AA. VV.
Ko Computer

Maybe because of being a twenty-year fan, I think of Are You Afraid of the Dark? - Reloaded, a comedic reinterpretation of the classic after-hours.
For example, the album opens with Bennato who, instead of singing «Porcocristo offenditi», sings «Sì lo so, siete un po' sconcertati». And then a whole series of gags, with Piero Pelù claiming Male di miele as a ghost track on Terremoto, Mal dei Primitives singing Pelle and then you discover it was actually Mark Lanegan, Eugenio Finardi reinterpreting Lasciami leccare l'adrenalina on piano and voice. I Ministri play Sui giovani d'oggi ci scatarro su. I Ministri, conceived on Monday at Leoncavallo. Agnelli tells Capovilla, «oh Pierpa' do me that thing you always do with Teatro: at some point, just the drums remain and you say the verse like Carmelo Bene»; Agnelli sees who sings Rapace better between himself and the bald guy from Negramaro.

An album like this, to spend three-quarters of an hour with friends, drink some nonsense, have some laughs thinking about how great it was back then.

Since Italy is not the province of the empire, let's do an Italian thing for the twentieth anniversary of Ok Computer. Let's make a compilation of covers with Benvegnù, Cristina Donà, and Marlene Kuntz in it and, no no wait, oh, listen to this: we call it KO Computer.
And down come the laughs, whistles, cheers, popping of Gancia. Long live independent Italy distributed by Universal. Long live the chicks. Let's call Appino.

The album begins with Airbag sung by Appino and Motta. They both really believe in it. Appino doesn't even know English, he got the PET by copying. Motta was born the other day and is already a human pose. One sings through the nose, the other through the adenoids, kind of like Oasis. Airbag is difficult to sing, and hats off to auto-tune which performs a challenging task here. But the result is that Motta sounds like Appino and vice versa. You can recognize Appino because his English is just good enough to put the right vowels in the words, even though Airbag is just long vowels anyway. But yes, all Radiohead songs are kind of like that, dude. Don't worry.

Diodato after X Factor I kind of lost track of. He comes back with this nice cover of Paranoid Android on a MIDI base or thereabouts, where he enjoys mimicking Thom Yorke, copying him to the millimeter. Because it's impossible that no one told him the concept of cover isn't exactly that: it must have been a choice of his, a provocation, really.

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Oh anyway, Thom Yorke says that since he switched to IOS, he feels much better.

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But let's move on.
Niccolò Fabi for his Kings Of Convenience style cover of Subterranian Homesick Alien will win the Targa Tenco. It is written in the destiny of Niccolò Fabi. Not many pay attention to him, I even had to check how many c's go in his name, but damn if he's an animal for Targhe Tenco.
The cover is pleasant and Niccolò is a good person: I wish him to one day snag at auction the legendary GE298821, Tenco's plate. And find the achievement he deserves.

The essence of Colapesce's career is the beautiful cover he made of Gli Anni, by 883. I'm not kidding, I swear, it's a great cover. But the fact remains that its essence is a cover of 883.
And this one? Good or bad? Let's face it: worse than a pineapple pizza, better than a LIDL gummy bear pizza.

The collaboration between Ernesto Dimartino, a distinguished anthropologist best known for Morte e Pianto Rituale (1958) and Sud e Magia (1959), and Fabrizio Cammarata, a total flop of the Cagliari Cellino era, now under-17 coach at Terek Groznyj in Chechnya. But beautiful only on a conceptual level.

One day someone will have to explain Marlene Kuntz to me. But not today.
Godano, notoriously humble, declares for Audio Rai.TV: «At the time of "Ok Computer" I (Cristiano Godano) dismissed Radiohead, unfortunately. I was very oriented towards the American side of music, and the English things that had captured me over the years were earlier: I think of post-punk. So I had prejudices. I continued not to follow them too much even with “Kid-A” and only from “Amnesiac” onwards I started to raise my antennas, little by little. I admit I haven't done a significant backward journey, so for me “Ok Computer” is a very cool album (how to deny it? Absolutely), but it doesn't belong to my personal pantheon of decisive albums for my formation as an enchanted listener.»
In short, he doesn't give a damn about Ok Computer, yet, remember, he is Cristiano Godano. And they give him the most famous track, because you know, the Marlene. But screw it, Diodato would have given away his thumbs to do it. Then it's bad, sung poorly. Godano changes the melody on the «this is what you get» just to make it a bit more Godano, a bit better.
But shut up Goda'. But a thousand times this.

