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Rating: Or: the "bennatica" boiling. This is not, nor does it want to be, much of a review of the piece in question. The rhetoric, the futility, the deep banality of the song are clear to everyone. That Edo, then, our old Edo, is forced to dye his hair and surround himself with people with no soul or art, is too sad a thing to comment on, even in the form of a review.
This wants to be a declaration of love for a wonderful artist, a father of Italian singer-songwriter music. To a man who has managed, with very few others, to elevate the singer-songwriter school of the south to the levels of the Genoese school, with the added value of the great Neapolitan tradition. All of this, as in the best Pino Daniele, another dead man walking, infused with the truest and deepest blues.
This man, then, and if you are young and don’t know him well you wouldn’t know, was also wonderfully self-deprecating. Profound, cultured, and self-deprecating.
In the mid-seventies, he made a handful of splendid albums. Literarily perfect, as I mentioned, profoundly self-deprecating and absolutely profound, both when he was laughing and when he was protesting, and musically completely innovative. Of course: there was the lesson of Dylan, the evident non-indifference to Battisti, the perfect knowledge of the Delta, Chicago, etc... In short, the sources were there, as always. But, as with all great artists, who are then great chefs, the ingredients were mixed with absolute genius, with strength and ability. Without melodramas, without rhetoric, without silly glances, etc...
Edo was surrounded, then, by an aura of absolute consistency and incorruptibility. I remember a friend of mine, during the “E’ arrivato un bastimento” tour (the last good album and in general one of the last listenable ones) who at the end of the concert approached him and had the nerve to tell him that, in his opinion, he had become bourgeois. Any other singer would have either told him to go to hell or pretended not to hear. Not him: he felt hurt, asked why, and they talked about it for a bit.
Then, toward the mid-eighties and after a certainly acceptable album in its being, somehow, experimental, like “Kaiwanna”, came the choice. That damn choice faced by all singer-songwriters of the great school: either hold on to your listeners, growing with them and perhaps experimenting (as the much-mourned Battisti did, but as Conte, Fossati, Battiato, and very few others also did still do in a less risky manner) or glance toward the young, believing them the only drivers of sales and charts, in a world increasingly ruthlessly dominated by the market. And so here are the dyed hair, the vivalamamma, the okitalia, and further down, until the latest production of risky and almost always flawed collaborations with weak guitar-wielding youngsters and this latest single. This last summer song, banal and beachy, from the very person who, a few years ago, at the tribute concert for De Andrè, sang “La canzone per l’estate” (not understanding it...?…bah…).
The choice of partner then clarifies the project. If I am a director like Antonioni, and I realize I'm not as strong as I used to be, I have three choices: either I quit (a choice that almost no one takes, often wrongly) or I team up with Wenders, because I have a name and a tradition to defend, and above all because I love cinema, or I team up with Vanzina, because I also want to sell at Christmas.
Well: Antonioni chose Wenders. Bennato chose Vanzina/Britti (though I'm a bit sorry for the comparison with Vanzina, who did do something good, well…), teaming up with a handsome strategically skilled six-stringer entirely devoid of soul, with the compositional ability of Cristina D'Avena when she’s off her game.
What a pity, Edo: you were a great. In the middle of your descent, you remembered us and yourself, giving us your alter ego Sarnataro. Deluding us.
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