Kid Yugi: “The street is the most hypocritical world I’ve ever seen”
As often happens in Kid Yugi records, it is a phrase in the final track that offers the most meaning to everything. In “Davide e Goliath”, the final piece of his third project “Even heroes die”, out on Friday 30 January, the Apulian rapper closes with a disillusioned and very powerful image: “the mighty win while the heroes die“. A bitter epilogue that definitively brings into focus the concept of an album built on the increasingly blurred border between good and evil, right and wrong, heroes, jesters and monsters, but without ever breaking too far into contemporaneity. “The further I go, the more I make disillusioned records, in this album I wanted to undermine the idea of the hero, who today is a blurred figure, it is no longer clear who he really is: perhaps no one can be an idol, perhaps the only one who really was was Jesus, who died to save others”, says Yugi, who for some of his religious quotes “in the past even exorcist monks wrote to me to tell me that they appreciated my music”, he smiles.
“Even heroes die” it is an ambitious album, crossed by high moments, very high ones if we think that Yugi is just 24 years old: raw, sharp, often violent bars, which coexist with authentic and rarely decorative literary quotes, one of the great stylistic features of Massafra’s voice. “On the cover of the album I am inside a coffin, I decided to die like an ordinary person, precisely to ‘demystify my figure’”, admits Yugi, who in describing the genesis of the project quotes Guccini, “I listened to him a lot while I was writing”, the CCCP, “I grew up with their music”, Dostoevsky, “his human anti-heroes changed my life”, the director Shin’ya Tsukamoto and Noyz Narcos, the closest artist to his way of rapping.
The opening with “The Last to Fall”a river of bars without a chorus with the intro in which Giovanni Lindo Ferretti’s voice stands out, introduces some central themes: the price of success and the conflict, also present in “The necessary violence”. The transformation of Francesco Stasi into Kid Yugi is told without triumphalism, rather as a painful mutation. “I hated rich people because I hated being poor, now I still hate them because I’m one of themIt is though “Monster” to represent the emotional center of the album. A confession that investigates how fame can deform, how the world can make us cynical. Among family memories and lost friends, Yugi utters one of the key phrases: “God is wrong, heroes die. And even today I will kneel to this world, please don’t make me a monster”. Here the conflict is not external, but internal, exactly as in “Gilgamesh“, whose title evokes the mythology of a demigod who defies death. “The conflict with myself, with expectations and with what they think of me, then has its highest point in the final track – he anticipates – sometimes man feels so crushed that he takes refuge in violence, as I tell in the album, but I certainly don’t want to push people to make ‘the night of judgement’, I hope that the anger and ferocity are channeled into something beautiful and good, in art”.
In the burning planet told in tracks like “Berserker”consumer society and capitalism have emptied the word “hero” of its original meaning. Today’s idols are no longer figures who fight injustice, but often simple accumulators of money, protagonists of ephemeral successes. Not surprisingly, in “Joker”the rapper speaks openly about “jesters”: characters who catalyze attention and produce economic value, but without embodying any ideal. “The lie that bothers me the most is the fake meritocracy: today a person is worth what he or she can produce and this is unacceptable,” argues Yugi.
Yet, despite the strength of the concept, not all the moments of the album manage to fully support it. “Push It”the song with Anna, despite relying on a Miami sound, effective in making it viral, appears like a foreign body: a track that struggles to dialogue with the rest of the album. “I enjoy it, music can sometimes just entertain – he replies – opening me up to pop? I want to be a rapper. A person I respect told me: ‘intelligence is knowing who you are’. I get asked about Sanremo, but at the moment I don’t see it as something close to me, I don’t even fully understand how songs are judged, what really counts in that context”. Also “Chuck Norris” it leaves a sense of a partially missed opportunity: the ending in dialect is identifying, but the contrast with a more elementary first part and the final beat change make one think that it would have been more radical, and coherent, to push the idea to the end, choosing the dialect for the entire piece. Pure “Mu’Ammar Gaddafi” and “Bullet ballet”undoubtedly two bangers, are however more frayed from the theme of the album than other episodes.
The album finds compactness and depth in its most personal moments. “What a fight for you” it is one of the most emotionally surprising songs: dedicated to the artist’s sister during a period of hospitalization, it transforms the struggle into a gesture of love and resistance. Here heroism loses all rhetorical aura and becomes daily sacrifice, a private promise. “I’m not a doctor, I couldn’t do anything while my sister was sick, except write, make a song. Suffering defines us, this track recalls two very hard weeks, but luckily she’s fine now”, he reveals.
Another fundamental axis of the project is the reflection on false heroes and toxic myths. “For the blood shed”a song in the highest sense of the term, tells of boys trapped in neighborhood wars, seduced by wrong examples and the mythology of the underworld. It is a look that comes from the South, from contexts where the “road” is often not a choice, but a consequence of lack of opportunities and deprivation. Phrases like “let your path not be the path” or “lost among bad examples, bad models“they convey the image of a youth crushed by a carousel of power that saves no one. “It is a song about violence, which in some places even exacerbates into wars. I don’t want to teach anyone anything – he points out – this piece is for those kids who are fascinated by dynamics that don’t belong to them. There’s no point in ruining your life. The street is the most hypocritical world I’ve ever seen.”
There is also room for love, but not always with the same strength. “Tristan and Isolde” it is probably the most successful sentimental song on the album, with a beautiful instrumental coda, because it manages to convey a love experienced, suffered, true. “Amelie” and “Heroina”instead appear more fragile and less incisive compared to the heart of the project, especially when compared with more inspired moments. “Eroina”, with its opening, and despite being based on an obvious play on words between drugs and the feminine “hero”, is a candidate to be one of the album’s singles. The circle closes with “David and Goliath”where Kid Yugi refuses any simplification: we are not just spectators of the conflict, but the conflict itself. Everyone is both David and Goliath, victim and executioner, fragile and powerful. “Even heroes die” does not offer solutions, but accepts the inevitability of the human condition in perpetual conflict with itself and with the outside world. “This is the real message of the album – he concludes – you have to fight against something: it is essential not to win, but as catharsis”.