Ah finally, Fitter Happier done by Spartiti. That was actually the only reason I started listening to this thing. Just the thought made me laugh. And here he is, Collini reading Radiohead with a Reggio Emilia accent, fast, colorless, more expressionless than the machine. Imagine Her by Spike Jonze with Collini playing Scarlett Johansson's part. Wouldn't that be the film of a lifetime?
There will come a moment when Collini will make a piece about having done this piece because he was asked by a beautiful intern at RAI while having a coffee: she pulls out the wallet to pay - Collini always makes the joke, «No no, do you think I'm a servant of capitalism? Ahah» [wink] but then never actually pays - and he promptly notices, between the ARCI and the Sakura buffet restaurant point collection, an old party card.
I still hold great respect and admiration for Collini and Reverberi, and I am sincerely sorry that, every now and then, even they lend themselves to pragmatic-conceptual ugliness.

The cover of Electioneering by Adriano Viterbini would be nice except that he sings and there are claps. But the guitar à la Bombino is nice.

D'Iosonouncane, I really liked Die, less so La Macarena. Climbing Up The Walls in D'Iosonouncane's version is very reverberated, martial, synthetic, with an organ climax from sci-fi nightmare, with the usual mystical-ancestral echoes. The vocal line holds. A nice cover by D'Iosonouncane, you can feel the boy has found his niche.

I did not want to speak badly of Nada, who is very honest, but damn she sings off-key on No Surprises even with auto-tune. There are a thousand better covers done by random YouTubers if you ever feel the need to listen to a cover of No Surprises.

Cristina Donà can sing and did a gospel cover of Lucky, misunderstanding the chord progression of the chorus. Noted.

I have a problem with young mothers. Wedding ring, freckles, slight crow's feet, and dark circles under the eyes. Well-groomed, but not refined. Not welcoming, nor aggressive, but hard and disinterested in superficial manifestations: yet of a suspicious hardness, as if they were secretly waiting for an opportunity to make burning in the hearth sweeter. Indie radical-chic mothers in their thirties have their own charm. With faded and outdated tattoos, some ethnic accessory, black nail polish, and an aquiline nose, the Ray-Ban Malcolm X-style glasses. Discussing Murakami, on the outdoor tables. It is an early summer evening, the breeze preserves the 33 for half an hour, it’s benevolent with the spritz and gin tonics that in July will be spoiled by the urgency of melted ice. A vague hint of ganja: it comes from my direction. I’m feeling good. Benvegnù is playing and everything's okay. His cover of The Tourist, the best song of Ok Computer, starts.
Benvegnù could do two things with The Tourist: sing it or not sing it. But to sing it well, you need a voice, you need to know how to sing, things that aren’t really in Benvegnù's pedigree: yes, he is a singer, but linked to the situational context. He could also not sing it, I don’t know, translate it into Italian and declaim the verses, make a version for solo cajon, remix it while keeping Thom Yorke's voice. He could do anything. But not this. Trying to sing it, but without too much effort, in the lower octave, with a slow relentless muzzled dragging means using deliberate violence. In the name of wo listen, I am Benvegnù and this is my style.
But that's not what bothers me, oh no. It’s that he, the young mothers of the indie radical-chic scene, sleeps with them all when he wants, while the dads are there praising how good Benvegnù is. Not me, I'm a kid, they like me because I remind them of Matteo or Alessandro when they met, but nooo, it's too late now, I can't anymore, you need someone your age. But in life, damn it, I want to become Benvegnù. Someone who, even if he makes offensive crap, still gets laid.

But anyway, why didn't you call Grignani?