Luciano Ligabue
Buon compleanno Elvis

THE REVIEW

The emblem of the Ligabue conception of life and music, or art in general, is all concentrated in this album. Some time ago, Woody Allen, with his usual sly and reassuring air, said, "I've been making the same movie all my life, but as long as no one notices, I'll keep going." Indeed, he kept going. Just like Ligabue. Liga is liked by everyone, maintaining for 25 years now a transversally shared and plebiscitally confirmed consensus. He is liked by the young because he seems to resemble them. He is liked by the left because he's magnanimous. He is liked by women because "they know it" and by men because "he's one of us." If De André was chasing the rhetorical game of the figure and De Gregori that exacerbated hermeticism, Ligabue is in urgent search, albeit rhapsodic, of the low profile. A profile never too thoughtful, a life in the midfield, whispering conformity, and that loosened pessimism at the end of every song. Liga, in short, is pleasantly reassuring. He's a faithful friend, a bit like Battisti, who speaks to the cheated generation and finds refuge in the thaumaturgic condition of "no, because no". The good Luciano has never hidden the desire to be the new Battisti, that universal symbol of human solidarity and sincere, peaceful gathering, but things are a bit different. Battisti, from a purely musical point of view, was a revolutionary, able in the hedonistic '80s to mock appearances, retreating into that anonymous, and therefore enchanted, refuge that was the partnership with Pasquale Panella. Luciano musically is as reactionary as Picierno in politics, that is, nothing. The singer-songwriter from Correggio, always criticized far too simplistically by a public opinion increasingly conforming to what seem like unassailable musical traditions, possesses a rare and commendable peculiarity: recognizability. Ligabue is not the new Battisti. He is the new Mogol. A more feminist, more intellectual Mogol, less rough and rustic but like him full of clichés; if for Giulio Rapetti "the cherry trees and dragonflies in a field" matter, in Ligabue's work "the thighs and mosquitoes" prevail.

His aesthetic, quoting Edmondo Berselli in "Canzoni", "spans between the banal and the sublime, between the concrete and the abstract, between the conjunctural and the epochal, between the flight and the down-to-earth, always considering the sacred and the profane as interchangeable." Luciano Ligabue's talent is not pragmatic, institutional, or academic, but rather instinctual and visceral (see "Radiofreccia", masterpiece, or "La neve se ne frega"). The Emilian singer-songwriter is a serene embellisher of everyday life, a comforting elder brother who whips you then immediately comforts you with a caress, an acute observer of society capable of grasping its most exposed aspects and understanding its shifts. The "great" Liga, as good Guccini likes to call him, has played a saving and at the same time deleterious role for the generation of the '90s, namely, becoming a generational singer for a generation that needed an existential soundtrack to support it. Thus creating an increasingly uncritical dimension around his art and an adolescent idolatry around his figure. Some of his songs have dazzled and pierced entire generations, leading even those who claim to hate Ligabue to roll down the car window and sing at the top of their lungs "Certe notti" or "Leggero". Luciano Ligabue has captured fragments of U2 and Springsteen, snapshots of Guccini, and that grumpy and grouchy restlessness typical of a certain rock that hasn't fulfilled a targeted political protest, but rather a generic, albeit vivid, "it’s not our time".