Mahmood on the new cover of Vanity Fair: “Between earth and Olympus”

This article is published in number 21 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 25, 2021

There is an imperceptible but giant absence around Mahmood’s neck. His gold chain, the one that has always been there, is lost. And that’s not a trivial sign. Because that thread that barely touched the hollow of his shoulder, and then descends down to the center of his chest and open shirts, hung the head of a little Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen, like “a precious treasure in me, a powerful symbol of my Arab origins, a baptismal gift from my father, who took me on horseback without reins in the desert and to the Pyramids, with the Invicta backpack on my shoulders, the beginning of my story ».

Warm gaze, animal, body that speaks in a secret magnetism of “tears” as of “swift in the eyes”, of “wounds” as of “Inuyasha’s scars”, which is a Japanese anime of his childhood memories, Alexander is a voice of a generation that has its own grammar, which flows and in that flow makes stamps and definitions vanish like soap bubbles. And so he is neither fragile nor his opposite, but just a boy full of grace with an intense imagination who has started writing his songs on the tram and every day corrects himself a little, and every day tries to tame his own demons. , a little, just like all of us. And so he is managing not to confuse the rarities of his instinct and his talent, to put them together, to keep them alive for something more than not losing them: to consecrate them.

How you do it?

«By giving himself without saving, entirely. I’ve been almost alone on the new album for two years. It’s closed, I look at it and it’s just as I expected it to be. Ghettolimpo».

It is a neologism.

«The ghetto is everyday life. Olympus is of the skies. We are in the middle. A little earth and a little air ».

Where does your passion for Greek myths come from?

«I would immerse myself in my childhood as an only child, in the bedroom, between games. I devoured them. I was fascinated by Hades, its shadows, its darkness. O Narcissus, who is in the mirror and dies for too much love. This proceeding to experiments that have myths and ending up in a teaching, an obvious morality from which you can no longer ignore ».

When you reflect, what do you see?

“Something I don’t feel inside.”

He’s not even thirty years old. What age is his?

“Difficult. I am putting my best energies into music, present core. I try to avoid emotional imbalances. I rely on my clan, which unites family and friends, and makes me feel comfortable, with my feet on the ground, especially after the explosion in Sanremo ».

Who is part of it?

«Who says to me“ Alessandro, maybe you are doing a shit ”where for others it would be“ Alessandro, you are beautiful, you are good, everything is fine ”. Close people who touch them, my dreams ».

What dreams do you have?

«One is to meet the master Franco Battiato. For that time he kidnapped me from a car radio on my way to a beach: with Tozeur trains I discovered the ecstasy. Greet him as if we were in that masterpiece of his Alexander Square. “There was snow, see you tonight outside the theater, ‘do you like Schubert?’” ».

His mother, Anna.

“I was her only child, it was her first time too, and it was great. In me it is justice, which governs and repairs. Hot headed, we look alike. Third media, great sense of work. After the Festival and Eurovision she was amazed with me, we who hadn’t had anything, we didn’t expect anything, and suddenly we found ourselves with everything. She never got tired of surprising me. Like once I was returning from Madrid and she said to me: “I’m tired to have dinner together”, and then I believed her, and instead I opened the door and there she was, she had cleaned my whole house, and she had cooked. She is the first to listen to my creations, I place every trust in her. “Ale, this is very nice but a bit difficult. Not everyone understands it ”».

His was, is, an absent father.

“I haven’t known about him for a long time. But of the people I tend to always want to save the beautiful, and to throw away the rotten ».

Is beauty that saves so far in time?

«At the Idroscalo in Milan when I was little there was a Luna Park. Santa always took me there. We were approaching my favorite carousel, which was the slides. The lord of the slides then gave me Aladin’s flying carpet, and in that ups and downs with my dad there I felt a bit magical ».

What happened between you?

“His biography and mine say he separated from my mother when I was five. So perhaps it would be more correct to ask me: “What did not happen” ».

Do you miss it?

