Superclassico

About the song

«Superclassico» is a song by the Milanese rapper Ernia, released on 19 June 2020 by Island Records, a label of the Universal group, as the first single from his third studio album, «Gemelli», which came out on the same day. It lasts two minutes and fifty-two seconds and was produced by Marz and Zef. Italian Wikipedia files it under pop and English Wikipedia under hip hop, and both labels fit: the verses are half spoken, with a rapper’s cadence, while the chorus is sung over a clean, mid-tempo arrangement.

The title borrows a word from football. The Superclásico is the match between Boca Juniors and River Plate, the two great rival clubs of Buenos Aires and one of the most heated fixtures in the world. Ernia applies the word to a couple: whenever the two of them meet, it feels like a decisive game that neither side can treat as ordinary.

The song follows a relationship from its first days to its imagined end. In the first verse the narrator wonders whether anybody warned the girl that he is the wrong kind of man to notice at a party. Even her sister advised her to drop the idea, because people like him only bring trouble. She writes to him all the same, and he catches himself thinking about her, to his own irritation. In the second verse she has won: he never meant to let her into his head, she is beautiful and chaotic, she dances in the rain with her eyes shut and then goes quiet without explaining why.

The chorus is pure jealousy. His heart skips when he runs into her in the street, he would gladly come to blows with her boyfriend — first the old one, then a man who is trying his luck with her, finally the new one — and he admits that he ought to be more flexible. The bridge looks ahead. One day, he predicts, she will get bored, as if a mask had fallen and she had noticed that flaws are easier to see from close up. Each will forget the other as though nothing had happened, and now and again they will think back, each beside somebody else.

Speaking to the Milan daily Il Giorno a week after the release, Ernia said that the song is about jealousy and that nobody had noticed it yet. He explained that it grew out of the relationship he was living at the time, that falling in love was a strange sensation he had not felt since his teens, and that he cannot write about things he has not lived. For a learner of Italian the song is a compact tour of verb moods: the conditional for what he would do, the future for what will happen, and the imperfect subjunctive after «come se», "as if".