Italian Rapper Caparezza Has Voted Communist All His Life

Italian Rapper Caparezza Has Voted Communist All His Life Caparezza is one of Italy’s most inventive rappers, and one of few who combine mainstream success with political engagement. He spoke to Jacobin about music, freedom, and his hometown of Molfetta, which recently elected a communist mayor. - Interview by - Jacopo Custodi Over the last two decades, Caparezza has been one of the most original voices in Italian music. A constantly evolving rapper, he has a vast and loyal audience who have followed him through ever-changing concept albums mixing languages, musical genres, and imagery. His most recent album, Orbit Orbit, released last fall, is accompanied by a comic book written by him. In July, it won the Targa Tenco for best album of the year — the most prestigious award in Italian songwriting, and a rare one for a rapper. Caparezza (real name Michele Salvemini) is one of the few contemporary Italian musicians capable of combining commercial success, artistic experimentation, and political engagement. His songs echo through marches and demonstrations throughout Italy without him ever conforming to the aesthetic and linguistic stereotypes of the “left-wing singer.” While his albums strike mainstream success, he remains somehow in the shadows, far from the obsessive search for visibility. In his home region of Puglia there was some controversy when the album was released, as some politicians contrasted the empty polling stations of the regional elections, held around the same time, with the long queues for Caparezza’s book signings. A few days later, Jacopo Custodi met him in his hometown of Molfetta to talk about freedom, music, politics, and the “pathosphere” — a term the rapper coined to refer to the sphere of empathy and sensitivity, which we increasingly tend to drift away from. In the interview, Caparezza explains how he came to the Left as a young man despite a family background that pointed elsewhere, and the central role played in his political awakening by the local branch of the communist party Rifondazione Comunista, whose members, he says, “were the ones who did the most interesting things, they were the most sincere and honest local politicians.” Nationally Rifondazione has been a small and marginal force for many years, but in Molfetta it has always retained substantial support — to the point that the town has just elected as its new mayor Rifondazione’s candidate Manuel Minervini, at the head of a broad left coalition. When Custodi spoke with Caparezza, not long before Minervini’s election bid, he said he hoped that passionate people would come along and give the Left new energy. That hope has aged well: Molfetta is now one of few Italian towns with a communist mayor. Jacopo Custodi Your new album, Orbit Orbit, was released on October 31 together with a comic book. It is a hybrid work that seems to conclude a trilogy: Prisoner 709 spoke of mental imprisonment, Exuvia of escape, and Orbit Orbit of freedom. What kind of freedom are you talking about — and how achievable is it? Caparezza When we talk about freedom, we immediately open a Pandora’s box, because every idea of freedom also brings its own contradictions. Who is truly free, which society is truly free: Western society or those that oppose it? How do we measure freedom? We immediately head into a quagmire. I have always felt like a “prisoner of Earth” — as we all are — because I have always seen the planet as a beautiful prison from which there is no escape, and gravity as a kind of electronic bracelet. So, I asked myself: What has been a true form of freedom in my life? Because in the end, the album is very personal. The only obvious answer was imagination. For me, imagination is an authentic form of freedom: you can’t forbid someone from imagining something better or worse. The only constraint is that imagination takes reality as its reference point. I’ll take an example from Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher who studied Vincent van Gogh and concluded that his creative act was a reaction to illness. According to Jaspers, the creative act is like a pearl: just as the shell creates the pearl, so the human being creates the artwork. But the shell creates the pearl when a grain of sand or something irritating gets into it: to numb that pain, it covers it with mother-of-pearl and the pearl is born. All pearls have something disturbing inside them. In my case, reality is the disturbing thing, imagination is the mother-of-pearl, and the pearl is the work — in this case, Orbit Orbit — that I bring into the world. So, for me, imagination is a form of reaction to reality: freedom but also resistance. I don’t think it’s “pure” freedom; in my case, it’s really a form of resistance. And Orbit Orbit is, in comics, the onomatopoeia of imagination: that’s why the album is called that. Jacopo Custodi An orbit is a movement but also a repeated course around some center. For a project that talks about freedom, were you more interested in the idea of escaping the system or learning to move within its gravitational fields? Caparezza You have to learn to move within it. It’s the same in comics: the panels are called “cages,” and freedom is exercised within these cages. Escape, for me, was the theme of Exuvia, the previous album, and represented the transition from one state to another. In part it really happened, because at a certain point I became a comic book writer, so this transition was achieved. But I realized that absolute escape is not possible. Imagination must be able to coexist with reality and move within these micro and macro cages. Jacopo Custodi On your latest album, there is a beautiful song in which you talk about how we have lost empathy, how we have left the “pathosphere.” How do you think we can return to it? Caparezza It’d hard to answer, because mine is more of a desire than a recipe. I’ve noticed that as we grow up, everything around us becomes increasingly unsustainable. To save myself, to avoid being constantly hurt, I realized that I too was starting to build barriers around myself, to pretend not to see, to numb myself, to leave the pathosphere. I think it’s a mistake that many people share today, in the age of social media, where you are constantly under attack. And often the people doing the attacking can’t take