Second studio album by Articolo 31, duo from Milan, Italy, formed by rapper J-Ax and DJ Jad. The title and cover totally represent the album: the cover is stupid, it's done very badly, while the title is meaningless. "Messa di vespiri" is the ungrammatical abbreviation for "messaggio, divertimento e spiritualità", three words that have nothing to do with the LP, in Italian the title means nothing. The disc is entirely performed by J-Ax, Solo Zippo is the only guest of the project, in a track. The production is performed entirely by Franco Godi, but the music is made by DJ Jad.
DJ Jad's music, let's say DJ Jad's production, with all due respect to the work done here by Franco Godi, isn't good. The rhythms are there, but they all sound mediocre and in a bland, generic, gray way, even when he pays homage (or steals from) the States ("Ti tiro scemo" has the synths of Muggs from "Jump Around" by House of Pain, for example). J-Ax does worse at rap: few played so weakly in the mid-nineties. His style is extravagant, in a negative way, very poor, slow, bland, and the freestyles mirror his horrible rap: by the way, these aren't freestyles, here we have a guy who mumbles things in spoken word, very slowly and never hitting the drum even by accident for about a minute, it's really bad. From a metric point of view, a child could have done better. Lyrically, he's mainly bragging for over an hour and has gone from being beaten at bus stops to threatening brawls in clubs, almost more embarrassing and ridiculous than before.
The product structure is shoddy: 22 tracks, 8 skits, 2 freestyles and the instrumental "E' già storia", which is also the best track on the record, in which DJ Jad scratches some of the duo's previous tracks. Almost every song is interspersed with a meaningless skit. The singles all suck pretty bad — Lola Feghaly's voice, greeted by synths and a poor midtempo drum in "Un'altra cosa che ho perso", is the best thing in the album and in the musical history of these two guys; it's a shame that it stays for only fifteen seconds, then the cut is ruined by a guy who mumbles something — among others, unfortunately, stands out "Maria Maria" (later to become "Ohi Maria"): this is a pop rap cut with a pop rhythm and a lackluster, commercial delivery by J-Ax. The guys think they're Cypress Hill and try to create a marijuana anthem that's very well-received by the Italian audience, although Ax sadly has neither good lyrics nor good flow or a decent voice. In fact, it's like B-Real. But scarcer, from every point of view, never memorable.
Released by Crime Squad, the album sells 160,000 physical copies and is a huge commercial success. Quotations to Italian pop culture are little pearls that make it the only reason why it's worth spending over an hour listening to this guy slowly muttering random things: no, wait, wait, just kidding. There's no reason why it's worth spending an hour listening to this stuff. In any case, there are tributes to everyone, even to Elio e le Storie Tese and to Adriano Celentano, whose brain at the time had already gone, over time he would have worsened, but already in that period he was giving the first great signs of imbalance. This weak actor, and dangerous singer, doesn't take well the homage that Ax and Jad have given him in one of the songs, and in the same year, he releases one of the most winding dissing of the year: "Il seme del rap", taken from his latest album, in which he denounces fake rappers, pranksters and studio gangsters like J-Ax and DJ Jad, and proclaims himself as the one and only REAL MUTHAPHUCKKIN G, further stating that these two guys are — I clean up the sentence — «children who really bother with rap». And he sends them home, annihilating them forever. I have nothing to add. It's a perfect summary of the life [and death] of Articolo 31.
Rating: 2/10.
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