The album that marks Dogo’s return is a hand that goes back in time.
“Ten years ago I showed everyone how to rap“: this is how Guè opened the last track of We are no longer the ones from Mi Fist, Club Dogo’s last album released way back in 2014. Today, ten years later, we are still here. The most awaited album of the return of Christ (then we’ll stop with the quotes) which will physically embody the reunion of the Milanese collective after a decade, is a hip-hop album in the purest and classic sense of the term, which stands out on an Italian scene all the more alive as it increasingly deals with trap or drill contaminations (or questionable parodies of them). A self-celebratory album to the core, exclusive even in the featuring tanto family members as much as musical pinnacle (Marracash, Elodie, Sfera Ebbasta), but at the same time a mass album, by those who know they embody one of the most idolized cult objects of Italian rap for decades. An album dedicatebestowed from above at the people and per the people, to those who were there and to those who listened ten, fifteen, twenty years ago;
Let’s be honest: we feared the tacky. The fear for this album was that Club Dogo would return but not Club Dogo’s music. After ten years of absence and three solo careers that took completely different paths, it was normal to fear something that was just a huge commercial operation, which had little to do with hip hop; but from the first listen the doubts were swept away. Certain, money does not stink: we are still talking about an album included in a colossal advertising campaign, which even before its announcement had sold out in a few minutes for the dates of the spring marathon at the Forum in Assago (five or two days for 10 concerts in a month ). But Little Clubwhich in certain aspects (such as the self-citation) almost ends up in fan service, is a record that beats and smells of worn asphalt, with varied sounds of a Don Joe in great shape ranging from melancholic (“BORN FOR THIS”, feat. Marracash) to reggae (“KING OF THE JUNGLE”, seasoned with a quote from Note Killer) to the more classic gangsta tones with dark hues; an album created by three authors who grew up in the cult of rap and which is more than that old school possible. Tracks that do not have a sung refrain, or where this is present with a choice consistent with the artistic direction and refined imagery, recalling the cultural and emotional context from which the Dogo come (see Elodie). In short, a record perfectly suited to 2024 which however demonstrates how Club Dogo are still, like it or not, a pillar of the Italian rap scene.
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We can’t say How much Little Club has boiled in the pot. Of course, the appearance of Jake and Don Joe together with Guè in the video of ∞ Lovetaken from the album Persona by Marra and also used as a preview by Inter Media House for the derby in February 2022, with the presence of the very Milanese Federico Dimarco (but Milan will win that match, with great joy of Cosimo and Francesco, ndr) had more than tickled fans and nostalgics, orphans of the trio for a long time on a pause for reflection that was never made explicit and surrounded by occasional gossip about exhausted personal relationships. Certainly, the alchemy on the tracks is that of the golden times, and Little Club it is anything but an improvised or musically negligible product.
In this messianic image in the shadow of the Cathedral there was all of Milan, an anthropic fabric that in Little Club it does not just remain in the background as a scenic theatrical backdrop, but rather emerges as a key and central place in a story that is far from over, just as in ∞ Love of his friend Fabio. The references to the city are continuous, and even the group’s path is closely linked to the city that saw them born: Club Dogo are Milan and in this album you can hear all the street cred accumulated over a twenty-year career. The urban mythology of moral capital is such that it deserves a dedication already in the title of the featuring with a nocturnal Elodie, “SOLI A MILANO”, whose slowed down sample of the Donna Summer song Faster and Faster to Nowhere takes us – again – to the past, specifically to The night we overthrew the order (and Capital Pen). It’s 2006, Italy is world champion and you are happy in your adolescence.
The rhyme. Although the recent trend is to look for the song to make it big on TikTok, with a strong but meaningless refrain, Dogo go against the grain and spit in our faces a record full of content and rhymes (“look at the State bro, the barracks in Piacenza”: a huge Marra in “BORN FOR THIS”) even in that style zarro which always distinguishes them. A continuous storytelling embellished with early 2000s beats and continuous references to street life and gangster films, the backbone of the group’s imagination. Guè and Jake take us by the hand and take us back twenty years, on the usual asphalt with their flow sharp as a sabre.
The first two tracks of the album, “C’ERA UNA VOLTA IN ITALIA” and “MAFIA DEL BOOM BAP”, are proposed as cult pieces, hymns to that street imagery (and to the Dogos themselves, as an incarnation of it according to their own – coherent – self-narration) which refers to Pure Bogotá oa For people, so as not to go even further back in time. Jake who closes the first song with “Take your feet off the table, the bosses have gone home” already sounds like a phrase to repeat endlessly, and always Jake with “I’m still here to fill that void, because the speakers didn’t sound like they did with Dogo” reiterates in an infinite loop a concept that would be out of place in any other mouth: the Milanese trio’s paternity of the Italian rap scene. A statement perhaps also questionable on a historical-musical level, but in the end what matters is the alchemy, the synthesis between quality, history and cult, the latter aspect expertly cultivated in the launch of this album. In the end, it is truly true that “everyone’s dream zanza it came true.” And hardly anyone was disappointed.
2024-01-12 18:00:00
#CLUB #DOGO #Sparse #Consideration
