@ARNOLDLAYNE Dear Arnold, I was musically born with classical music (I studied piano), which I absorbed from a young age, and alongside classical, my parents made me take in The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, along with Battisti, Mina, and the great Italian artists... Just to introduce myself... Then I went beyond... Beyond the realms of rock, jazz, the more or less cultured avant-garde, the more or less boring, electronic music (from Schulze to FSOL), New Age to '70s progressive and psychedelia... Until I fell in love with '50s be-bop and "gothic progressive metal"... so, just to continue with the introductions... and when I want to relax, nothing beats a sonata from "Ludovico Van" or a Bruckner symphony...
That said, perhaps I was excessive in my intervention, but I'm also fed up, believe me, I'm utterly tired of hearing the same old "village gossip" every time Vasco comes up! Arnold, I couldn't even stand to hear Vasco's name until the mid-'80s, and believe me... I don't remember any friends, classmates, acquaintances who listened to him... Especially among the "cool kids" of the time (who were called Paninari), to which I (like it or not) belonged. In fact, I’ll tell you that many "cultured" Paninari listened to Sylvian, the early Brian Ferry, Roxy Music, and so on... Not to mention the '60s and '70s rock that was still popular among many of my peers... Then there was metal... which I also listened to, despite my belonging to that group of people who refused to even talk about it... And Vasco was seen by my entourage as a “tamarro from the periphery,” so ostracized that, apart from the radio hits you were forced to listen to (like "Bollicine," "Vita Spericolata"), he wasn't even spoken of...
Then, one day I met a girl, from the upper bourgeoisie of Milan, by the way... Who ADORED Vasco... I fell in love with her, and together we began listening to all the songs of his that I had missed, including the very first ones, like "La nostra relazione," "Anima Fragile"... I remember that when I listened to certain tracks, I would tell myself: ah, so this song that I occasionally heard on the radio and adored was by Vasco Rossi? Great...
As for the character, I won't discuss it, to be frank, I’ve always tried to keep the life, the attitude of an artist separate from the music... However, it’s undoubtedly true that Vasco was already making waves in the '80s... and I assure you that later I met quite a few people (who knows why it always ends up like this) who listened to him, some of them quite diverse, by the way: from the hot "bimbetta minkia" to the daughter of a worker, to the scion of one of the most important families in this country (which I won't name for privacy)... who also adored Vasco... Now, there are two possibilities: either millions of people, from every social class, of every cultural background are fools, or Vasco really said something, maybe poorly, maybe rudely, but he said it...
Because as I’ve already written, Italy has always lacked the figure of the "ugly, dirty, bad" rocker... Arnold... It has never existed!!! Damn!
There have been excellent rock bands... I think of PFM, Le Orme... then there were many great singer-songwriters, from Battisti, Venditti (also VenduTTo), Guccini to De André and De Gregori...
And yet the "character" of the drug addict, the rebel has never existed... We have never had a Marc Bolan, a Lou Reed, a Mick Jagger!!! We had intellectuals who wrote poetry... true... but that kind of character no... Vasco arrived at the right moment, with the right things... How can we not think of those first surreal, angry lyrics? The iconoclasm he brought with him? Enough with the minstrels, with the more or less social singer-songwriters... Vasco spoke the language of millions of young people, those of the famous "Riflusso," orphans of the ideals, of the struggles of the previous decade... People who identified with him because he spoke like them, dressed like them, lived li
