Review: GHALI - "Pizza Kebab Vol. 1" (Track by Track)

At thirty you enter the life plan phase. Maturity, responsibility and enough bullshit. It’s time for the first assessments. Ghali is thirty years old and in his life, from the bottom, he has reached the top, but now he necessarily has to start again.

To do this he chose not so much to evolve into something mainstream, pop and more accessible. He chose to start again from “Via”, from his origins, from “Pizza Kebab Vol. 1”.
A project that undoubtedly includes a second phase (Sanremo is on the horizon!).

Thirteen songs + a skit for just over half an hour of music where Ghali dusts off the Italian trap manual, the one that he also partly wrote, and shows the new scenes how to do it, how to write the bars and how to wrap yourself in the beats, all essential, raw, primordial.

A record that is the fruit of a long journey around the world where he absorbed cultures, sounds and influences: Los Angeles, Korea, Mexico, Tunisia, Morocco and finally the return to his Milan, full of creative energy.

Many friends around him. New generations and bros who created the road with him. On the list: Geolier, Luchè, Tony Effe, Dylan and Side Baby, Simba La Rue, Soolking, Digital Astro and Draganov.
His students KIID and Sadturs are producing together with the Rabat rapper Draganov and the Los Angeles sound engineer Night Feelings.

A record that almost seems like a chrysalis to me. A first volume that marks his past and his desire to remain in the comfort zone and demonstrate that he is always an undisputed master of trap, but at the same time he wants to prepare for the big leap, for the new phase of his musical development, for his evolution of the post thirty years!

A clear and evident indication comes from Sins, the final track, which could be the message and the key to entering the new level!

For the moment let’s enjoy this, which is a lot of stuff anyway, and see if a new Ghali will emerge from the cocoon!

TRACK BY TRACK

STO
Ghali goes back to trapping. With STO everywhere, which is the album’s intro, but also the last track recorded. He feels the right energy found in the studio and the satisfaction of the work completed. Ghali is proud of his new project and proud of the project he decides to open it with a summary, from its origins to the comeback. The track opens with a hypnotic and pounding base, a sound of bells opens the coming-of-age story of Ghali as a child who others see as Tunisian, who at twenty is a ghetto boy, at 25 a star and today at 30 he makes a clean sweep and starts from the beginning: here I am and here I stay, and the Sto label means all this.

FEAR AND LOUD IN MILAN (feat. Tony Effe, Dylan, Side Baby)
The track was born from the artist’s idea of wanting to reunite his three friends Tony Effe, Dylan and Side Baby. All four in the studio work together on the creation of Fear and Loathing in Milan. An incredible night, of great harmony between the artists who in pure shawl close a hit masterfully produced by Sadturs and KIID. The Roman trappers conspire with the muezzin of the Milanese trap to return a sound portrait of the hallucinated Milan of 2023: not the Las Vegas of Hunter S. Thompson, but the Milan of today, prey to security paranoia, hostage of wild nights and young gods neighborhoods.

MACHIAVELLI (feat. Simba La Rue)
This track was born the day after returning from the recent trip to Egypt, when Ghali together with the producer of his label KIID and his entire team launched themselves into the undertaking of this album. Ghali and KIID meet in the studio and the freestyle starts. Bar by bar Ghali enters a world all of his own, and here he has as his accomplice Simba La Rue, the artist of Moroccan origins who is on the charts and in the news. It is a heavily dreamlike track, rapped almost like in a REM dream, full of dark and criminal visions, a rosary of repressed anguish and expressed anger.

UNDER CONTROLLO (feat. Luchè)
Continue the same method. Beat by KIID, freestyle on the microphone, real trap. Luchè passes by the studio, listens to the project and chooses to collaborate on this track. Great harmony between the two artists, who write together and close what is one of Ghali’s favorite pieces. UNDER CONTROL alludes to its opposite, the state of chaos and mental confusion as you pass from one border to another still in a hangover from the night before. The chorus is light-hearted, the rhymes are insightful, the song etches itself into the neural networks of the listener/player.

