Mia Martini
Lacrime

Each album by Mia Martini delivers to the history of Italian music some of the most significant portions of musical beauty that have been expressed in our country in years, now distant, when there was still a decent record industry capable of supporting a certain type of "world," artistically speaking, made of talent, personality, and good taste. A world that has almost disappeared, leaving a void that I strongly doubt can be filled today, as we are invaded by the vulgarity and total flattening that reigns supreme in every artistic sector. Absence of soul, absence of depth, absence of beauty: except for rare and commendable exceptions, this is the condemnation of our present.

The beauty of the works of an artist as frankly unattainable as Mia Martini, today more than ever seems capable of redeeming, at least partially, a life destroyed by the superficiality of an environment that ultimately could only fully represent an attitude that has always existed in a substantial segment of Italian society, small and provincial, but precisely for this reason ruthless with those who have something true to say, with strong personalities, with the "different." And Mia Martini was different, in art and in life; she was a splendid anomaly who paid all her life for the brutality of many colleagues and industry insiders who psychologically violated her for years, until they left her consumed by anger and loneliness. She is no longer here.

But her voice, her songs, her music, will never end; there they are and there they will remain.

You have to have her records. I, who have them all, can no longer say which are the most beautiful, which could be the "essential" tracks for a representative best of. For this reason, having to talk about "Lacrime," I do not intend to express myself with phrases like "one of the most beautiful," "among my favorites," no, because I practically love everything she did. I love the intensity and truth of her art, her always being beyond time, fashion, and the cunning allure of the profession: a curious woman, perpetually in search of that "passion of the soul" – as she called it – and an irrepressible traveling companion: music, towards which she always had a "maniacal" inclination, as Ivano Fossati, the love of her life, instead said.

After a long but necessary preamble (in relation to what follows), now I really want to talk about "Lacrime." An album that was recorded more than twenty years ago, but which I feel particularly current, perhaps also because it remains the last album of unreleased tracks by Mia Martini, so it's as if her music and her voice stopped at that period: then as if it were still now.

In 1992 Mia Martini had reached an artistic-expressive level that had few equals in the so-called Italian "light" music scene (a term I have never liked): after her comeback success and rediscovery by old and new songwriters, Martini had also confronted jazz and Neapolitan song. "Lacrime" is indeed an album that represents Mia Martini in various musical guises: there is the great interpreter who goes to Sanremo with great popular success songs, there is the sophisticated lady of the singer-songwriters, there is the folk-singer who enjoys singing in Neapolitan without disdaining ethnic atmospheres; there is the artist-woman who expresses herself on the problems of other women and the changes in society.

It is also a not-at-all-commercial album, like almost all the works of her refined production: the only song capable of breaking through to wider audiences is perhaps "Gli uomini non cambiano," a track with which Mia Martini returns to speak to the large public, something to which she cared a lot. In the album, we find many points for reflection, often characterized by a subtle ironic vein typical of the latest years of Mimì, as if this were her last weapon against suffering: on the cover, the tears of the title come out of an onion, and this to make light of it, because "Lacrime" should not be received as a "sad" record.

For the realization of the album, Mia Martini relies on the team of the late Giancarlo Bigazzi, author of the success "Gli uomini non cambiano": a song that may not be liked (and indeed many do not like it), but which certainly could not have been interpreted better. "Gli uomini non cambiano" is one of those pieces that entrusted to any other performer compared to the original, loses all its strength; several years ago I saw it performed on TV by Manuela Villa and it was really embarrassing to hear all those trills and flourishes that stripped the song of its original "truth" and its emotional rawness, turning it into a pathetic and anachronistic pseudo-melodrama. But I could also mention the recent tribute by Eleonora Crupi, who naively tried to update the song but got stuck in the original interpretative scheme, which due to obvious artistic limitations did nothing but reveal her in all her inadequacy.

In short, "Gli uomini non cambiano," interpreted by another singer, practically makes no sense, because no one after Mia Martini can actually restore that completeness, that intensity, thus that credibility necessary for it to still be received as a "serious," "important" song musically. She managed it, of course thanks to her incredibly aching vocal timbre, but also and above all thanks to her life experience as a woman now worn out by disappointments, by the weight of affection damaged since the tenderest age. The ending ("those in love like you") was pure irony: she didn't believe in it. I truly love this interpretation, I consider it one of her greatest ever, where desperation, anger, bitterness merge together, with determination mixed with resignation and exhaustion.

At Sanremo '92 she was the victim of one of the greatest injustices against her: the missed victory at the last second. She (and not only she) was badly affected by the second place, and by that victory that was literally stolen from her behind the scenes of a bandwagon in which it was decided that year that the winner couldn't be the one who was given as favorite from the beginning. Needless to say, after all these years, the song-interpretation most imprinted in the collective imagination is precisely "Gli uomini non cambiano," and certainly not "Portami a ballare" by Luca Barbarossa. Pippo Baudo, twenty years later, still goes around on TV to say he's sorry for what happened during that Sanremo: apologies that unfortunately now serve no purpose.

