Jovanotti
Il Disco Del Sole

I return, and Jovanotti returns on Debaser as well (and I'm not sure which of these two is worse news). Let's say that one can always find some time to write a review, and more or less, I believe, Jova made the same reasoning; the time to put together an album can always be found, even if the album is then what it is, that is, not much.

"Il Disco del Sole" comes out in December (on the 9th of 2022) and there's already little sun, plus it's a collection of singles released in the previous two years (there's also some new stuff, but sparingly) that were, more or less, beach hits or, if we were in the '60s, jukebox hits. Summer hits, precisely, and ours releases them all together at Christmas, well. The idea is a scary leap back in history; it feels like being in the years of the economic boom when Italian singers flooded the music market with 45s, and when they accumulated enough, they released the 33 record that contained them all (the most striking case was Battisti's LP "Emozioni", year 1970). Now, here we have Jova, not Battisti, and already the leap back is significant in itself; if we add that the operation is born already old and ancient, imagine. But the fans, what do they know, think that these are "trendy" commercial operations, only to then get mad at the boomers, who in this appear more "trendy" than them.

The hits in question are "I love you baby"; "La primavera," "Sensibile all'estate"; "Mediterraneo"; "Yalla Yalla"; "Il boom" and so on. Not everything is to be thrown away, one must admit. "Yalla Yalla," for instance, is a nice "banger" that brings back memories of the Jovanotti of the '90s, the best on the scene, and "Mediterraneo" is a nice little 5-minute song with not even banal "oceanic" rhythms. Let's stop there, because the rest is shameful: "I love you baby" is a song designed to "break" the radio and be forgotten after half an hour; "Sensibile all'estate" is insubstantial and is supported by such a silly text that it's hard to believe ("Are you happy? Even today I made the sun rise, it took a while to convince it, you see I had to tell it about you, can you believe it?"); "La primavera" shamelessly cites Battiato in music and lyrics, but where Battiato reached peaks impossible to scale, except for himself, here we are at ground level, between art academy students and Turks patrolling Syria, ending with a future in which karaoke will be sung at the Scala.

Ah, the new tracks. Help, please. Now, I understand that ours lives with unconditional happiness and is always happy and cheerful, stuff that if they smashed his car, he'd be able to find, if he wanted, a positive side (I'd be pissed, I don't know about you) but a tiny little song like "Ricordati di vivere" is scary. Because it's fine to always be joyful and cheerful, but to put together a text as delirious as it is stupid on such predictable and boring music like this took some effort. In practice, the substance is the following: live life in every moment. What a revelation. Then there's "Se lo senti lo sai," well the little game of stuffing the songs with S is now a revealed trick, but even here we are at kindergarten level. Listen here: "And one day in December summer will arrive, because things do what they want". Well, oh dear, maybe it's the justification for having released a summer album in early December. Cherry on the cake: in the chorus, a reference to "Felicità" by Al Bano.

Trivially, it goes for intimacy with the romantic, so to speak, "Tra me e te" and even throws Enzo Avitabile into the forgettable "Corpo a corpo". Then occasionally he gets something right, and this saves him from total failure, besides the aforementioned "Yalla Yalla" and "Mediterraneo" "Oasi" also deserves a mention and the entertaining "Tirannosauro Rex," perhaps the most successful piece among them all.

Jova is no longer what he used to be, and I'm one of those who loved, and still loves, his early "pirla" period, the one of "Vasco" and "Il basso pompa," because he was a fool indeed, he goofed off, he had fun and had no pretensions of being a street poet. Now, but I would say for some time, he thinks he is a refined pen, a respected author, a musician par excellence. Yes, there are some flashes of talent ("Buon sangue," 2005, was, in my opinion, a more than decent album), but "Il Disco del Sole" (2 CDs, moreover, ours lately struggles to contain himself) is a small trinket in a sea of uselessness. It must be said, this time he hasn't even sold out. Perhaps even his most faithful followers have grown tired of the monothematic Jova-thought?