco in 2022, the most important award for song writers in Italy, for his album “Noi, lui, gli altri”. But that debate, that exchange between worlds, has never ended: in that river of words and history the two tributaries of rap and songwriting continue to flow, feeding the waters of comparison, as also demonstrated the samples of Gino Paoli and Francesco Guccini made by Fabri Fibra in his last two albums, “Caos” and “viene Los Angeles burns”.

These days, almost like a sudden waterfall, it arrives “Panopticon”, album by Caleydo, rapper and singer-songwriter from Vicenza born in 2000, born Alessandro Motterle, supported by the productions of Bassi Maestro, icon of hip hop culture. A project that is as fresh as it is anchored to a certain tradition. And for this reason it is interesting, enjoyable, vivid In the time and out from time. The title is inspired by the concept of “panopticon”, the ideal prison theorized by Jeremy Bentham and taken up by George Orwell in “1984”: a place of invisible and constant controlmetaphor of a society in which every gesture is observed and judged. The album has a lucid look running through it the ten tracks of the album: a common thread made of social criticism, introspection and external observation, where bourgeois society ends up in the crosshairs, with its contradictions and dark areas. Caleydo, followed by the Double Trouble team, the management agency founded by Jacopo Pesce and Max Brigante, like a new Ellis in “Meno di zero”, takes on the look of the witness: describes without judging, as can be seen from the first track, highlights and leaves the listener the freedom to interpret.

On this journey to the borders of poverty and social control, the young author is accompanied by Lucio Dalla, who we find in “The Big City” together with Willie Peyotean analysis of freedom built around to the sampling of “Free”; from Gino Paolipresent in a skit; and from comedian Eleazaro Rossito seal the ironic and disenchanted approach with which the album is imbued. Caleydo’s lyrics move like sequences in a film, between bars that reveal paranoia and system cracksimages and allegories that people transform into “animals”with vices that take on bestial traits. To support and amplify this imagery there are the beautiful productions by Bassi Maestro, which create the right atmosphere, enhancing the lyric and transforming each song into a contemporary soundscape.

The project looks at Italian songwriting in its different eras, with references to the 70s and 80s, and it is from here that Bassi started to build hip hop bases with a vintage touch, but not at all dusty. In “Panopticon” there is also the intimate memory of the places that marked the young man’s adolescence, told in “That way”; there is the description of a neighborhood reality, that of the bar and its frequenters, a popular microcosm that seems destined to disappearas well as a dive into feelings, between bruised loves, a “Samba of the night” and painful attempts to understand each other. “Panopticon” is a warm embrace, in the cold of today’s music, between two generations and two worlds, which are both rap and songwriting, and Caleydo and Bassi Maestro themselves.