marpado

Ligabue, what can I say about this other phenomenon: predictable melodies, lyrics of embarrassing banality, the only thing worse than this bar-room rhetoric is Vasco, which says it all. But above all, repetitive to the death. And you don’t need to be an expert in technical stuff to notice it: I, who can’t even hold a guitar, realized almost immediately how stale his music was, even though I’ve been forced for years to endure his crap; it’s something that stands out on its own, a flatness impossible not to notice. I’ve always asked those I know who go crazy for this dude, who made me listen to him, how they couldn’t notice such repetition, the same three or four chords, the always identical key, not to mention the stereotypes, the clichés galore...no one has ever deemed it worthwhile to answer me, everyone so caught up in his deeply profound themes like "loser, accept that life is always the same and you won’t change it, at best you’ll get laid," themes which, by the way, explain how a guy like this can sell so much: hordes of spoiled and disillusioned teenagers convinced they’re depressed “above the day of sorrow” who sell out shows, and here comes the money-making machine doing its job; after all, as Bart Simpson said, “depressing teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel…”

Obsessive? Perhaps. I consider myself one of those who appreciated Vasco from the first 10-12 years, let's say until '93, so I believe I'm also in line with your thinking, as I understand it. I don't belong to those who hate him out of spite and who also look down on his early works. Vasco carved out a niche in Italy that was still essentially free, that of the sort of outcast who narrates youth and urban discomfort with simple, sparse, direct language. Beautiful, intriguing, captivating—there's no denying it—but necessarily short-lived, because after a while, what you had to say has been said, and, compounded by age creeping in, continually insisting leads to descending into the ridiculous, culminating in the pathetic contemporary Vasco. The only thing is, this clever fellow had realized that his persona sold better than the singer, and he adapted himself to the level of those fans he found around him, sufficient to support him for decades to come, renouncing any claim to artistic renewal and/or growth (assuming he even had the capability), resigning himself to the zero level of his followers and gradually approaching, album after album, a sort of flat musical encephalogram. Good or bad, it seems to me the fitting endpoint of this regression; songs like E, Un senso, and Senorita are simply disconcerting, on which not a word more should be wasted.
And this is where I "obsess," dear primiballi, I certainly obsess against the average Vasco fan, that cranio-less pill-popping creature mostly incapable of producing a sentence or coherent thought, the tacky/douchey/trashy type all about sex, partying, and random subjunctives, spoon-fed by radio and MTV (but they distinguish themselves from the common man, sure) who, from their high perch of "fuck you, you don't understand a thing, Vasco is God," seriously demands that those nonsensical lyrics be passed off as poetry, as emblems of Italian music in the world, as works of art—people who measure the quality of an artist by attendance in stadiums, because if Vasco fills them up, it’s impossible that the 80,000 people who went to the live show to get drunk and hook up don’t understand a thing. People who will make you look like a snobby critic if you dare to say that Vasco lives only thanks to the character carefully crafted at the drawing board and to those merchants who have been manipulating him for years, who would sell an album of farts as pure gold, as long as it’s signed by Vasco. People who, with their four burnt-out neurons, expect to come and teach you about music when they don’t even know what music is.

Oh, anto-pippo, but you die-hard Vasco fans know how to do nothing but repeat Vasco's tiriterà that teaches you about life? What the hell was that illiterate supposed to teach us, to get us hooked on drugs, to drink like a camel, to sleep with girls after a concert, or to laugh at thousands of fans for years and years? These are "lessons," if I may say so, suitable only for the average brainless idiot who crowds his live shows and gets all hyped up with those few phrases that his (the idiot's) stoned neurons allow him to process: "great, king of rock, legendary Vasco," certainly not for all those who, and thank God, are many more, who detest the character and have a good laugh at his "lessons" in the form of songs.

Aside from the usual jumble of third-grade terms and concepts (strange he didn’t throw in some "eeeeh" for good measure), this fool comes to preach about a society where "it takes little to make an impression"? Him, of all people, who for at least the last 15 years has been pestering all of us (and mocking his fans, who may be deaf and idiotic, but don’t deserve such treatment either) with pointless, repetitive, and banal songs that are just a collage of tired clichés that were already thoroughly exhausted during his early years? It’s been at least 15 years, I repeat, damn it, that even if he released an album of flatulence, it would still sell and fill stadiums, and he comes to tell me "it takes little"?