Alberto Camerini
Cyberclown

One day, while I was living in that period in which I bombarded myself with electronic music, a fragment of an Italian song came to my mind that I had heard who knows where and when. I focused better and reworked "Rock'n Roll Robot" by Alberto Camerini, a fun, entertaining, schizophrenic song with a nice upbeat rhythm.

So, I decided to investigate the life of this now totally ignored character, to discover a rather unique biography. Let's say that Camerini was one of the first Italian singers to provoke music with heavy themes, in a time when a protruding belly button was enough to create a scandal. Alberto began playing guitars and/or flutes in various popular Italian music bands, until with his first album of '76 "Cenerentola e il pane quotidiano" he began to draw a world suspended between the absurd and the mysterious composed of Martians, sweet delights, televisions, and above all drugs, a world made of many colors and especially of metallic, magnetic, cathodic materials, with LEDs and electronic sounds, which in their apparent banality expressed various problems of the time like false myths and illusions.

From this first experiment supported by metropolitan rock sounds, he moved to completely different fields, and a year later with "Gelato Metropolitano" made of Brazilian sounds (Camerini was born in São Paulo) and dealing with political and environmental themes; but his popularity ended with the third release "Comici Cosmetici" of '78, an album this time more committed to creating psychedelic digital sounds and narrating the adventures of an imaginary clown named Neurox. Popularity ends but not necessarily his career, and in full '80 here he is again composer of "Skatenati Serenella", an album from which he begins to create a creature, that of Harlequin. It will be precisely thanks to the already mentioned "ROCK'N ROLL ROBOT" that he will return to full success, in '81 repeatedly confirming excellent positions in the record charts. With "Rudy-Rita", he fully develops the electronic harlequin that would then be himself in the famous costume, but to really have carved an important piece of Italian music of the '80s was the release of the single "Tanz Bambolina".

However, Camerini was more than a man, he was an alien chameleon, characterized by the ultra necessary need for change, and his continuous changing of look and musical style only put him in difficulty, as many fans could no longer follow and understand him. He focuses with rock in "Angeli in Blue jeans" and gradually resigns to great success with the album "Va Bene Così", while still remaining active in organizing shows and much smaller albums. Among these, I listen to "Cyberclown" from 2001, the cover alone lets you understand what is the final transformation of the mimetic artist: punk. A career composed of serious problems with money and drugs helped by abundant antidepressants ends and gently dies with a simple transformation of a modern and stylish punk. And Camerini wears loose and low shorts, checkered shirts, and has a crest. YES because Camerini says "An album that is worth more for the lyrics than for the music", but the lyrics announced with the introduction "Prologo" are strongly banal, futuristic rap rhymes and riffs on a stereophonic rock base. If listened with a certain taste, the album will not prove to be a fundamental musical support at all, but it won't be indifferent in the artistic field either, in fact, Alberto's love for the colors of plastic and for everything that is physically hardware remains evident, unfortunately, some songs break and are really foreign to a friendly approach.

It follows "Un altro sogno", a sweet and melancholic ballad of a depressed condition of "different" outcasts perhaps cosmic planetary; cute base but voice to say the least graceless and theatrically false. The first and true punk piece arrives with "Subtelevision" in perfect Ramones style, which just like the following "Istruzioni" gives the idea of being forced to listen to blink 182 and other parrot punk bands for high school students singing in Italian, the lyrics are saved which retain that semi-scientific futuristic and complicated style.
The techno-rap "Cyberclone" is a bit more embarrassing, but the following hard rock "Roquette" already recovers, along with "Alice forse lo sa già", a punk song about synthetic and cosmetic substances, which Alice will access conscientiously and used. With a nice rocking rhythm "Orfeo" in the song of the same name will start heading into mystery where he will find Voodoo. More rock cues with interesting riffs return in "Bambola Vodoo", a rough and naive song, but very apt and strange.

You reach the final part of the album where there is a substantial change of genre, as reggae and ska arrive, starting from "Non rompermi le skatole", very simple and childish as much as the ska "Ska-skatenati" in which he also sings in Brazilian. The purely reggae "Fatti una canna!" has a nice perfect rhythm of dub percussion and '90s-style tunes, truly not bad. If this album left me quite perplexed, and almost a bit disappointed because it made me know a small alien clown playing with electronics and imagination fading slowly, I slightly change my mind with listening to the last song, title track, in my opinion, beautiful: "Cyberclown", a melodramatic ballad depressing with theatrical/lyrical adventures that narrate the misadventure of the Cyberclown android beset with identity crises. He questions all the mysteries surrounding human existence and finds his in the memory of a computer after venturing into the spiral of synthetic substances and trampled spirituality.... Alberto Camerini closes with "Cyberclown: Cyberpunk".

Here then is the last metamorphosis of a true artist, ridiculed, mocked, and ignored. And yet Camerini never bowed to trends to stay present. For this reason, I think the album is not the best, but it represents a human condition full of doubts, difficulties, and naive contradictions that serve as basic material for a stunning and original creativity, a true art form.