Negrita
L'uomo sogna di volare

THE REVIEW

It's the new work by Negrita, L’Uomo sogna di Volare, which in these times monopolizes Italian radio frequencies, in the triumph of heavy rotation. The band, which turns ten years old, showed promise, debuting in 1994 with music that broadly followed the style of the Rolling Stones, a rough music sometimes combined with that funky rock that characterized them artistically in Italy. This latest album, as far as I'm concerned, desecrates their "formative" journey, their "cursus honorum," something obscene, given their history and origins. The soft rock with a strong British imprint that defined this band is dead, drowned in a triumph of ethnic sounds, South American ballads, pop songs from heavy rotation – precisely – in the satirical rap of Gabriel O'Penasador, one of the South American artists who cooperated in the making of the album. Indeed, this album was born in South America, and there it dies.

Let's move on to the album: “Sale” is a politically sycophantic song, where that ancient rock flavor that the band from Arezzo used to offer to the public still survives, and where the rap of the aforementioned artist drowns in a sea of clichés and banalities, in such a predictable rhetoric that it almost seems unreal…
“Congratulations to the kings of nowhere: Mr G. W. Bullshit and his loyal royal clowny Blair all dis-honour to be shared with Sharon, we don't need another Hitler...”
Greta is perhaps the only good track on the album, a good rock ballad with soft tones and above the general average of the album. “Rotolando verso sud” is hateful, with that banal, meandering, and inconclusive rhetoric, with its Latin American rhythm it could have been a Manu Chao song, and that’s not a good thing.

After analyzing some tracks from the album, a second analysis is necessarily required, placing this album in its historical context, thus considering it as a change of direction for the band from Arezzo, perhaps in search of new energy and new ideas. But certainly, it is not by dusting off world music, a demanding genre that today finds its only great admirer and performer in Europe in Peter Gabriel, that this band will be able to regenerate its musical strength.