Debut album by Articolo 31, an Italian duo made up of the Milan rapper Alessandro "J-Ax" Aleotti and the disc jockey from Bollate, hinterland of Milan, Luca "DJ Jad" Perrini. The production is entirely done by DJ Jad, while the guests are Chief, DJ Wladimiro, brother of Jad, and Lory Asson. After releasing a first single in 1992 ("Nato per rappare"), the following year the duo released one of the first Italian studio albums in rap.
The intro explains the origin of the duo's name and anticipates eleven songs without skits. Then begins what is considered by most fans and specialized critics to be one of the most important and influential hip-hop records in the history of the Italian genre. This consideration rests on very uncertain and shaky elements, highlighted by track number two: usually the title track is a great cut even in the most disastrous albums. The beat chosen by Jad is minimal, with an interesting drums pattern that combines a snare with a hard downtempo, but his samples still leave something to be desired: there are Sly and the Family and George Clinton. Ax lets the rhythm breathe, he could come up with something interesting here, if he had only a minimum of talent, instead, he spits out pseudo-socio-conscious bars of disarming banality, with a soporific style and questionable technique. The hook is of an embarrassing simplicity, the boy repeats the title a couple of times, then there's the rookie Chief, before Ax returns to the last verse.
After the title track, the album doesn't improve, it has no real direction and casually roams about socio-political topics ("Fotti la censura", "Pifferaio magico"), socio-conscious (title track, "Legge del taglione"), sentimental ("Solo per te"), sexual ("Tocca qui") and, above all, braggadocio ("Ti sto parlando", "DJ Jad", "Questo è il nostro stile", "Nato per rappare"). Rapper J-Ax and producer DJ Jad are evidently little more than amateurs, like all the guys making their debut in the construction of a music album, but what is surprising, it's that both are never inspired. And you can hear it from the first moments, when Jad decides to sample two of the most sampled songs in hip-hop history, "UFO" by ESG and "Atomic Dog" by James Brown (at the time of writing, these two songs are been sampled more than 850 times, according to the whosampled website).
Jad's production is generic and decent, funky and jazzy, it sounds the same both when he uses an infinite loop and when he places several layered samples, failing to achieve something musically excellent. The instrumental track made by brothers DJ Jad and DJ Wladimiro, "Cantico errante di due DJ notturni", is quite mediocre and colorless. For his part, J-Ax fails to elevate this set of beats: between metrics and lyricism, overall, it's one of the weakest efforts of the year in rap. The boy stretches each track beyond the limit of the right and the bearable, never falling below two hundred seconds, and always committing to pull down three stanzas in which he never says practically anything, throwing up random words in a row with a slow, monotonous, sparse, cumbersome and uncertain delivery style, technically random, devoid of personality and metrically poor, below an elementary level. Sometimes he accelerates, to no avail.
The album could easily play on party topics and would be one of the best of the season in Italy, but it never does (excluding the sexual cut with Lory Asson), preferring instead to go into socio-political and socio-conscious: this is deeply inconsistent, because to launch them in the music industry is a commercial for one of the most important industries in the history of Italy, FIAT, at a time when making a commercial for FIAT still means something. When they even go straight to the street, they get ridiculous results. Gangsta rap is dominating in the US, on the one hand, Dr. Dre debuted his solo album and is producing the debut of Snoop Dogg, on the other hand, Kool G Rap has paved the way for everyone and the boys of the Wu-Tang Clan are coming, but Italy is still lagging. So far behind. He's so far behind that, as a street piece, this guy boasts that he was beaten at the bus stop in the outskirts of Milan for looking at one, in one of the rare cuts that features two stanzas, proving he doesn't really know what it's the "law of retaliation". Simply embarrassing.
Summing up, in these twelve songs and fifty minutes of listening, there are few really good moments: the best is definitely represented by "Solo per te", a cut dedicated to a girl in which Ax still sucks metrically and lyrically (he begins one out of two bars with the words "that", "and" or with a preposition) and that deserves an honorable mention more for being thought than for its poor execution. This album is not hip-hop. It's just rap. Executed poorly. These guys are not representing. This is not Italy. This is not Milan. In any case, their best album, probably. 4/10.
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