the blows when they suffer them. So you defend yourself by creating a shell of cynicism. That’s very dangerous, because when you lose faith in humanity, you’re on the brink of losing your own humanity. The real danger is becoming insensitive: no longer recognizing the beautiful things and people around you. But you can only recognize them if you also accept their negative side. I believe this is a great lesson in life, one that I learned as I reached my fifties. So you have to be empathetic, but empathy is a violent act, in the sense that when you really put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it’s not easy to bear the weight and the contradictions. We have to accept the fight with reality and with what hurts us instead of numbing ourselves. I know that there are also people who are a little disappointed by my “shift” on these issues after albums that were considered more political. But for me, politics is not necessarily about being a tribune of the people; feelings are also part of politics. In fact, I would say that the politics of feeling is the most authentic, the strongest, the most engaging. Jacopo Custodi This introspection is something you have in common with other politically committed Italian artists — I’m thinking, for instance, of the comic book artist Zerocalcare — who, like you, often start from their own existence to talk about the world. Do you think it’s a sign of the times? Do we need to start from autobiographical experiences to talk about society at large? Caparezza For me, that happened as I grew up. When I was young, I felt like I was an integral part of a world that was moving in the present. Then, at a certain point, the past began to peek out inside me. I don’t know why, perhaps because there is ever less of a future ahead of us. And somehow the past reminds you that you have been many different things, that you have had many lives. So I started to see myself as a journey and no longer as a young man living in his social context, fighting for his present and for a better collective future. I began to analyze all the stages of my journey, which is not only made up of beautiful places but also of horrible places, like all of our lives. And this is probably a necessity; I see it as an adult necessity. I felt that I no longer wanted to talk, that I no longer wanted to point the finger, but I wanted to turn it toward myself, to understand what had happened in my life. That doesn’t mean that I stopped thinking about community; I simply thought that before getting up on the pulpit, I needed to better understand who I am on the pulpit. Because then what you say from the pulpit becomes more credible. Jacopo Custodi In an interview, you said that the first album you bought was by Run DMC and, years later, once you were well-established, you also collaborated with Darryl McDaniels. What influence has US rap — and more generally US music — had on you? Caparezza US rap was the epiphany of my musical life. As a child, I never wanted to be a singer, because I was very introverted — and I’m still very introverted, even though I’ve worked on myself. As a child I wanted to be a cartoonist, because I imagined myself in a room away from my surroundings, just me and my imagination. Then at some point something happened: I saw Run DMC’s “You Be Illin’” on TV. The image of these three guys in tracksuits rapping, with one of them making sounds by putting his hands on vinyl records — and I had a lot of my father’s vinyl records at home — struck me deeply. It was like using an object for something it wasn’t “born” for, a bit like Frank Zappa when he started playing the wheels of a bicycle on a TV show. What’s more, as a child I was fascinated by the sound of words: I loved tongue twisters. Seeing that rhythmic cadence, that musical way of speaking, was a revelation like the road to Damascus. I didn’t even know it was rap or who those three guys really were. I went to a record store in Molfetta and asked insistently for the Run DMC album that had “You Be Illin’.” “There was no internet, the record came from the United States and wasn’t distributed in Italy, so I went back to that store countless times to see if it had arrived. When it finally did, I remember standing at the cash register, with the owner taking his time doing the receipt and me eager to run home and listen to it all. For me, US rap was the big bang. Of course, talking about “US rap” is saying everything and nothing, because it started out one way and became something else entirely. For example, I was never drawn to gangsta rap: I started to dislike a certain type of attitude. But with Run DMC, and then with groups like Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys, every new album was like opening a box of toys. I started thinking that I could try my hand at rap when I first heard Frankie hi-nrg mc, someone who had found a way to translate that communicative power into Italian. Jacopo Custodi Jacobin readers may be interested in understanding how we went from Italy being home to the largest Communist Party in Europe to a country governed by Giorgia Meloni. As someone who works on collective imagery and emotions, how do you experience this political shift? What do you think it says about our country? Caparezza I believe that the Italian Communist Party was the most credible and serious party of all. It was a party in which there was also poetry. I don’t know how to put it. . . . Today, however, we live in a country that, in my opinion, is not right-wing but populist, where there is a disaffection with complexity. There is a general rejection of complexity, and not only in politics. Today when there is a complex problem — think of immigration — the simple answer is the one that takes root. The famous politics “of the gut” works better, because looking deeper into things is tiring. But if you refuse to look deeper, you are also impoverishing the cerebral mechanism that leads you to evolve as a person. So you begin to live in a Manichaean society. However, I don’t think this is a problem unique to Italy; we see it in the United States too. It is a widespread problem, perhaps fueled by the internet, where news stories become nothing more than clickbait headlines and algorithms feed polarization. This is impoverishing dialogue and our approach to life. Simplistic thinking is the serious problem