Neffa returns live and in rap version: a 'guaglione' they now call maestro

A great show as a game of translation, in time and space. A game of texts and contexts, where the past resonates but where it is still played, in the present, with a long line-up of guests. Neffa in rap version at the Forum di Assago, year 2025. Yes, in concert there is pop, there is the pop music embraced at the beginning of the millennium that makes the arena dance, there is soul, funky, black music, but above all there is the karstic river of hip hop, which resurfaces with beats, flow, rhymes, references, the guaglione, the balotta, the featuring of sons and grandsons (musical, of course).

It all comes together in the live show on 5 November, the summa of a career, but not a pretext: it comes in the wake of the two chapters of Canerandagio, the double album released this year in which Giovanni Pellino, born in 1967, returns to don the metaphorical rap cap. A work of cross-quotations, which recalls the Neffa of the 1990s, that of Sangue Misto and Messaggeri della Dopa, and spreads echoes of the songs of the past in the tracks, with new sounds.

He does not wear a hat on stage, Neffa, moves composedly, but opens and closes the concert with two clear messages, live from 1996: In linea ("It's the return of the boy on the track") and Aspettando il sole, the historic hit that for the first time (or "maybe just once by Red Ronnie") is sung live with Giuliano Palma, who was the voice of the refrain in the original. And it is the final blow of a composite show, more than two hours of music enriched by a host of artists, young and former, the same ones who parade in the tracks of Canerandagio: from Jake la Furia (Biancoenero) to Coez (Inquire), from Guè (Cuoreapezzi) to Franco126 (Bufera), from Fabri Fibra (Hype) to Mahmood (Lunarossa).

The guests are many (too many?), there are twenty-one of them, and the show has to run, out of necessity, while on stage they call him maestro, legend: some say that 'the reason I do what I do is Neffa' (Frah Quintale), others emphasise the 'utopian' situation and remember when he used to consume cassette tapes (Gemitaiz). The former 'opponent'J-Ax even takes a knee. And the tribute also comes from those who were not yet born in the days of the Messengers, such as Ele A. While the audience cheers at the call of historic collaborators and fellow travellers: Kaos, Deda or Al Castellana. "It's been thirty years and counting/Still en masse you can hear them copying me, sings Neffa: "I don't know what to say, but they call me "maestro"/ A bit to say I've grown old".

The retrospective show alternates between rap (Carcere a vita, L'incognita, Stare al mondo) and songwriting (Prima di andare via, La mia signorina, Lontano dal tuo sole, among others), interlocking the two moments, with the accompaniment of his friend DJ Double S and  that of a band and the voice of Tahnee Rodriguez. The set design does the rest, evoking these 'thirty years and counting', from 1993 to 2025, and summarising them with images that at one point flow in the form of news headlines and TV reports: from the arrest of Totò Riina to the bombing of Gaza. "And it makes me laugh that they say that when I'm rapping/ It feels like being in the nineties, I look at the world, it's old".