COCO
The track completely changes the register. It was an audition born in Ghali’s house, in a period of “warming up of writing”. Ghali records COCO at his house on the Finesse beat. A few days after the closing of the album Draganov, a Moroccan producer and singer who came to Italy to package his friend Ghali’s album, completed the track with the touch that transforms a beautiful song into an unforgettable song. COCO is the romantic breath of whispered love, a composition full of affectionate nostalgia for a relationship with a girl who opened her heart to Ghali, who remembers her with tenderness and kindness.

LOTS OF MONEY (feat. Geolier)
The track was born as Ghali’s need to describe what happens in the streets, he who grew up there, but who is part of no “gang”. The piece starts with a storytelling of a beef between rappers that ended badly. Here is a classic rap from gangsta rap origins where Ghali is together with Geolier. The piece opens with a Mina voice that sets the scene. Ghali starts with an almost Homeric incipit, with a storytelling of a beef between rappers that ended badly. Then the chorus with Geolier and the epic of a thwarted love against the backdrop of the cash raining down on young rappers who try to give meaning to this surprising and cursed life.

COW JUICE SOUP
A piece that remains indelible in the memory because it distills the Ghali sound. With an upbeat base, Baggio’s genius lyrically analyzes himself as he takes aim at the foodist obsessions of contemporary civilization and sings a praise of the spicy kebab pizza, the food of the park company.

TELL ME THE TRUTH’
A bittersweet ballad in autotune about a thwarted love (“let’s kiss or call it quits”) which then ended badly, in the sense that he is now dating someone else around the city. But in what is also a confession, Ghali feels within himself a metamorphosis to come and at the same time the fear of fully adult life (see the fleeting reference to fatherhood as a category of the possible). Above all, the feeling of lack hovers over the song (“in bed we were fuego”).

SAFI SAFI (feat. Draganov)
In the studio during a break from recording, Ghali decides to make Draganov return to the great rapper he is. Freestyle on the microphone for a great Italian-Moroccan hit: sung in French and Italian, it is a hymn to the multi-ethnic youth of Mediterranean Europe.
The expression means “ok, that’s fine” in Moroccan Arabic. Sung in French and Italian it is a hymn to the multi-ethnic youth of Mediterranean Europe. C’est fini, the two sing and allude to the heroic phase of trap, which ended with its full legitimation as a cultural product that speaks to all the cities of the world.

CELINE (feat. Digital Astro)
After the 2:30 AM sound insert where we talk about a Rolls Royce that could disappear in the wild night of Gotham, CELINE opens CELINE with Digital Astro, a member of Ghali’s nursery who had already collaborated on SENSAZIONI ULTRA on the song Peter Parker. Both of them take turns having fun in front of the microphone, transporting us into the world of star life. The luxury brand is actually an excuse for a mesmeric number with synth effects and the urgent refrain “mum don’t worry, they keep coming in”.

MERCILESSLY’
Between sinister tolling bells, Ghali sings about the alienation of too many dull and forced parties and the disorientation of the contemporary youth condition. It is a merciless moment in the history of the world and the musician must abstract himself from those around him to understand what is happening and think about the new album.

BUONASERA (feat. Soolking)
A reggaeton track that goes straight to the heart. Sinuous and impetuous, full of Arabic influences and melodies, it is a potential hit. It has rhythm but is also tinged with poetic melancholy. The synergy with the Algerian singer Soolking is perfect, when Ghali enters the pairing sparkles.

SINS
The piece, sweet and very fresh, is a personal confession and an invocation for forgiveness. It’s Ghali’s admission that she sinned like a rock star but he’s still the kid on the block no matter where he goes. This is why Ghali is unique, because he is Hamlet-like, consumed by doubt, poised between two worlds in this cursed but sublime existence.