“Worse. I don’t know in what way anymore, I miss him ».

Is the suburb still your home?

“Yes, the only place where I do my hair, at my barber Aziz, where I find myself and I’m really comfortable. I left her to go to my mother’s bar in the center of Milan, when there was a need to help her. Then we set off, off to ski on the white mountains in Madesimo, with the lake freezing in winter. I attach to each song as many memories as possible ».

Everything is reopening, in a pandemic that seems to be in the process of being resolved with the number of vaccinates increasing, and summer is now near.

«Superb, but be careful, it’s not a gift, it won’t be easy to get used to people again, to make peace with the idea of ​​contact. I was walking on the Naviglio yesterday, and an annoyance of the noise grew and, on the other hand, a silent discomfort in me, as the consequence of a trauma. It will not be enough for us to be free. We will have to relearn, for example to hug. I don’t know if I know how to do it anymore ».

Is there anyone who has never stopped hugging?

“Mom. Mom is protection ».

And what is protection?

«Even if it seems a contradiction, to tell you: ‘If you take a debt, you work’. “If you finish high school and don’t go to college, too.” And so I did: the steward at the fairs, the entertainer in the summer villages, where he started at 8 with the aqua aerobics and ended at 2 in the morning taking down the sets of the stage, a military effort. But when she was little she used to collect olives with her grandfather in the fields, and I couldn’t say a word ».

What were you most afraid of in this stretch?

«Of illness and death, so linked to each other. I was bracing myself: if all goes well, when it ends, I take a plane and take my friends to dinner in New York. But the anxiety was there, still ».

What did he teach you?

«That every soothing is temporary, that one can be lighter in discovering that one cannot, perhaps one should not, please everyone. That when you think you are right, if for others you do not have it, it is not your problem but theirs. Realize that you can’t be what people expect without blaming yourself for it anymore. Do not fall into despair because they criticize you is an achievement, a liberation ».

To those who are still looking for differences in who they love, what do you answer?

«I reply that we are open young people who do not need to be pigeonholed. It is a need of others, who find it more convenient to differentiate us, to label us, to divide us into departments. But life is not a supermarket and non-normality is only violence, ignorance, which come from fear, from not knowing, from not knowing. From thinking that there is complexity where instead everything is very simple. I was lucky enough to have a strong mother who was able to understand that there are no differences, because there are no differences ».

The Zan Bill would help those who do not.

“I think it’s the least they owe us, that they owe everyone. A protection that has a reason, we are not inventing it. Violence and homophobia exist, they are there for everyone to see, they materialize in insults, irony, wrong words, in mothers’ silences, at best, in slaps of fathers, ignoble, violent gestures. But don’t your blood freeze to think of a daughter who has been thrown out of the house because she loves a girl? Or the idea of ​​being attacked for a kiss? How many times have they made jokes that we didn’t want on our skin, how many times have we not felt safe going to school? Do we realize? In going to school ».

Has this happened to her?

“In middle school. A mate comes under me, throws me to the ground, breaks my glasses, breaks my team, a kick to the bruised technical education folder. The end of a terrible gesture, me returning home in pain, dirty, violated ».

Have measures been taken?

“They didn’t even suspend it. His friends, the next day’s blackmail: “And you try not to mention names” ».

Is such a trauma something that can be forgotten?

«Even today I am afraid of being attacked because I am misunderstood. The songs are my shelter. Salvific art and beauty because everything is connected in that light, in that strength, in that love ».

Do you still feel the “beginner in everything”, as he declared himself at the beginning?

“I’ll never stop being, beginner. Even in feelings, which I don’t always understand. Love is sometimes too subtle for me to recognize. How is it recognized? ».

I think it is when all the cells of the body take the head and with the eyes full of the other say “yes”.

“Is strong. But I find it hard to even feel my cells now. Too exhausted. Sometimes I would like to be so light as to fly up like a bird, only to look at us from above, slow down on it, almost a glide, and see from there the effect it has.

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