Records like Decrease They are rare in Italian music. Do you remember Rkomi at the last Sanremo, where did he ask if this was “music or bureaucracy”? There he was not understood there (penultimate), but here is the answer: his, in doubt, is not bureaucracy. The dots come together. Eighteen songs that are “letters aimed at many people of my life”, by the friends of adolescence as Tedua, with whom she began to dream, to the mother, from the neighborhood in which she grew up – Calvairate, the suburbs of Milan – to the father he never knew, went away from home when he was only a year old. “I had other fathers and, in part, I made the little man of the house,” he says. There is everything: drugs, popular neighborhoods, domestic violence, but also music as a salvation. Childhood and youth before success, in every aspect. Mirko Manuele Martorana, his real name, more than Rkomi. It will be thirty years, it will be the desire to close rims, it will simply be that after the enormous success of the hits of the previous one Taxi driver (of 2021, in the middle there was No stress With Irama) he wanted something different, between rap, pop and songwriting. “Sometimes it seems to me that we don’t know how to think big more,” he confesses. «I myself perhaps, with the shape, I didn’t go too far: I didn’t feel like making songs for almost five minutes of duration. But for the themes, at least for those who know me superficially, it will be unsettling ».
Why did he return to his childhood?
«It is the decrease in the title, in fact. Go back to the roots to understand who you are. I came from two records in which I had chosen not to look at the dark inside, pretend nothing, unlike the first two, in which the darkness played a predominant part for pure need for outburst. It is an “honest” album: I wanted to talk about certain aspects of my past, to get rid of it ».
Did you make therapy for this path?
«In reality no. I did it from 18 to 24 years old, because it was inevitable: I understood a lot of me, but then we ended up at a deadly point, as it is normal that it is, and I stopped. I resumed a few months ago, almost ready on a disc. It came naturally, in the middle, write like this ».
On the cover there is her, as a child, who smiles in the classroom.
«The contrast makes me smile: in front of the flash we put our best of us, we invent a smile, from the photos everything seems ok. Instead, I also wanted to tell those moments that do not end in the photographs ».
The disc opens with a strong scene: she who looks at her mother’s partner beating her mother.
“It was the first weight I wanted to take away. I was nine years old, I tried a senseless anger, I wanted to intervene. My big brother stopped me. “
It’s not obvious, don’t you think? A child might also think that this is the normality.
“I don’t know, it’s not my case. It will be that that person, in some way, had entered our family, I saw it as external. I never met my father, I left that I was one year old, but I didn’t miss strong and healthy male reference figures: an uncle, but above all my older brother, who for me was a sort of father. Maybe he loved me more than he wanted to himself ».
Was this that the day he became great?
«In part yes, in part I was already. The fact that my father has never been there and that my brother, however, was bigger than me – and therefore, at home, there was and was not there – he immediately made me the little man of the house. It was not easy ».
His mother, hearing the song, what did you say?
“He understood me. We have a nice relationship, it is empathetic, it has realized how important it was, for me, to talk about it. He is an honest person. And it is happy if the others are. He always asks me: “Are you happy?” ».
And her?
“Of course I am. Happy and stressed. I am one who lives the anxiety of one’s role, everywhere. If I’m engaged, I want to be the world’s best boyfriend. But I would also like to be a great artist, I don’t want to end those colleagues who, at the end of their trip, find themselves alone … with their travel. Only with platinum records, here. I prefer to leave people and myself. The money is just a part of the whole ».
In There is no love He speaks of his chronic difficulties in building and maintaining relationships.
«It was a passenger thought, exaggerated: when you look at the past, at first glance you have wrong reactions. The truth is in the middle, but I wanted to keep it ».
What did he understand about his relationships?
«That sometimes I was wrong, I behaved badly: in today’s texts I find so much self -indulgence and I don’t like it, it is rare that someone gets involved and you think they were wrong; Here, I did it. In general, in love as in friendship, I was too little direct, so I found myself having more facade relationships than anything else. People who wanted to please me, to have something in return. I learned to be more straightforward and direct: if you understand each other, you understand each other immediately ».
Decrease It is also the story of a difficult adolescence, in which he soon knows drugs.
“I had it around it, especially in my neighborhood – even if it is everywhere and, if I had grown up in a neighborhood already well, maybe I would have known it even before. In some ways, and I understood it only recently, growing there was a fortune: I was 15 minutes from the center but in a popular area, this gave me the opportunity to meet both faces of the medal. To understand, here, how this world goes. To understand the rest, I read and travel ».
Do you still feel the friends of his neighborhood?
«As you feel thirty years old: not every day, not dividing everything as before, but every time you see, for a dinner, it is as if the time had never passed. Also with Tedua, with whom I shared so much as a teenager, it is so ».
Among the collaborations, actually, there is no pop name that helps to climb the rankings, nor a rapper from another generation. There is simply her with her friends.
«It would have been a contradiction, at least for now, to look for more: Decrease It means going back to when you were little and I looked for the companions of my generation, from Izi to Bresh, from Hernia to Tedua himself. Many of us have not had a father or mother, we are similar in this. There were no classic study sessions, from a blow and go, to go out in the evening with the ready piece. We met days on days, spent a lot of time together to imagine songs, as it was once ».
What is success for you?
«Good question. Anyone who is on a pedestal, in the spotlight, does so for a need to communicate, to be understood. It is also my case: like so many – I don’t say everyone, but in short – I have looked for a long compensation for a long time, in music, which is not only cheap. And now I always want something different. All my disks are born from these need, too Taxi driverwho was more carefree ».
And that was the best -selling album of 2021. Did he suffer the stress of being at the top?
“Less than it might seem. Before this I did many jobs, experienced difficult situations, understand what effort, mental and physical. And I assure you that making music that is good in the standings is not as tiring as that. Then that there is a percentage of stress, in short, it is normal: I live in Milan, here the walls are also covered with numbers and rankings ».
Do you look at them?
«From the perspective I consider right. I am not interested in being first in the standings, this time, if anything being “first” in the hearts of the people who come to hear me. Then, it must be said, there is a system based on numbers and competition, so there will be, among the public, who will ask me that Decrease do the numbers of Taxi drivereven if maybe it won’t be like that – I don’t know, there has never been anything calculated. It is a trap, but it is more a matter of expectations of others. Look Sanremo ».
Here, what did not go with The rhythm of things?
«I dared too much, probably. I wanted to make a small revolution and I was not able to. The public expected another Unsurpassedbut it would not have made sense, let’s talk about a different album. But I had realized just a few more positions, compared to the penultimate, nothing else. I’m serene. But many, from the outside, were convinced that I had sunk in the drama. There is “music” and “bureaucracy”: I fooled – maybe too much – of the bureaucracy. It’s okay. “
Many rappers, we think of Marracash, are taking the song of the songwriter. It is also his case.
«I try to do it naturally, but yes, it’s one of my faces. I have many, if for me I would also like to be the frontman of an extreme rock group, but I can’t afford it. That of songwriter, perhaps, suits me more. What is certain is that now I needed more raw music, in which I really told me, without purity ».
What did you learn at the end of this album?
“I don’t know yet. But I’m better. And for now it is enough for me ».
Source: Vanity Fair
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