2023-08-05 22:01:49
Florida is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Hospitalet that, thanks to Morad, has been transformed into a pilgrimage center for urban music. Hundreds of thousands of people feel they know the neighborhood: they have seen its people, streets and squares, or blocks of flats in the viral video clips that creator Iván Salvador has produced in recent years for the Catalan rapper, with a legion of fans in Europe and in Morocco, the country where he has his roots and with which he feels identified, because he says that, here, no one has made him feel neither Catalan nor Spanish, that’s all.
Salvador, who is 26 years old (two years older than Morad), distills his own and personal view of Florida that allows him, from street-level realism, to turn a neighborhood without much charm, complicated but not marginal, into a symbol of the extraradio, as an emblem of the neighborhood’s culture and pride, and also of the neighborhood’s myth. From the verism of its aesthetic commitment, the result is a romanticization of Florida, where the harshness of living on its streets also contains, thanks to an impeccable visual treatment, certain doses of epic.
Motorola, which uses the mobile phone brand as a pretext to talk about what it’s like to live (and survive) in the neighborhood, is one of the most iconic songs de Morad El Khattouti and one of his most successful music videos (48 million views). It is pure extraradi, pure urbanity. The rapper appears there, day and night, with his colleagues. They parade defiantly, disgruntled, uninhibited, pretending to shoot a gun, in a video that smells of maria and trapicheo. Shot vertically with an iPhone, Motorola contains many ingredients of the Salvador-Morad team: spontaneous videos, a high degree of improvisation and a minimal budget, recorded with the help of people in the neighborhood in a matter of hours… and more at once, interrupted by the arrival of the police.
Florida is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Hospitalet that, thanks to Morad, has been transformed into a pilgrimage center for urban music. ALBERT GARCIAAlbert Garcia
In any case, Florida has had the good fortune of having someone who, from its harsh reality, explains it and endows it with beauty. The beauty of it all is that it could be any other forgotten corner of the outskirts of Barcelona, where interesting things like the Morad phenomenon happen, often away from the gaze of the media and the majority of society. Hence the identification that many young people living in similar conditions feel towards Morad and the neighbors who co-star in the videos. And hence, also, the fascination of many other teenagers with more affluent existences towards a life that seems dangerous, interesting, on the edge. Morad is heard in Hospitalet, but also in Eixample.
Morad is the raw material, the soul of a neighborhood where, paradoxically, he has been forbidden to enter for months by court order: a judge considers that he incited some serious riots that occurred around Plaça Blocs Florida, cement terrain, hard, shadow orphan Salvador is the artistic look at the neighborhood, which starts from reality (a certain way of being in the world) to go beyond.
Life in Florida is not easy at all. That’s what the neighbors say as little as they are heard, not always happy with Morad’s ascendancy over other teenagers and young people in the neighborhood. It is a neighborhood with almost no green areas, noisy and lacking sufficient facilities, where the flats – built in the fifties to accommodate shack dwellers from the Somorrostro beach – are small and not very shiny. The administrations have poured resources and imagination into it: the facades of the blocks have huge murals that add color to the space. “On the outside we are different, but in the neighborhood we are all the same”, says one of the graffiti.
Morad wants to be an equal, has been for many years and wants to continue to be. But whether he likes it or not, the success of his meteoric musical career has placed him in a leadership role. The rapper has returned the help to the people who give life to his video clips, especially the children, protagonists of many of his songs. Morad takes some of the children to his concerts for free, pays for their football team ticket, covers the expenses of the most needy families or boosts the fledgling career of a friend. For many, a hero exiled in a neighborhood where day-to-day life is complicated.
The video clips represent a certain vindication of the neighborhood in that they convey a sense of camaraderie (things are not that simple) and claim the pride of the neighborhood and the sense of belonging of those who feel forgotten by society, of those who are on the sidelines . Morad expresses it with an acronym (MDLR, mec de la rue) that has become a successful trademark, just as he himself has become an inspiration to many other young people who arrive in Florida looking for the scenarios wisely woven by Salvador, imitating the rapper’s clothing (cross-body bag, cap, tracksuit) and hoping to find him.
It won’t be easy to find him, at least for now. At the outset, due to the current restraining order. Many residents have experienced it as an injustice: they feel that Morad is being blamed for all the ills (there are many) of a neighborhood that was already going bad before the rapper settled there and that continues the same after he left . Other residents, it must also be said, have experienced it as a relief for the ever-increasing concentration of young people who want to go out in Morad’s video clips. The judicial investigation of the case draws a Morad who feels a visceral rejection towards a police that he considers racist. On the night of the riots that he allegedly instigated, according to the Mossos, he exclaimed: “From now on I will make Florida burn.”
The forced exile will expire (necessarily it must be temporary) and Morad will surely allow himself to be seen again in a neighborhood where, by the way, he does not live: for some years he has had an apartment near Plaça d’Europa, a space of relatively new construction near the Fira de Barcelona, where there are skyscrapers and expensive apartments, bigger and more luxurious than the buildings in Florida. But his life, where his songs are born, is in the neighborhood, the place where he has had to look for carobs, where perhaps at one time (no conviction weighs on him even though he accumulates several judicial processes) he has crossed the line of the law with his adventurous friends, where it all begins, where the roots of a music career that fills concerts, tops Spotify charts and, for now, does not seem to stop
#Florida #Morad #myth #neighborhood #notebook