Antonello Venditti
Unica

THE REVIEW

UNICA (2011) 3/10

With infinite wisdom, no one had yet reviewed this so-called record. And with infinite recklessness, I am doing it myself, so that the "Venditti discography" on Debaser can now boast an (almost) professional completeness. As for me, I had only listened to "Unica" once back in 2012: I replayed it now for the occasion and remembered nothing, except the title-track, which is one of his most famous pieces of the last twenty, thirty years. Now, you naïvely thought that the egg on the cover of "Che fantastica storia è la vita" was the worst (another album I haven’t listened to in ages): instead, this is even worse, and I’m a little sorry because with the previous album, "Dalla pelle al cuore" (2007), he had shown a slight sign of life. No luck—take your eyes off him for a second and our National Antonello throws yet another extra-luxury dud at you.

So, the album was released on November 29, 2011. The date is important, and so is the context. After decades of love songs, our man suddenly realizes it’s been geological eras since he "churned out" a political record—so here is the perfect opportunity. And indeed, according to the author’s intentions, this should have been a political album: but if 9 out of 7 songs are about something else, it’s hard to think of it as such. What happened is that in 2011, "Berlusca" was at his lowest, engulfed by all kinds of sex scandals and with plummeting public support (the only one who still seemed willing to defend him, for extra-political reasons, was Scilipoti), and a widespread movement of young university students emerged in Italy. Without wanting to invoke the glorious 60s and 70s, they occupied universities, contested the shameless government policies (these were the years of Gelmini, Minister of Education, who saw things we humans could not even imagine, like tunnels and whatnot), and culminated in May that year with the crushing defeats in Milan, Naples, and the referendums. The Rete 29 Aprile Researchers (which I'd completely forgotten about) invited "Vendittone" onto the roof of Sapienza in Rome to protest alongside them. Now, why they picked a singer clearly in decline is beyond me—maybe everyone else turned them down, or it just doesn’t add up. Our guy, reinvigorated as if he’d gone forty years back in time, believed he’d once again become the reference point for a youth movement that saw him as a sort of "noble father" of student discontent. That didn’t last: Berlusconi was ousted that November, Monti’s loden arrived (which Venditti openly blessed), the protests died down and that was it. Too bad Venditti already had the album ready (which he wisely should have released during his brief resurgence) but it dropped on November 29, when the party was already over. So, those two measly political songs he made the effort to write already sounded like something from the Triassic.

The album is bland, irritating, blatantly thrown together. "E allora canta!" is the song dedicated to the young protestors (he calls them "le compagne"), but I doubt any twenty-year-old at the time even raised an eyebrow in admiration ("...E per la strada un uomo guarda il movimento della gioventù/il sorriso di una compagna, non lo vedi tu?...", welcome to the last century!); the other is a comedic little number relegated to the end of the album, titled "La ragazza del lunedì (Silvio)". Whatever. In between, there’s an uninterrupted stream of love songs sweet enough to give even Iginio Massari diabetes, including "Forever"; "Ti ricordi il cielo", "Come un vulcano", and a "broth" on the topic of immigration, "Oltre il confine". There’s even space for a dedication to Saint Cecilia—"Cecilia", of course. The sound is flat, monotonous, it’s the sound of a band playing something so limp they hardly seem to be trying (anonymous drums; guitars that occasionally attempt to get a bit more electric, but without conviction; piano presence very, very subdued), and not even guest appearances from the eternal Gato Barbieri on sax or, as usual, Carlo Verdone on drums can make a difference. It clawed its way up to sixth place in the charts, but by the end of the year it was ranked 32nd. I’d say the university crowds didn’t really care about it all that much. But during the album’s launch, he stubbornly declared: "Questo disco è dedicato ai ragazzi ed alle ragazze di questo Paese ed ai Ricercatori della rete 29 aprile che mi hanno accolto come Antonello sul tetto della Facoltà di Architettura di Fontanella Borghese". Well, trying to be young when you’re no longer young is the saddest, most decadent thing one can play out in the human soul. He’s all played out.