4TU feat. Anna
Cleo

Dear all, I thought of sending you an Easter blessing by returning to write, with and for you, about Italian "minor" music, several months after my last public appearance and also considering the repeated invitations to reconsider my choice from some dear users of the site to whom my special greeting goes (Romeo1985, Birba, Rivoli, Il Giustiziere, Panapp).

I want to make it clear from the start that this review does not constitute - alas - my stable return to the site, but rather a fleeting incursion into the environment that birthed me to briefly reflect on the ways through which music reaches the audience in a fragmented and uncertain era like ours, as proof of the complexity of the times we have to live in and the fleetingness of the means of knowledge of reality and the transmission of knowledge or the dissemination of the products of human ingenuity.

Well, you should know that in my area it's all the rage to follow Karima Ammar, the sensual singer of Moroccan origin, who, as known, variously frolicked throughout 2008 in "Amici" by Maria de Filippi, appearing barefoot in recent weeks at the Sanremo Festival with the song "Come in ogni ora", a really interesting piece enriched, in one of the evening performances broadcast on Raitivvù, by the presence of the great Burt Bacharach (the one from "Raindrops Keep...").

The "Karimania" that exploded in these circles has driven many of my followers - despite my disapproval - to obtain the piece through now-common tools like p2p, with an interesting implication that explains, in a rather striking way, the very concept of "heterogenesis of ends": acting for one purpose and achieving another, perhaps positive but completely unexpected and unforeseen, confirming lives dominated more by Chance than by an Intelligent Design.

The fact is that the piece downloaded by many, despite carrying the title of Karima's song, is actually something entirely different, namely "Cleo" by 4TU feat Anna (the singer), erroneously attributed, in some parts of the web, to Caterina Rappoccio, a very young singer launched directly from Fiorello's karaoke and already backing Max Pezzali of the 883 in popular pieces like those of the '90s, among which "Aeroplano".

Truly an unexpected tour through the more minor streets of music from the past decades, this one, whether due to an Accident of Being - and thus, in these times, of the Internet - or to a savvy communicative move, where the talented Karima and the elusive Caterina Rappoccio are used, much like in Paul Auster's tales or a well-known Ridley Scott sci-fi film, as tools to convey something entirely different to the average Italian's eardrums.

The piece, it must be said, is wonderful, perhaps even better than that of the aforementioned Karima and the earlier tracks of Rappoccio, deserving my attention and the consequent review for the benefit of all of you.

From a strictly musical-technical standpoint, the song is characterized by a blues-derived pace for solo female voice and acoustic guitar, where I seem to hear some Battistian reminiscences, especially from the "Anima latina" period; recorded with seemingly makeshift means in a domestic environment, the piece gives the listener the sensation of being immersed in a typical lo-fi, homely atmosphere, poles apart from the pyrotechnic Sanremo event or the karaoke bazaar of years gone by.

The voice of this Anna gives an impression of fresh youth and inexperience regarding the deviations of Being, especially when she climbs to the higher tones with daring descents and ascents of various kinds, giving the whole a dreamy effect that, listen after listen, one almost ends up adoring, especially where the piece reveals itself as a juxtaposition of verbal and linguistic suggestions where metaphor and analogy mix, surpassing the constraints of verbal realism and sentimentalism, umbilical and self-referential, à la Pausini, which I consider the real problem of Italian music in our last fifteen years.

Thus I come to the most interesting aspect of the entire piece, namely the lyrics and the disorienting suggestions it triggers in the listener: it is not clear what it speaks about, who it refers to, who this Cleo might be, what feelings bind her to the singer, and where exactly the piece is set.  

The ultimate sense of the narrated affair seems to me, but here I may fail and I obviously leave everyone the freedom to interpret the lyrics as they please, a sort of hymn to vitality and liveliness that transforms into Creation ("On the warm salt of the body/That doesn't melt/A song in D flows softly in the head"), in which the singer finds herself in all the places and non-places of northern Italy speaking of this Cleo, a subject now distant yet close, Immanent because seen and experienced everywhere ("The 98 still passes close by/...softly disappears in the blue fog... [Milan?] Cleo now looks up/Venice now has your face [Venice?]).

Realism is surpassed, not only by the plurality of viewpoints and the almost free juxtaposition of words, but by the call to classical ancestry synaesthesia (They're tears of wool, little girl/They'll warm you and you'll be a woman... Sweet the sound of her crying... Forever the scent/Of your white night), which give everything mysterious and hermetic tones of background, with almost psychotropic effects if the song is repeatedly replayed until it becomes a pleasant mantra to possibly sing in chorus on a spring Sunday outing, where every field flower carries within itself the sense, thought to be lost, of the All and of Nature that calls us to live and create.

In concluding summary, I can observe how this track is probably the most captivating piece of Italian "minor" music I've heard in recent years, a cut above all others (like the "Pop porno" I reviewed in November) and deserving, at least for what it's worth to me, to be spread to the average and larger public, hoping that the authors continue in this direction without being overwhelmed by the demands of a market that does not always reward the best.

(Deus Sive) naturally Yours,

Il_Paolo