John Cale
POPtical Illusion

I didn't want to write this review. The artist is too overwhelming for a music layman like me. John Cale is a true genius, innovator, and master in his art and craft. I lack the knowledge and intellect to discuss his work—or review this latest album—with the authority and seriousness that befits his talent and culture.

Then it happens that my friend calls me while I'm about to board the flight back to Brescia after a beautiful weekend spent with family and friends: in tears, he tells me that T., 57 years old, has passed away, taken by a sudden heart attack. In an exponential increase logic, the more the years go by, the more I have to find the strength to endure these moments. But this time the pain is too great; T. was one of us, one of those 10 people you can go without seeing for years yet could ask to jump into the fire with you without fear of being left alone. T. wasn't a great music expert, but he cared for me. One afternoon, in the late '80s, he picked me up from home to smoke together, and knowing my tastes at the time (Sophisti-pop), he put on the "Swing Out Sister" cassette: "I know you have scaghddiuni fin” (fragile teeth. Figuratively speaking, someone with cultivated tastes). That was him, ironic and generous.

Mechanically, in an attempt to exorcise the moment, during the flight and even afterward in the car, I kept on listening to the latest work by the Welsh genius without interruption, and I found comfort in it. Thank you, John, I don't care about the work spent over the years, the study of music, the experimentation, everything you had to do to be able to release, at 82 years old, this work. I only care that it exists. That there are now these new, thirteen, splendid songs, with heavy lyrics drowned in a playful atmosphere, seasoned with synths, noise, hip-hop grooves, and the vintage roars of the Velvet Underground.

Moreover, if further proof were needed, I have already had the chance to notice that a genius's product can be appreciated even by those who do not have the means to fully understand it, and, coincidentally, precisely by listening, together with my wife, to a Velvet track: “The Murder Mystery.” I was convinced she would ask me to skip the track and instead, after an engrossed listening, she says: "wow, how cool!!!" Honestly, as a Velvet fan, I've always been more aligned with Lou Reed's vision than John Cale's. Of the Welshman's solo works, I love those that musical critics label as accessible: “Paris 1919,” “Fear,” and especially “Fragments of a Rainy Season,” the unplugged ante litteram, published well before this sound test became an obligatory step for any musician or band. However, every new work our man has published, I've at least tried to listen to it.

I had already listened to the previous “Mercy,” which, like this one, originates from over 80 songs written by the great elder during the lockdown period imposed by the pandemic and, although I liked it, it didn’t enchant me as much as this “POPtical Illusion” did, thanks to its ability to “see the sunshine through the rain” (“Edge Of Reason").

As in Mercy, you can feel all the anger of the artist angry “for the programmed destruction by unscrupulous capitalists harming the wonders of this world and the goodness of common people” (from the album’s promotional material). Besides, it’s known, there’s nothing better than a shocking era like the recent years to provide an artist of Cale’s caliber with the necessary fuel to launch incendiary products like his last two works.

But, both in the lyrics and in the music, in “POPtical Illusion” there’s a vein of irony not present in Mercy. The nihilism of the 2023 work that leads to abstraction gives way to the sarcastic vein that suggests not giving up. The communicative urgency of an over-eighty-year-old aware of having lost so many friends, colleagues, and collaborators over the last few years and who has decided to document the passage of time and the involutional outcomes of a purely temporal development. 13 tracks that musically move, predominantly, in the hip-hop, electro-soul, and ambient-pop domains but do not disdain incursions into the avant-garde, upon which Cale's unique, grave, and impassive voice delights in launching barbs (the right-winged burning their libraries in "Company Commander") against the (pre)powerful, while at the same time indulging benevolently towards subjugated humanity, inviting it to start from its mistakes “Make sure it happens to you in the future, a better life than your past, avoid all the mistakes we made when we were younger” (“Davies And Wales”).

So, thank you, John. And thanks to the DEB, which made me discover that writing serves more for me than for those who read me.