Has Fedez's private life devoured his music?

The story of Sex shopthe new song by Fedezin duet with Emis Killabegins in 2016, with I would like but I don't post. At the time he was just a pop-rapper with Everyman's Front ideas, he didn't move heaven and earth in terms of public opinion, everything he did, his tattoos were discussed and the one with J-Ax was a parallel project, a winding down after a couple of years of perfect storm, which in his case had taken him from the social centers to the top, and in the other had relaunched him from limbo – and peace that it wouldn't have gone like this, that the thing would have exploded on him in their hands and would have cannibalized part of their solo careers. However, at a certain point, as is well known, Fedez brought it up in the text Chiara Ferragniand so far nothing strange, except that the quote will be the fuse that will make them known, and the thing will become the founding brick of the Ferragnez. The rest is history: «If I hadn't written a rhyme with your name in a completely casual way, we wouldn't be here today», she would have confessed two years later at the wedding.

Something had changed forever: the fact that a true loveand that love had been told about socialwith Fedez meanwhile becoming more and more influencers and less of a singer (not that things obscure each other: it's just that they can't coexist), he had blurred the boundaries, broken the banks, rethought the protagonist's life and career from scratch. Fedez, largely by choice and partly, as he recently implied, by inertia, had transformed his life (or at least what he wanted to tell about it, including music) into a performance, in a film to be fed to followers in which music was now part of a bigger whole, greater than the sum of its parts. The songsin short, like an emanation, signals to be reconnected to a broader narrative reverse. It's not that there is an experience close to the listeners that comes back; if anything it is a whole, with Fedez who is a character, an influencer precisely, and unravels his work, his being, Also making songs.

Sex shop (which it should be Sex shopsbut we are Italians and we distort it) closes the circleand not because it tells the end of a love where I would like but I don't postunknowingly, had marked the beginning, but because it establishes the victory of out on the inside: anticipated by various spoilers – including that of the fateful «Love is not made in sex shops, you were like a Jackpot in the slots and then you knocked me out. You say I'm a bastard, but for you I won't change”, which now turns out to hold up the whole piece, otherwise a little lacking in ideas – and gives a style atmosphere Shakira vs Piqué (but without, here too, equally incisive passages), we already knew what he would talk about, the blood in some way had already been glimpsed, indeed, it was essential and this is just the expected, even predictable, response; more than a piece of summer, it is a speech to the nationone vent from Instagram. The result is a palace with foundations devoured by termites: the basics are missing, the song only stands up, precisely, as part of the narration of the Fedez-universe, as a live broadcast or a documentary could; the end result would be the same.

For heaven's sake, even the various catchphrases in which he sang in recent years – and which have now become his main use, as far as music is concerned – were to be read as part of something. There was Fedez, here, who by working on diplomacy and balancing every summer managed to get the most prominent names on the market, basically a he with whom to split the verses and a she to whom to entrust the chorus (from Disco Paradise down), and punctually he was fine with it; reading it from the outside was a way to demonstrate that we were there, that we knew how to interpret trendsto be, if desired, as well stinging (the hit of the summer, in the end, that is what they are) and renew themselves, like a three-headed dragon where you cut off one and leave two. Fedez, here, like those who do the trickeven though the conditions become more and more difficult, he always takes home the victory: others fail to do so, and it is the key to both making himself loved and hated.

This time however, either by choice or because the last few months have been difficult, there aren't the same colors as before, but not even a turning point conscious. A lot has been said about how, in recent months, he was returning from a bourgeois who drove around in a Lamborghini the original boy from Rozzano which was. Here it is only partly true: in the hinterland there is rap everywhere you turn, while in the song hip hop it's just a pretextand not even Emis Killacalled upon to lend a strong hand where needed, brings notable bars, and indeed creates a strange déjà-vu effect with Maracana, the theme song for the Football World Cup on Sky that he recorded in 2014 and from which he then wanted to distance himself, to return to his hard and pure roots. It's more than anything bumper car danceVery unz-unz, Rozzano distillateyes, but in this sense, and in any case without even the slightest inspired imagination of one Children on the streetthe outsider hit of 2020 in which he sampled a trance classic like Children by Robert Miles.

Net of the fact that it is not (i.e., it can not be) all a great diabolical plan to ensure that a response to Ferragni goes viral, Sex shopin itself, still has the characteristics to collect nice numbersis neither better nor worse than average of summer hits, even without having the flashes of, let's say, zeitgeist of a Disco Paradise, nor the imaginative impact. It's more one private matter, partly something new for him. But the impression is that it is, above all, a moment of passage, waiting to understand what Fedez wants to do with this third phase. As a person and character, of course; that the musicit seems, is now subordinated.