Ten years of “Squallor”, Fabri Fibra’s darkest album

Ten years after its release, “Squallor” by Fabri Fibra remains one of the darkest, edgiest and probably misunderstood records of Italian rap. Released by surprise in 2015 with an announcement on Twitter, without singles, without promotion and with a deliberately disturbing and essential aesthetic, it sounded more like a warning than a return: “look what we have become”. Not just rap, but the whole of Italy. The project, a few days ago, and for the first time, is available in a collectible vinyl format. It was also a great social experiment: no promos, no interviews, no marketing. Fibra said: “I wanted to make a record that was ‘against’? In reality I simply wanted to make a rap record. Italian rap today is too conditioned by a whole series of rules and beliefs censorship which makes it a harmless genre. I believe that the music market is currently based on factors that have less and less to do with music. ‘Squallor’ absolutely doesn’t change the rules of the game, it’s just a demonstration that rap can achieve results even through alternative routes”.

After the success of “Counterculture” and “War and Peace”many expected a more open recording operation, a replica of Fibra capable of combining irony and denunciation, making it a captivating mash up even in radio hits. Instead “Squallor” was a gesture of rupture, almost a refusal. The album is long, dark, disillusioned. In “Sometimes” with Gel, which remains one of the jewels of the project, Fibra looks around and no longer recognizes anything: not the music scene, not society, perhaps not even himself. It describes the paranoia and difficulties encountered in rapping: the choices, the success, the confusion, the competition, the discomfort. It is an album in which the rapper from Senigallia dismantles his own mask, deflates the media character he had created and which risked suffocating him. The voice is more hypnotic than angry, the writing nervous, disenchantedsharp as a diary written at night in blood. The beats, tense and claustrophobic, amplify the sensation of a toxic presentpoor in truth.

In 2015, Italy was already a country in transformation: the economic crisis still alive, politics rewritten with slogans, social media that began to dictate the rules of self-talk. “Squallor” intercepts this mutation and returns it in a brutal waywithout aesthetics or filters. It is the portrait of a system that has lost its bearings, where anger has become entertainment and protest a content to be shared. And the rap scene, for Fibra, is an accomplice. In “Rap in my country” Fibra slaps the industry, also including a diss track to Fedez, symbol of a glossy rap to be “sold” on the market. “Sluts in Porsche” is an uppercut to the rap scene, described as in the title to underline the ease of giving oneself away in exchange for money, but in general it is an attack on careerism. In “Playboy” with Marracash we talk about “sex as a bargaining chip”a metaphor for ruthless capitalism. In “Like Vasco” there is the bitterness of those who try to achieve everything, but don’t feel part of anything. In “E tu ci covivi” a snapshot of a poisoned Milan takes shape. “Pablo Escobar / Skit Squalor” doesn’t seem to offer any breathing room and is one of the strangest pieces and fascinating features of the project. In general it is an imperfect, fragmented record, which makes you feel uncomfortable. There is no redemption, just a clear look at an emptied world.

The title itself, a caustic homage to Squallorbut also a manifesto of a state of mind, it becomes a declaration: squalor is not only that of others, but that which lives within us, which passes through us when we stop believing that things can be changed. “Sento le sirens” reopens personal wounds between bad choices and drugs, “Alieno” delves into loneliness, into distance from others, while “God exists” has a bruised and dirty mysticism. “I want to know” is a wish, but also a nihilistic anthem against the political class. “When I was little my mother used to beat me. When I was little my father used to beat me. That’s why I don’t give a fuck, guys,” he raps in “I Don’t Give a Fuck,” transmitting pain and anxiety. Ten years later, “Squallor” has not lost strength, on the contrary. In a landscape where rap has become mainstream and sterile provocation a marketing strategy, that record remains a foreign body. It is the chronicle of a country in disarray, but also the portrait of a man who had the courage to look at himself once again in the mirror. After all, it was all already there: the torment, the awareness, the distance. Today we understand that album better. Because the squalor has never gone away.