Home » Kento: conscious listening – Patrizio Ruviglioni

Kento: conscious listening – Patrizio Ruviglioni

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Kento: conscious listening – Patrizio Ruviglioni
Illustration by Stefano Fabbri

When Kento speaks it is as if he follows the metric of a rap song, the flow. He keeps a tight time. I throw him some ideas, he argues without taking a breath. He smiles: “Hip hop has given me the tools to be who I am. To get to know me and make me known. To transform a passion into work. And yes, also so as not to get stuck in the interviews “.

In his accent there are still traces of Calabrian origins, even though Francesco Carlo, 45, has lived in Rome since 1995. He had arrived from Reggio Calabria to study philosophy of law at the university and has never left.

As a rapper he trained in the mid-nineties, when in Italy the genre was coming out of the first phase, political and militant – that of the posse, the left and the social centers – to enter the one marked by records such as 107 elements of Neffa and the messengers of dopa, lighter and more attentive to technique. His style is in the middle, however far from today’s rap, dominated by hedonism and stories of the underworld.

For him, the genre is synonymous with social commitment and militancy in the alternative scene. He often participates in concerts that have a political character, such as the one for the April 25 celebrations in Rome. His debut album, Sacco or Vanzetti(2009), is inspired by the story of the two anarchists sentenced to death in the United States in 1927.

“But I’m happy with how rap is today and the success it has”, he specifies. “We must educate to conscious listening, to distinguish what is wrong and what is right in real life, not in songs. I like street rap, partly I understand it. When I was a child my city was devastated by clashes between mafia, I saw several deaths on the sidewalks. And anyway, the popularity of gangsta rap helps me in what I do. Also and above all in prison ”. In fact, for more than ten years Kento has been organizing rap workshops in juvenile prisons, as well as in schools.

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We have lunch outdoors, in Rome, in a restaurant along viale del Tintoretto, a road bordered by large buildings and parks. It’s a beautiful spring day, he’s wearing a suede jacket over a black T-shirt. We arrived in his car: the place is out of the way, on either side of a gas station. It is furnished like a diner American and American-style meat cooks, but the managers are Italian. “Smoked american barbecue”, it says on the sign.

“I come here often, I fell in love with it from the first time,” he explains. “I am passionate about the stories of courage, those of those who make ideas grow in inaccessible places, like here. This place is an oasis ”. Everyone who works there knows it. One of the waiters, 19, started rap and he took it under his protection. They joke a little, he introduces it to me. When the boy walks away, Kento says: “He can give a lot as an artist, so I’m demanding with him. But I assure you that they are also with the prisoners ”.

In Italy there are 17 prisons for minors: boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 18 end up there, who can stay up to 24 to serve their sentence. In January 2022 there were 316 in all of Italy. “They are real prisons, therefore with the agents of the penitentiary, the peepholes even in the toilet, the handcuffs, the structures and in general the spaces intended for adults; but there are children inside ”, Kento tells me.

“Fortunately it is difficult to end up in there, usually alternative measures are applied.” Apart from the most serious cases, those who fail to avoid prison are often “the last of the last: those who cannot afford house arrest, those who do not have a family that follows them, those who have been ill-advised and perhaps have had a attitude over the top with the judge, who arrived alone in our country “.

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I ask him if these stories end up in the texts the boys write with him. He takes off his glasses, niche. And he explains to me how his laboratories work. For example, he says, his students in prison are interested above all in being successful once they are out, he immediately conveys the idea that music is a job and should be experienced as such, as professionals.

The meetings – which are usually also attended by educators as supervisors – are divided into listening sessions, debates, analysis of video clips and texts (“not just music, we recently read Cesare Pavese”) and moments of writing real.

Hip hop is the most popular genre in juvenile prisons: because it is the one that kids are most familiar with along with neo-melodic pop, but also because it comes from the street, has popular and rebellious roots, “strictly anti-racist”, he says.

It is also straightforward and relatively simple to do. “If we were to rock I would have to teach everyone to play at least the guitar. So instead the basics are enough, which I bring. They write, I help them fix the metrics. I never interfere with the contents, I rather try to stimulate them to tell what they feel in an original way. I hardly ever read texts that glorify crime: those in prison already know that crime does not pay. Often, if anything, they speak of love even in a somewhat naive way. They write dedications for their girlfriend. In general, they dream of a normal life. The one they never had ”.

We chat with the rap waiter again, then go back to talking about jail while having coffee. “I don’t want to know why anyone who participates in my lab is inside,” he says. “Once, before a performance, one of them was shaking. He looked at me and said, ‘I’m more upset than the time I shot the cop.’ I prefer not to know ”.

But he knows many of their stories, often dramatic. “I remember a boy who for good behavior went out on leave for his birthday. To see an older woman, with whom I believe he had an affair, he had a tragic accident. He died on his birthday ”.

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It was one of the few times that Kento thought of suspending the laboratory. The other participants, however, convinced him to continue. “They wrote a song for the partner. In the first verse there are their memories together, everything they had shared. In the second, instead, they imagine his answer: ‘Don’t cry for me, now I’m at peace’ ”, he laughs.

Kento recounted his experience as a teacher in prison in a book entitled Barre (minimum fax 2021). I ask him if it is a useful reading for the boys in the cell. “I tend not to let him turn between them”, he replies, “he is full of considerations on juvenile prison. Whole pages in which I say it should be abolished ”.

He’s afraid of pushing them to rebel, and this “would backfire. He always goes to his cell like this, it is the prisoner who loses. I understood this many years ago, when the first workshop I had organized was canceled for a series of sentences against juvenile prison that I had released for a documentary. Now I prefer to compromise and protect them ”.

We get in the car, it is three in the afternoon, they are waiting for him for a workshop. “One of my students, at the beginning of the pandemic, had been transferred to the community for good behavior. He had more space, more freedom, in general much better conditions from all points of view. After a while he escaped on purpose to be arrested and be able to return to prison. He told me that in the community he suffered: he didn’t have the opportunity to rap, and he didn’t have the old friends. With what perspectives are we growing these kids? ”.

Phil’s deli
Viale del Tintoretto 420, Rome

2 mixed roasts in bbq sauce € 38.00
1 water €2.00
2 coffees € 4.00

Total € 44.00

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