Various Artists
Pop Italiano

Singer-songwriters are dead, and De André has become a pain in the ass.

I've already talked about sculptors and their associated waste materials some time ago. Here, we're faced with funerals without form or substance, no rites and no boxes to contain and preserve them. In fact, even though we are dissecting the earth, this isn't about profane matters but rather prophets, saprophytes of mythomania and megalomania capable of creating a morbid relationship in perfect symbiosis with the albums or artists in question. Blindly convinced and jealous of being the sole bearers of knowledge that sometimes even surpasses that of the musicians themselves. With a touch of resentment, one must also thank these kinds of people, since something did emerge thanks to those who, armed with time and curiosity, dug through the humus and the subsoil.

I want to emphasize one thing, I don't like those who overrate artists to compensate for their lack of fame; seriously, they give me the impression of someone who believes they will find fortune by scouring the shoreline with a metal detector bought on sale for fifty euros, finding a paperclip and a 10-lira coin, going to a numismatic friend and after some discouraging judgments decides to sell it on eBay for 15 euros: happiness lies in small disappointments.
With the slightly rusty paperclip, he stores past months’ bills, he's indomitable, he got his tetanus booster shot two weeks ago.

So mine is a descent, the time in which I try to immerse myself and to which I refer is the late '70s, the end of barricades, the reflux of gastro-ideological and well-trodden paths thereafter. We are indeed at a standstill moment where pop music was in a transition phase, confused and orphaned of a precise path to follow, finally free from any ideology. After a return to the glorious days of punk, rock transformed into new wave, disco was in rapid decline, and the electronic revolution, already growing, was inaugurating the transition from analog to digital.
This period also saw the relatively brief emergence and flourishing of dominant commercial nuances that mixed soul influences with folk/pop compositions and jazz sensibilities in equal measure, creating an easy-listening hybrid but also emotionally and musically rich, all obviously based on Afro-American music influences.
In Italy, such a sophisticated approach to pop music was embraced not only by established names like Lucio Dalla (“L'ultima luna”, “Siamo Dei”, “Stronzo”), Alan Sorrenti (Figli delle stelle and L.A. & N.Y.), Franco Califano (“Balla ba”) and Ornella Vanoni (“Ti Voglio”) but also, and perhaps most importantly, by an entire generation of writers, arrangers and musicians raised on the early fusion records from across the ocean. All akin to an annual bloom, it's just that after the first rich spring opening, the winter frost never allowed them to awaken from their usual creative dormancy.

Countless examples can be cited, from what is considered the first Italian funk record, namely Funky Bump (1976) by Pino Presti, to the sweet and enveloping Notturno Italiano (1984) by Mario Acquaviva, a perfectly rounded concoction of jazz, fusion, and funk, not underestimating the textual part made of dreamy and disillusioned images.
The phenomenon seems momentarily uncontrollable, harvesting from every latitude, ranging from Brazilian piano bar pianists playing samba-fusion-jazz in Trastevere venues with Chet Baker, an example being Rio (1983) by Jim Porto, to cosmic German prologues mixed with Mediterranean sounds of the single C’è una donna sola (1979) by Massimo Stella with a final burst of unstoppable percussion and a kaleidoscopic piano and keyboard solo that evolve into a volcanic prog-fusion.

Speaking of volcanoes, one of the main epicenters of the earthquake will be exactly Vesuvius with its slopes (beware of the lapilli), with stories of revenge and forgetfulness, all with a common denominator: The mustache.
But this is another story that deserves much more space, for now, I must leave as I'm due for my tetanus booster shot.

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