Between lockdown and rebirth, Sassari rapper Malakay: "Music saved me"

A transfer from Sardinia to Lombardy , an album ready for release in March 2020 and then almost completely trashed due to a pandemic, a lockdown in total solitude in an apartment in Milan where the only thing to do was to write more music, " so as not to fall into the abyss ”. Thus was born "Monster cries solo in the heaven" , the debut album by Malakay , born Andrea Camboni , producer and rapper born in Sassari 32 years ago and in love with the genre for 20 years, despite a violin and piano training at the conservatory of his city.

Or rather, as he tells L'Unione Sarda, it was precisely his solid classical base that made him different from the others, that pushed him to reject the clichés of the rap tradition and toxic masculinity with an elegant style that is completely personal soaked in electronic sounds, hip hop and trap .

Anticipated by the single of the same name and by " Millennium ghetto " and " Higher love ", "Monster cries solo in the heaven" comes out today for peermusic ITALY: 8 tracks inspired by the great references of American hip hop from the early 2000s to today as Kanye West and Timbaland.

Malakay had arrived in Milan in 2018 to keep up, to marry the faster pace of the Milanese city and work closely with the great labels. But his life has always been music: “My father plays the sax, so from an early age I started chewing music. My parents enrolled me in the conservatory to study violin, and piano as a complementary instrument ".

Not really rap music instruments, what changed then?

“As a kid I fell in love with rap with Fabri Fibra, Marracash, Club Dogo. I wrote my first single when I was 15 with a friend. He was very amateur, I skipped school in Sassari to go to his house where he had set up a small studio. Then it became more and more serious ".

Such as?

“I started making the first mixtapes and the first freestyles. I collaborated for many years with another Sardinian producer, Pherro, who has worked with Marracash, Gué Pequeno, Sfera Ebbasta. In early 2019 we released 'V Days', an EP distributed by Universal. Disaster in 2020 ".

For the pandemic?

"Just in March 2020 my first album was due to come out, everything was ready. Clearly the lockdown blew everything and we postponed the release month by month, because at the beginning it seemed something 'solvable' in a short time. As is well known, it didn't work out like this. In the end, it no longer made sense to me, I had to trash almost everything. A completely different job started for me ... ".

Or?

“I decided to take advantage of all that free time by studying other producers that I liked a lot, like Kanye West and Pharrell, looking for new sounds. Today I embrace various sub-genres, from classic to hip-hop, but I also included synthesizers, backing vocals, distorted vocals and trap nursery rhymes on the album. In short, I don't like classifications ".

And from the point of view of contents, what did you want to tell?

"It was a very difficult moment. My roommate had returned home, so I suffered a lot from loneliness and being away from my family. Fragility, insecurities, personal and generational nostalgia came out. Thus was born the title of the album: 'Il monster cries only in heaven. "Heaven for me is home, a place that should be happy, and that instead for me had become a melancholy place. In the end, however, thanks to music, there is rebirth: for the cover I chose an enormous carpet of flowers, as well as in the sets that we set up in Milan for the video clips, shot under the direction of Claudio Spanu in six days ".

On the record you can hear world leaders from Barack Obama to Boris Johnson, why?

“During the pandemic, institutional figures incessantly dominated the media scene. Hence the idea of including other famous speeches such as the 1962 Jfk speech for the launch of the man on the moon, that of Barack Obama who takes office in the White House, Bill Clinton and the terror of the 'millennium bug', Richard Nixon with the Watergate scandal up to the most recent ones of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump ”.

How would you describe the rap scene in Italy?

"I think it has finally caught on and has a specific weight in the music industries. The other side of the coin is that it is super saturated, there is almost an overcrowding of artists and sounds that are always the same. In a bit of a synthesis. "extreme: everyone makes music, everyone makes rap music and everyone does it the same way. I tried to distinguish myself by doing something not trendy".

Have you ever thought about X Factor?

“They contacted me for the auditions but I don't think it's for me and my path. Not that it's an absolute bad thing, it's a showcase like any other, only I would feel out of place doing covers or anything other than my music. Talents give you huge instant exposure but people follow you because you're on TV, not because it's you. The problem is that the following year there will be others in your place ”.

What does Malakay mean?

"It has no particular meaning, it is a nickname 'street' that friends gave me in Sassari when I was little. But I am fond of it".