Noyz Narcos is the star of the new episode of Venticinque, the LifeGate and Rockit podcast that tells the story of 25 years of Italian music.
Noyz Narcos, pseudonym of Emanuele Frasca, is the star of the new episode of Venticinque. 1997-2022: gli anni che hanno rivoluzionato la musica italiana, the podcast produced by Rockit and LifeGate Radio and written by Dario Falcini, Giacomo De Poli and Marco Rip.
The Roman rapper represents 2007, the year in which the legend that is Noyz exploded thanks to the release of Verano Zombie, the album that consecrated him as one of the most influential names in the Italian rap scene. The new episode, dedicated to Noyz Narcos, is available on all streaming platforms from Wednesday 21 February 2024.
Noyz Narcos's career, retraced in its entirety in the new episode of Venticinque, began in the early 2000s in Rome, a city etched into his artistic identity as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. On the streets of the capital, Noyz Narcos honed his style, characterised by raw lyrics and a powerful sound, drawing influence from the urban and social reality around him. His music became an authentic reflection of street life without censorship — a sonic fabric that tells of lived experience, urban stories and social hardship.
Everything I've done in life, I've always tried to do it well. If I banged my head against it so hard, it's because I probably imagined and knew that sooner or later it would bring out what I wanted to do in life — that is, not having a boss above me.
Noyz Narcos
He took his first steps with the TruceBoys, a crew made up, alongside Noyz Narcos himself, of Gel, Metal Carter and Cole, and subsequently with the TruceKlan ("of which I will always be a member"), a broader and more heterogeneous collective encompassing TruceBoys and In the panchine, which quickly became an institution in the capital.
Listen to "2007: Noyz Narcos" on Spreaker.
But to describe the TruceKlan simply as a hip-hop crew or collective would be reductive: it is rather a fraternal bond, a collection of different individuals united by rhythms and bars, by writing, skating, forming a community that openly challenges the system: "We were just like a tribe, something apart, a tribe. If there was a moped, it belonged to everyone; if you got a slice of pizza, you split it; they'd swap clothes… we were very close, like brothers (…) Many of them played punk music, had grindcore bands, played techno… I was the one who did rap and at the start I felt that in my lyrics I somehow had to pay tribute to them too, because, in any case, we spent life together, and if I was telling a story, I'd probably done it with one of them."
In 2007, following his first album Non dormire, released in 2005 — which already contained an early version of the track Verano Zombie — the record Verano Zombie came out, Noyz's second solo album. With this work, the rapper not only captured the essence of hardcore rap, continuing his raw journey through the outskirts and the Roman underground street life with an account of lived experience that left an indelible mark on Italian rap, but also proposed new sounds, making the album something more than the simple expression of a single genre.
Verano Zombie also featured an enormous number of names from the Italian rap scene of the time, including Danno of Colle der Fomento, Gué, Marracash and Vincenzo da Via Anfossi of the Dogo Gang, cementing the album as one of the best of a three-year period — 2006 to 2008 — that marked a turning point for rap in Italy.
If there is one thing that characterises Noyz Narcos's entire life, it is the desire to throw himself into things, sharing them as much as possible with others, whether fans or partners. Just as in the early days with the TruceBoys and the TruceKlan, throughout his entire career Noyz has woven an impressive network of collaborations with well-known artists from both the Italian and international rap landscape, right up to his latest major collaboration with Salmo on the album Cult, released on 3 November 2023.
But it is not just about music: the creative synergies extend to many other fields. For instance, running parallel to Noyz's story is also that of Propaganda: a brand, a label, a network of creatives, a booking agency that, in 2019 in Milan, also became a tattoo studio under the name Propaganda Tattoo Temple.
Propaganda is the idea of Noyz Narcos and Andrew Propaganda, manager and lifelong partner, who at the Venticinque microphones describes their relationship as proof of how two people, two friends, can grow while still developing a working path and a life path on equal terms: "A fraternal relationship of which I am very proud and which is the foundation of the energies underpinning the Propaganda network."