Goodnight of Hernia: abortion seen by a man

How I came across this song is not accidental. I was working, the album had already been out for a few days but it wasn’t in my playlist yet. My sister writes me a message: «Listens Good night of Hernia», at first without giving any explanations. Often this is her way of communicating her feelings, sharing the song that is bouncing around in her head at the moment. «Did you listen to her?», She reiterates her a few hours later. “You have to listen to it in a right situation. Not on the metro, you need serenity », she continued in the chat. So I said ok, I’ll find a moment. At the end of the day, when the pc was off and the water was heating up for the shower, I met Good night.

Good night is the song that Ernia, the Milanese rapper from 1993, dedicates to his unborn son. It is the story of how his partner chose to have an abortion in the hospital. She is the painful lullaby that he dedicates to the life that she has not seen born, she explains the choice, the sensations, the road to the clinic. Lor Marco Masini had already sung in Cinderella in lovehow difficult it was to figure out the right thing to do. Hernia does something different. She talks about what happens after an abortion. The headache that grips him when the night comes back to him, the difficulty of understanding how he loves himself, the fear of making a mistake and finding himself stuck in something he didn’t want.

Goodnight is not for him or for the son it could have been, it is a desperate plea for the mateso that he can sleep despite his “heavy soul”: “I don’t know how to be so strong/
Make her say goodnight.” And the unexpected thing is the delicacy with which the singer chooses to address the issue of abortion. He steps aside, as few men are able to do on the subject, but observes what he sees around him, in the waiting rooms of the hospital: «You see, I was already out from the arrival/ It had something punitive, like being punished/ But in the waiting rooms I understood/ They fear that the man can put pressure of some kind».

The single comes at a historic moment in which they are once again questioned women’s rights regarding abortion. Probably Ernia’s intention is not to make propaganda against the new government, which threatens to influence the freedom to interrupt pregnancy, but nevertheless chooses to let her message of anger and denunciation shine through: «The other evening there was a old man at an evening program / He railed against cases like ours then I would have shaken my hand on his jugular / To tell him, “It’s easy to get fat, lecturing other people’s morals”».

Good night is part ofalbum I’m not afraid, released on November 18 through Island Records. The title, which suggests a form of courage and resilience, is actually extremely ironic. For Hernia this it is the album of fears, of anxieties that his generation is facing
daily basis. There is the anguish of a dying planet, sung in Roses and flowersthere is the risk of ending up in a life that is always the same, in Weekend. And even if Good night is the album’s most intimate and deeply personal exception, it manages to make itself incredibly collective: in this letter to his unborn son, Ernia recounts the pain of a choice in an Italy that is still struggling to improve.