«The Trojan Horse containing the others of us»: socio-spatial inequality, school marginalisation, and labour market in the work of Marracash

Abstract

Rap music has emerged in Italy as not only a driver for the relaunch of the recording industry but also the main instrument of self-representation for subaltern youths who could have never narrated their condition of socio-spatial marginalisation in a non-mediated way before. The paper analyses the work of Marracash (namely, a best-selling Italian rapper from the public housing neighbourhood of Barona in Milan) as a paradigmatic example of this expressive function of rap music. In his lyrics, the class background emerges through inversions of sense. His experience of deprivation comes to the surface through the paradoxical glorification of the effects of his pauperisation, or (by contrast) the exaggerated celebration of his later economic success, which, however, shed light on experiences marked by the frustration of having no possessions and feeling socially downgraded, where the artistic affirmation through rap music becomes the means for social revenge.