I Ain’t Tryna Survive,
I’m Tryin’ to Live

Here it’s a question of survival. At the foot of the wall of determinisms of an American society that was its dream ever more aggressively, a wave of artists unfurled and broke with unprecedented energy. Between superhuman verbosity, raw demands, resigned resilience, and reappropriation of the myth of the self-made man, American rappers have shot up in recent decades as a multitude of independent symbols of the historical strains tearing at the fabric of the United States. Crazed journalists, neurotic biographers, marginalized businessmen, fascinated and sharp as a knife – all feverishly devised a series of verbal jabs and jolts, often contradictory but always startling in their passion for life. With a deep experience facing and facing down adversity, they created a music that ran into many roadblocks on the way, obstacles that even today still hinder the horizontality of social connections in the United States. Within this reality there arises an outpouring of music that is free-flowing, connected, verbally teeming, and able to rapidly adapt to the new cultural, economic and societal issues roiling the contemporary world. The various trends in American rap nowadays offer an uninterrupted volley of different ways of seeing the world, a perpetual reinvention of the language that mold our realities.

I Ain’t Tryna Survive, I’m Tryin’ to Live looks to capture individual moments of these meta-chronicles, individualized like a series of outcries aimed at the ears and eyes of those who hear and understand but do not listen to them.