francis

Fuck, I don't understand why the comment sending gets stuck..sorry for the inconvenience.
Dude, if you think about it, even your reviews are written from your personal and subjective point of view..when you say "Area are the greatest Italian band of all time, the rest is crap," you're also expressing what can be interpreted as an Absolute Truth, so don’t come calling me megalomaniac or a show-off, because deep down we’re all egocentric if we have a bit of self-esteem. Everyone expresses themselves when talking about the music they listen to.

Post-hardcore seemed like the most fitting option. Anyway, it’s time for me to reveal what the “key” is to understanding my reviews: I don't want to be clear, I want to be DARK!!! Damn, is that too much to ask? Readers shouldn’t know everything right away; they shouldn’t be manipulated, they shouldn’t take away the joy of their own personal discovery. The reviews I write are not reviews "of the albums," but reviews "on the albums" "for the albums." If someone reads this review and likes it, they listen to the band and draw their own personal conclusions: they might even say that I haven’t understood a damn thing about the band in question, just as they might say I’ve done an excellent job. I don’t believe it’s possible to “agree with”: everyone is a story unto themselves, a taste unto themselves, a cultural background unto themselves. A review should stimulate, using information and music for a deeply subjective discourse.

I have to correct: the accusation that I don't respond directly comes from Moonchild, not from Iko.
Iko, then read from the second line where it says "Ah, ah..." onward.
Moonchild, look, I always respond to you when you are worthy of a response. But often you don't go beyond just claiming that I'm a faggot, and that I'm handsome on the outside and ugly on the inside, huh, huh.

Iko, Iko... but what will remain of you?? Am I not answering you directly? But if I counter (and trash) point by point your stupid insinuations?? Ah, ah... I may not have been the epitome of elegance in this flame, but compared to you, I have the nobility and grace of a Roman Emperor... I don’t like foul language, but if you start acting like a fishmonger, I'll smack the fish back in your face!
Returning to the rec, Bowie's American tour is cited as the driving force behind the album; the phrase "America forcefully enters Bowie’s imagination" is just one of many examples. You have neither excuses nor arguments to justify your irritated insolence; come to terms with it. And believe me, if I had realized I had written something foolish, I would have made a public apology. Something you would never do, with your intolerable behavior of a spoiled child. It's time to grow up; get weaned, Iko.

But what do you know if I've ever "played soccer"? I mean, do you really know me? Who do you think I am? I've never taken a pill, that's true. I stopped at marijuana and I did coke just once, but that doesn't mean I can't listen to, and write about ATR even if the only raves I've attended were mainly house music (and you, being Sardinian like me, should understand what kind of house I'm referring to), a few years ago. All in all, you've made some valid points: the Italian music press is mostly inconclusive, flip-flopping, and useless. But what you see as a conclusion, for me, is a starting point: assuming that in Italy there's a lack of that certain level of musical culture and promotion that happens instead in Europe and England (even though things are getting worse, read my forum about independent labels), maybe it's really better to do retrospectives rather than reviews. The number of people who know about Atari is relatively few: this review of mine is not at all written with the intention of being exhaustive (nobody would succeed at that) but to introduce this album to a hypothetical "newcomer," that's all. If we want, let’s call it a tribute; that sounds better. Not out of false modesty, but I believe this is one of the very few pages written in Italy about Atari Teenage Riot. You mention Italian newspapers, but as far as I know, there's never been space given to this band; Alec Empire yes, but not to them. I remember a few snippets here and there, but never a real feature. But it's also true that almost all Italian music magazines suck.

Great Masterflash!

I find "Heathen" disgusting, but those are personal opinions.

I repeat, once again: I write reviews, period. They may be liked or not liked, but criticisms must be minimally reasoned and polite. Iko, you lack these two qualities. Your apocalyptic way of doing things, with all those tiresome Latin quotes (just so you know, I come from a Classical background too, don’t provoke me into starting a war over this), all that lengthy indignation, fundamentally devoid of precise criticism, bores me to death. It’s obvious that Bowie developed his own "travel diary" during the American tour; if you pay attention and read (read, for God's sake), this element is repeated several times in my review. Do I have to explain everything to you? Do you always want a ready-made narrative? If you can’t get there, the problem is yours, not mine, since this review has been enthusiastically received even by those who criticized me in the past. What is it, do you perhaps want to say that those who liked the review don’t understand a thing? That they appreciate mediocre things? If I wanted to, I could interpret it that way too, couldn’t I?

For Easycure: it's true, I probably should have used different terms than "chemical beats"... let's just say it was a way to describe the boom of that type of music that had come out of the ghetto of the "club" and suddenly became the mainstream trend of those years. It's precisely thanks to those records that now the term "dance" (even if some associate it with Gigi D'Agostino) has lost the negative connotations it used to have. Regarding the NIN, I wanted to specify that despite much of the press continuously linking Empire as Reznor's "little brother," the proposal of ATR has definitely been much more direct, extreme, and uncompromising compared to that of the "big brother." I've always thought of Reznor as a wildly overrated artist, neither here nor there. For once, I'll play the role of the idiot: true "industrial" music is somewhere else entirely.

Contaminations of hip hop in the ATRs: I didn’t say it exactly like that, read carefully. I said, in the introduction to the rec, that I liked the crossovers between hip hop, punk rock spirit, and rave culture proposed by some artists in the second half of the '90s. The ATRs drew from certain old school hip hop: the slang (especially in live performances), the structure of the lyrics (in many tracks, Empire, Crack, and Helias alternate on the mic), and, even though I know you’ll scream scandal, even a few sonic elements like the use of samples, anomalous but still samples. That said, their proposal was absolutely original, innovative, and devastating like few others before them. What the Public Enemy were for the "people" of color in America, the ATRs were for the generation of discontent after the fall of the Berlin Wall.