She should have ranked first also at the Eurofestival (where they had her participate, which generally was the right of the Sanremo winner), but there too Mia Martini paid once again for being Italian: that year the Italian representative could not win because the following year it would have been up to Italy to organize the event and we know well here how the Eurofestival is considered.

Biagio Antonacci, Mimmo Cavallo, and Enzo Gragnaniello are the three singer-songwriters who complete the album.

By Antonacci is "Il fiume dei profumi," a beautiful song, in which Mimì's voice manages to best render the melancholy of the soldier writing to his woman in the midst of a war, lost in the memories of a distant love.

Mimmo Cavallo signs "Dio c'è," a decent song that however today feels the effects of a not particularly excellent arrangement, with those ugly choirs at the end. The text, interpreted with grit, denounces the lack of authentic references in an increasingly complex and disoriented society, incapable of metabolizing its own changes, with the weakest dramatically suffering the consequences: an interesting retrospective look at what were already the germs of today's general decline.
Then there's "Il mio oriente," also by Mimmo Cavallo, and it's one of the most fascinating tracks of the album, where Mia Martini returns to express her ethnic taste through the use of choirs that evoke atmospheres of other tracks from her past discography like "Milho verde" (1976), "Nannenò" (1981) and "Lucy" (1985), where the Mediterranean, the Orient, Brazil, and all the Souths of the world breathe and blend, where the artist had always identified and placed an important part of herself. As evidence of her love for the South, her roots, and the city of Naples in particular, at the end of the album Mia Martini inserts "Scenne l'argiento" by Enzo Gragnaniello, a continuation of the path started with the previous compositions by the Neapolitan singer-songwriter: the singer does not want to renounce this type of repertoire at all, also being able to count on the success of "Cu'mme," written by Gragnaniello and released a few months earlier, in a historic duet with Roberto Murolo.

But the songs that I personally find most exciting (besides "Gli uomini non cambiano") are "Uomini farfalla" and the other two written by Bigazzi's team: "Versilia" and the eponymous "Lacrime." "Uomini farfalla" is by Maurizio Piccoli, a historic author present in many stages of Mia Martini's discographic journey, distinguished by great sensitivity as well as by sincere friendship towards the artist herself. It is one of the most beautiful lyrics in absolute that the singer has interpreted in her career; she even thought of proposing it for that same Sanremo '92, but indeed the theme dealt with was absolutely unwelcome, especially for a singer like her, very much loved even by the most traditional audience. "Uomini farfalla" is the story of a woman who believes she can love two men very much friends with each other and suddenly discovers that the two are secretly having a homosexual relationship: everything is told with enchanting poetry ("almost hard tenderness cultivated on my breast," perhaps remains the most significant line).

"Versilia" is lovely, full of suggestive images in which the imagination of a woman in love gets lost against the backdrop of a Versilian summer: the melody is not at all trivial and includes rather difficult musical passages, which the singer, however, brilliantly challenges with her usual skill.

Her vocality is perhaps what I love most about the entire album: the last two works by Mia Martini are extraordinarily moving especially for that voice of hers so intense, visceral, thriving with life within, and it was above all her own life. A voice undoubtedly more tired, but so authentic, and so powerful in its expressive vigor.

"Lacrime," the other song signed by Bigazzi, focuses on the domestic alienation of many women, overwhelmed by a social role for the use and consumption of the male, which too often ends up belittling and humiliating their feelings, sometimes even to the most extreme consequences (I wish I could drink the detergent and die in this heat...), thus with a clear reference to suicide. The original title was "Lacrime nel Vim," Vim which was later replaced by the more innocuous "Clean" (which doesn't exist), for fear that the text would be received as a bad commercial for Unilever's famous detergent (thus avoiding potential legal repercussions).

To Mia Martini, who during her career had repeatedly addressed the theme of women from a social perspective, in this case, liked the idea of contrasting sharply with the most conventional (obviously distorted) media representation of housewives, exacerbated by an advertising language essentially based on the stereotype of the beautiful, smiling, maybe even winking housewife, intent on promoting any detergent rather than any other, banal commercial product.

In this song, the object of said conformist fiction – stripping itself of all superficiality and clichés – finally becomes subject, person, woman. And not her reassuring media stand-in, aligned with the worst "macho" subculture still prevailing, according to which this one would exist exclusively as "at the service" of someone or something else, and not as a truly completed human being, with emotions, desires, and thoughts of her own.

"This record is dedicated to men... of good will."