of this historical moment which, mind you, is not the same thing as simplicity. Simplicity is a value, especially in popularizing things; simplification is the problem. Jacopo Custodi In recent years, there has been much discussion on the Left about the relationship between culture and politics. We have seen how focusing politics on this can produce problematic culture wars; and yet, in Italy, we have known ever since Antonio Gramsci how important cultural hegemony is for winning new rights. As an artist who does not overlook politics, what do you think of this relationship? Caparezza Let’s start with art: I think that in art, everything is permissible, and I say this categorically. In art, you absolutely cannot set limits of any kind. Artists will then take responsibility for what they say, but art is something other than community or life, so let’s say that I don’t want limits on art and creativity. I am against cancel culture. I am not in favor of taking things from the past and censoring them, because they are a testimony to the past and give strength to what is happening today. Today if you watch an old movie that mocks a certain group and compare it to a movie from today, where people are more careful, you understand that a step forward has been made. However, if you erase the testimony of the past, this evolution is lost. The same goes for statues of historical figures: I’m not in favor of tearing them down but of changing the way we talk about them. Otherwise, it’s like erasing parts of your own life. I’ve made mistakes in my life, but I can’t erase them, otherwise I would exit the pathosphere — to circle back to what we were discussing earlier. They must have had some meaning, even if only to make me a better person. We should look at society in the same way: as a human being that grows and changes. Obviously, in life and in politics, cultural battles are necessary and important. However, personally, I am in favor of conscious cultural revolutions: not that I wake up and decide that from today we are going to do things this way, because that is not how you really change people culturally. I prefer small collective steps forward that, once they become conscious, will at least hopefully become collectively recognized. Jacopo Custodi You come from Molfetta and you have often brought a sideways perspective to your lyrics and style with respect to the dominant cultural canons. How has coming from a quite small city in southern Italy shaped your approach to culture and your political ideas? Caparezza I don’t know, it seems to me that my approach to life derives more from who I am, from my character, than from where I was born. But I’ll try to think about it now: Molfetta is a large town where the idea of community survives and where there is not yet the extreme individualism typical of contemporary capitalist countries. This generates forms of help and solidarity and helps us to stay within the pathosphere. I like living here, and it’s a beautiful area. However, there are also problems, such as issues related to crime, which I really can’t stand and which turn my stomach. My heroes will never be those celebrated in contemporary TV dramas. I also have a difficult relationship with the Catholic religion, which is very deeply rooted here. Sometimes, especially during the holidays, faith is experienced with a somewhat painful intensity, with the ostentation of pain. During Easter week, you see people pierced, people crying, people hooded. These are things that did me no good as a child; they made me anxious and fearful. One good thing, however, is that aside from religion, in Molfetta and the surrounding towns people tend to play things down a lot, and this has helped me never to take myself too seriously, not to feel like a star. I have always played down my role, and fortunately I have never felt like “I’m the shit.” I think this is part of the Molfetta way of life. Jacopo Custodi What is your relationship with the word “left” today? Do you think that still gives us bearings, or is it too confusing? Caparezza All my life I have always voted for the communist party Rifondazione Comunista. I was born into a family that more or less orbited politically around the Christian Democrats, so I didn’t have a Communist imprint. I simply became interested in Rifondazione by watching what the party members were doing here in Molfetta. I became passionate about them, and so I always voted for Rifondazione. They were the ones who did the most interesting things; they were the most sincere and honest local politicians. I could hardly see myself voting for the center left today [as the Partito Democratico’s camp is widely called]. They seem too centrist to me, too much like the old Christian Democrats. Jacopo Custodi Which of your albums is your favorite? Caparezza My favorite album is always the last one I made, because it’s the freshest, but also because every new album for me is like a death to be celebrated. When I release an album, I free myself from thoughts that I have struggled to put on paper for years, and so for me it’s a death to be celebrated. Maybe it’s my religious and Molfetta upbringing coming back! Jacopo Custodi Zohran Mamdani was also a rapper before he became mayor of New York City. When will we see you running for mayor of Molfetta? Caparezza Never! I have a lot of respect for politics, and I’m not one of those people who says that politicians are all thieves. I’m not one for simplistic views: among the people who choose to go into politics, there are always some who have a real fire inside them, and that should be recognized. It’s like in music: there are those who have that fire, but you might not find them in your Spotify playlist — you have to go looking for them. I take politics very seriously, and precisely because I take it seriously, I know I don’t have that fire. Over the years, I have been courted several times to run on some electoral list. I have always refused, also out of respect for politics. I would not have the skills, and above all I don’t have the desire. We need people on the left who are driven by genuine passion. I know some, and I have seen them gravitate toward that sphere. No one is completely incorruptible. Everyone makes mistakes, but if someone has a real fire and does it because they believe in it, then we need to put that person forward.