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Rating: I loved Mina, I admit it. Until a few years ago her voice made me swoon, but really swoon. And even the silly words of many sappy lyrics, that false poets competed to bring to her attention, ejected from her throat had an indescribable effect on my perhaps too accustomed ear.
I promoted Mina everywhere and to everyone. Italians, Germans, Americans, Chinese, even to an Indian girl named Minakshi who, for convenience, insisted on being called Mina, I once said she had chosen a truly splendid nickname, the same as the greatest Italian singer in absolute terms.
Today I buy Mina's records due to pure inertia. The voice is still the same, but I swoon much less. It's the commercial-machine sensation she has become that I just can't bring myself to like. The unreleased songs she sings sound too familiar and no longer ignite the listener's desires as they once did. Because before, this was precisely what happened: you would crumble at the sound of her voice, which suggested sensuality and forbidden dreams even if you knew that behind the notes was a lady of a certain age and also a bit overweight.
There are too many covers and they’re excessively revisited. Nothing to say, for heaven’s sake, about the individual qualities of the members of the bands accompanying her. Except that they are perhaps excessively skilled and too inclined each time to prove they are, as if playing for Mina meant they must necessarily refine riffs and various melodic themes to excess.
“L’allieva,” the tribute just released in all record stores that Mina offers to Frank Sinatra, is this in excess. No doubt, what makes me speak this way is the deep anger I accumulated within me when I discovered that one of the most beautiful songs of all time, “My Way,” had been unworthily shortened and dramatically transformed into a mere gurgling whisper accompanied by a piano, thrown in just for doing so. But I no longer accept this Mina. Maybe it's just this, which I consider a real affront, that makes me toss this record into the pit of mediocrity.
One extra star out of respect, more to justify buying the CD than to truly pay homage to a great, who is now, however, far too accustomed to admiring her own – still enormous, all in all – class.
In a television segment presenting the record, the reporter said that Frank Sinatra was a great admirer of Mina and would have wanted her by his side to present to the public what would have been a sensational star duet. Imagining her in the recording studio proposing her jazzy fantasies to him, I also envision his unsatisfied reaction. And, thinking about this scene, maybe it's better that this pair never materialized.
Tracklist and Lyrics
10 Dindi (04:52)
Sky, so vast is the sky, with far away clouds just wandering by,
Where do they go? Oh I don't know, don't know;
Wind that speaks to the leaves, telling stories that no one believes,
Stories of love belong to you and to me.
Oh, Dindi, if I only had words I would say all the beautiful
things that I see when you're with me, Oh my Dindi.
Oh Dindi, like the song of the wind in the trees, that's how my heart is
singing Dindi, Happy Dindi, When you're with me.
I love you more each day, yes I do, yes I do;
I'd let you go away, if you take me with you.
Don't you know, Dindi, I'd be running and searching for you like a river
that
can't find the sea, that would be me without you, my Dindi.
can't find the sea that would be me without you Dindi.
Like a river that can't find the sea, that would be me without you, my
Dindi.
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