AKIRA feat. GB Conte Cielo (2023)
There are a handful of regions in the world that are referred to as “blue zones.” Those regions—located in Japan, Greece, Costa Rica, Italy and the USA—have one particularity in common: People tend to have above-average life-expectancy. American author and entrepreneur Dan Buettner was an early evangelist of the term. In the early 2000s, he founded a company called Blue Zones LLC to market products and services to prolong one’s life—including guidebooks, diets retreats, cooking courses and much in between. However, Buettner wasn’t the one who originally coined the term; that honor belongs to scientists Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, who used it in their demographic research on Sardinia in the early 2000s. The closer Pes and Poulain and their team got to the Nuoro province in Barbagia, a region in inner Sardinia bordering the Gennargentu massif, the more men of 100 years of age and older they encountered. The scientists used a blue pen to mark the areas with high concentrations of centenarians on a map, which ultimately led them to the name “blue zone.” It’s not just Pes and Poulain who were kissed by the muse on the isle in the Mediterranean Sea, but also Swiss-Italian rapper GB Conte: “Atmosphäre”, the young artist’s first song to break through, harks back to a trip to Sardinia, as does his artist name. During one of his visits to the isle, he saw an old picture of a ferry called “GB Conte.” The musician adopted the name for himself and since then has released a number of cloud rap songs using the pseudonym—among them “Cielo”, a blissful collaboration with fellow Swiss rapper AKIRA.
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