The National Museum of XXI Century Arts is not only the Roman temple ofcontemporary art, the design and photography, for a cycle of three meetings it will also be the place where the value of contemporary music is investigated.
The event is called Street Music and it will be a journey starting from Thursday 28 March and for the following two Thursdays through the history of rock, blues and rap, contemporary musical genres, all analyzed in the context of the street understood as a place of popular music, represented both as a physical space but above all as a conceptual space, describing an idea around which music was written, and then sung and played. The cycle of meetings aims to draw a map of the luxuriant and at the same time complex relationship between the street and music and the inspiration that comes from it and which led to the birth of innovative styles such as folk, rock, blues and rap.
The reference to the street is also linked to the exposure The street. Where the world is created. During the first meeting with journalists and music critics Ernesto absent e Gino Castaldo will be told the ideal scenario of the road, “in which to try to start a path to get to the top, or in which to set and tell stories. The roads traveled every day, from city to city, to bring one's music around the world, those of the suburbs or provincial cities, those of the big capitals or those of the most hidden villages, are all roads of rock. The road, the streets, whether they are endless "highways" or small and obscure "backstreets", are the ones that rock has celebrated, narrated, created, the ones from which it has taken its lifeblood, inspiration, breath. There would be no rock without the street”, as stated in the note from MAXXI.
And if on the one hand rock has made the history of contemporary music reaching a very large audience, on the other the blues with its warm and deep tones it heats much more niche environments, but equally fruitful: “one evening, legend has it, Robert Johnson had gone at midnight to the center of a crossroads and there he started playing while waiting for something that he himself did not know what could to be. At one point, an all-black man arrived and took his guitar, tuned it, played an unknown tune, and then handed him back the instrument. The legend of the crossing and the pact with the devil is almost certainly false but the story has gradually spread over the years. It is the most mythical road of the blues, the "crossroads" that Johnson sang in the homonymous song, the first of many crossroads, of a thousand roads, that the bluesmen have physically traveled with their guitars and their stories, up to the present day,” as reported in a note. There will be talks about blues stories at MAXXI Alex Britti, leading musician on the contemporary scene of Italian and international Jazz and Blues.
The road traveled during this cycle of meetings led to rap, a controversial genre that continues to be discussed and during the meeting it will be Militant A, from Assalti Frontali, who will tell the streets and music through his experience. Militant A has recently published the book Conquer your neighborhood and you will conquer the world – My life with rap (Goodfellas Editions). "Rap is the CNN of the ghettos," said Chuck D of Public Enemy many years ago. But given its enormous diffusion on a global scale, the language of rap has definitely crossed over from the Afro-American ghettos and has become the language of the streets of the world, from the French suburbs to the Italian suburbs, from the streets of London furthest from the center to those of Africa or the Arab world. “The true and only musical language of the street today is rap, hip hop culture has made the street its scenario, to represent life, in all its forms, with love, anger, passion, dreams, frustrations and desires. It is a story of roads and encounters”, writes the note from the national museum of XNUMXst century arts.
The events will take place at theMAXXI Auditorium and each provides a ticket at a cost of 5 euros. There is also a subscription for the three meetings at a cost of 10 euros.
