Why do rappers want to do pop at a certain point?

You are born a rapper and grow up a pop singer. It is a parable that is anything but fantastic or fairytale-like, but rather increasingly clear and real, especially since rap has tasted the heights of the mainstream, pop noticed it and not only embraced it, but also bit it like a vampire, transforming it. The last to end up on the brazier of the purists was Tedua who, with his “Paradiso”, the deluxe of “The Divine Comedy”, opened up, plowing through broader melodies, singing and making love pieces mostly from radio tone. But the point, leaving useless and harmful radicalism out of the discussion, is not to play with pop, but how to do it. Rap has always been contaminated, mixed with other influences, contagion, understood as infecting and being infected, is in its deepest nature.

The feeling, however, is that many rappers today, especially several of the new generation, to accelerate the climb, they do so by aping the stylistic features of the pop genre without a real identitywith the sole aim of broadening their fan base, of being more popular on the radio, of arriving on the Ariston stage and, simply, of being accepted by an audience that they would never have intercepted otherwise. It seems that, at a certain point in one's career, rap is no longer enough to feel like an “artist”, almost as if there were an unmotivated inferiority complex towards pop. But let's get back to the central point: how the most open potential hits are churned out is the heart of the reasoning because the most pop hit, in itself, has no reason to be demystified. Let's take Fabri Fibra: an artist capable, from “In Italia” to “Propaganda” of churning out more musically accommodating songs in which, however, he textually inserts meanings and words that are anything but reassuring, sometimes poisonous. It's his specialty. We sing carefree, but we sing tragedy.

Fibra is the emblem of how one can break into the mainstream, but without ending up making banal love songs, remaining tied to what all rappers should defend: the roots of hip hop. There are those in that championship with a high rate of mainstream who ended up there with an accident, see the case of “Superclassico” by Erniawho however remains a rapper tout court who didn't want to ride that wave too much, who knew how to play his cards intelligently, read the entry “Cenere” by Lazza, the real winning song of the 2023 Sanremo Festivaland who did it with a particular stamp of belonging and authenticity: “Crazy love” by Marracash. These are very different cases, but virtuous. The latter, in particular, “Crazy Love”, is undoubtedly a love pop piece, but musically and lyrically rich in personality and perfectly integrated into the album “Noi, Loro, gli altri”. And this makes a difference, substantially. It's a piece by Marracash, it's not Marracash singing, as if he were a cosplayer, a pop song. This type of approach should be a beacon.

You can make more open songs while keeping your clothes on. And this is what also happens in the careers of international big names: Eminem, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Drake, to give different examples, have created, more or less, several hits with a softer shot, or by exploiting perhaps feminine refrains or more open melodies, but often evident children of their creativity. Chasing pop standards, without real awareness, often turning one's identity upside down is justified behind the fig leaf of “versatility” or “experimentation”. The truth is that it is incandescent, dangerous matter, especially when it is not linked to “episodes”: for a rapper to throw himself into another playing field, perhaps in a premeditated way, on the drawing board, but without ideas or worse with ideas copied from others, risks disorientating the public and then end up creating a crisis even in the artist himself.