Bugo
Pane, pene, pan

I was in elementary school and having a snack, I remember quite well. During some music video rotation on TV, Pasta al burro came on. There was a tall, skinny guy with a big hat who rapped strangely with a filtered voice about the yin and yang of the classic first course. But above all, he twisted, threw himself on the ground, causing cable messes, guitars spinning, bowed heads, retches, excited people, probable hard drugs, definite soft drugs. It was a live video with the studio track audio and superimposed writings. I immediately thought that this Bugo was cool and that I had never seen or heard anything like it in Italian music. I don't remember how long after that, but after discovering the story of p2p, I managed to get all his stuff, which I believe ended at Golia e Melchiorre - great - or Sguardo contemporaneo, very beautiful. Yet Bugo, aside from the embarrassing and at times somewhat Catholic last album Nuovi rimedi per la miopia, has over the years been a changing confirmation of that freakish, mind-blowing first impression he made on me as a young boy enjoying his snack. But that day when the Mule did its duty, Pane, pene, pan, Bugo's first album, I just couldn't grasp it. I didn't understand what or why, or how it even came into being. And to think that the first album is always the best, according to my unwavering conviction from back then. I listened to it from start to finish, but I believe I was doing something in the meantime, put it in its neat folder and never picked it up again, even lost it a couple of times due to computer crashes and external hard drives, only to find it and always leave it there.

Between then and today, there's been - and often paused and still remain - Jandek, Guided By Voices, R. Stevie Moore, Slanted and Enchanted, Sic Alps, the shitgaze of Psychedelic Horseshit, Von Hemmling, electronic Battisti, Julian Koster and his various things, Tony Molina, The Punch Line, the no-wave and Royal Trux, a thousand poses and frankly unnecessary stuff, live cable messes thrown up on and under the stage, tracks recorded on a phone and sent from the room's system «oh I made this yesterday morning at home, see if you like it» and WRAAAAAAM the unnatural distortion of that Nokia that turns all acoustic guitars into the Jesus and Mary Chain of Taste The Floor, «okay you can get the intention, right?», «no.»; demagnetized tapes, the device for listening to music in pairs with a pair of headphones each that made you appreciate the Pixies when we were seventeen on the train and then served me when I was alone, breaking earbuds in two days, then managing to fix it by staking two pairs all for myself and damn because the left always breaks and I only have stereo versions of the Zombies!, the Tall Dwarfs compilation, the Relics tape by Jeans Wilder, Smog, Soerba, Metal Machine Music for falling asleep, the summer I was half-deaf for a couple of months and the day I suddenly began to hear normally and wanted to kiss and hug everyone, recording and then sending the recorded stuff from my makeshift stereo and playing over it recording everything again and repeating twenty times until it became real chaos and the first thing I recorded no longer existed at all, Rivers Cuomo's home demos, the first of Meat Puppets, Crywank's early recordings, Metal Circus.

If today I listen to Pane, pene, pan again and I like it so much, there must be some reason. If Gioconda with its little keyboards and kazoo is so childish, naive, touching and a bit autistic it reminds me of the first time I heard Daniel Johnston. If writing a western, rambling on it and titling it Fa caldo, fanculo suddenly seems like a great idea. If the end of Mio morbido letto feels much more like early Pavement demos than Times New Viking. If Cibernetico is so beautiful I don't even know what to say, with its genius and crooked guitar riffs, and those spatial effects that remind me of the musical saw of the Music Tapes and that humble and lame vocal line that made the fortune of small gems like Solitario e Oggi come sto, on the subsequent extraordinary La prima gratta. If now Brutto scherzo more or less fits for me: it starts like poor man's free jazz, exhibits the early Beck flow attempts from Trecate (NO), part pentatonic riff (Black Keys crap) and then inexplicably ends with a completely out-of-context guitar. Perfect.

But Bugo was also a somewhat unaware Roland Barthes and there is here a love discourse in chronologically scattered fragments, between «Anche se ho il maldischiena, ne vale la pena», which all those afflicted by misfortunes, hernias, and old mattresses know as an afternoon reflection for a promising evening in love. Between the not-so-cryptic «hai dovuto regalarmi un grande corno» of the betrayed and wounded, which Bugo sings in Assorpresa with a strangely thin voice, unlike any after. With a guitar so ugly you can hear the soft pick on the strings. Between the disillusioned apathetic falsetto «Hey baby, non ti voglio più, al tuo posto ho preso una tivù» and Universo which surprises with piano and synthesizes everything in a dark and decidedly grunge mood, closing a romance with Giannini's «bottana industriale» to Melato.

There's also Samurai which sounds like an angry and terribly crooked demo of the early Verdena demos, but maybe it’s just the "samurai" that makes me associate. Anyway before the Italian scene was obsessed with things like samurai and sci-fi from snack packs, who knows why. There's A chi medita sulla tazza, a celtic-flavored folk song that makes no sense. And Non dovrei scrivere il titolo which already then presented, already accomplished, the demented poetry of the best bizarre Bugo in grunge agonistic trance out of time; first verse: «I shouldn't take magazines to the bathroom, I shouldn't scratch cause then it bleeds, I shouldn't mess up the third round again, I shouldn't peel potatoes for the priest». There’s already Vorrei avere un dio, one of Bugo's early classics, revisited later in Sentimento westernato: «questa insicurezza nei rapporti la sistemerò quando avrò i capelli corti. Come un cane senza il suo guinzaglio, vorrei avere un dio anch'io».

This is the tape that Bugatti used to carry around in Ninety-six, among alphanumeric nonsense which are wita splinters, nursery rhymes and cowbells, often even good ideas taken and left there without further development, as Pollard teaches. Which is then the sense of a demo. Just six years later Bugo would end up signing with Universal, moving From lofai to cisei. A sign that, by being themselves and authentic to the hilt, sometimes even the ugly, the petty, the drug-addicted, the crooked, and the strange win too.