Benito Urgu
Latte & Cozze

After the dazzling beat experience with I Barrittas (greatly underrated in the genre) in the 60s, a solo career in the 70s, Benito Urgu opens the 80s with theater but above all with his comedic work, obtaining great responses among the Sardinian public.

In these years, Benito Urgu's production of cassettes exploded, capturing him live, as he tells his hilarious jokes to a warm and amused audience. The pinnacle, both in quality and sales, was reached with the cassette "Visitors".

But, in my opinion, it is in "Latte & Cozze" that Benito Urgu achieves his main goal, namely representing a socio-economic-cultural picture of the Sardinian population in a period (the 80s) of great transformations and changes, in which Sardinia has to deal, more vigorously than in previous decades, with the Outside, the so-called "Continent".

The characters portrayed by Benito come from various (forgive the antiquated term) social classes. The predominant language is Sardinian, but Italian also frequently makes an appearance.

The themes are quite varied: From family ("Mother and Daughter", "The Student, the Father, and the Professor", "The Mallus Neighbors", "Farts at the Cinema") to marginalized characters of society ("Two Prostitutes", "The Drunk & the Hen", "Useless Push-Ups", "Giovanni the Stutterer"), from carabinieri ("The Accordion") to hilarious everyday scenes at the market, in the office, in a restaurant ("Live or Dead Lobsters", "The Patent", "The Cat's Head") to love affairs ("The New Shoes", "Gelati").

Finally, the eternal duality between the Sardinian and the Continental ("The Pimped 500", "The Friend from the Continent").

All the voices, sounds, and noises are by Benito himself, thus confirming his great flexibility in interpreting different characters, not only Sardinian ones (the carabinieri have an almost perfect Roman accent), but above all his great ability to connect with people, studying their behaviors (without opportunistic motivations for creative-compositional purposes), becoming their friend from the first contact, and creating a sort of alternative sociology (unofficial, not scholarly, not academic) light-years away from the (still valid) bookish one studied in academic circles.

It's impossible to put into writing the sensations experienced during listening, beyond the jokes and hearty laughter they provoke.

It is consequently a cassette tape (along with perhaps the cassette "Two Cagliaritans in New York") to have and to listen to.

Try it to believe it.