“I lost as queen queen queen / you cheated as king king king” and then comes, perhaps inevitable, the rhyme with the word “bling”, but rapper Epoque has a talent of her own for keeping together a multilingual record between Italian, French and Lingala and an imaginary that tries to free itself from the clichés not only of hip hop and trap (albeit Mediterranean) but also of how a girl raps. It is no coincidence that his latest single is called Cliché, a fast-paced piece in which she says she runs blindfolded around the city and turns to an interlocutor who makes a thousand films but doesn’t know her.
Born in Turin, raised in Paris and Brussels, Epoque renews that intuition that when a song works you can emancipate from the empire of sociological interpretation, which has always been an integrated issue in rap, but which sometimes dulls its artistic merits and expressive to transform an artist into a symbol whose flow overflows from sounds to pour into the streets. Instead there is a joy in listening to Epoque without thinking about what it represents of these years or of this country, to follow it in its speed and ease between languages not only linguistic but also belonging to various musical basins, an afrorap often pleasantly de-Americanized, or better: an afrorap that contains a lot of Mediterranean and very southern, just like the American rap for years has been dealing with pieces of Latin America, disposing of a predictable and banal machismo, in search of a new fluidity. Thanks to Epoque we dance and think a little less.
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