Oingo Boingo
Only A Lad

THE REVIEW

Moving forward by looking back seems to have become a leitmotif for me; in my private life as well as in my musical preferences, I now navigate several parallel tracks that often speed by side by side, exchanging glances of understanding before disappearing into the darkness of a tunnel. I've carried this rampant schizophrenia with me always, but it's only now that I realize how useful it has been in my record searches, where the obvious and the incomprehensible are daily sniffed out, assimilated through hearing, and immediately distributed throughout the body like an infallible remedy.

However, when I come across something very special, my instinct automatically leads me to delve into the content in minute detail: I've rarely encountered obstacles, but I must admit that I've struggled immensely to enter the imagination of some artists so complex and fascinating at the same time that they leave me even today with a series of unresolved questions. All this can only make a review otherwise manageable with enthusiasm more difficult, but if my fingers fly swiftly to the end on the keyboard, it will mean that, whatever happens, I have accepted a "singolar tenzone" with Danny Elfman.

A duel on a stage is what's in store for me, but it's not the spotlight that scares me, rather the multiple gazes of the Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo, a theater company between the serious and the facetious with one foot in satire and the other in the realm of Rockers-Wannabe of Zappian extraction. What remains of a large core from a long apprenticeship are sixteen blazing eyes watching me as the roadies finish setting up their instruments. Elfman approaches in small steps, equipped with a recorder over his shoulder, with the microphone in hand, pressing his devilish makeup against my nasal septum, handing me that old burden and breathing on me: "Here, these are your weapons, ask me whatever you want...and don’t mess up!" Now I understand, it's not a duel, it's an interview, and I thought....

A brief brass riff, a sharp stroke, and the melody of Little Girls echoes in the empty theater, a doubt always left halfway formulates itself in my mind: "Danny, why didn't such a perfect and immediate piece get the recognition it deserved?... And why was the video banned upon release?". "Uhhhmmm.... you still don't know? Well, listen a bit, I like fresh and eager underage girls, I do what I want with them at their risk and peril, a bit like that pig of yours who would still like to be the Prime Minister, and if I sing that they could even die.... Oh oh .... I'm in trouble .... Oh Oh ... I'm in a nightmare tooooooooo.......". Damn, now I realize that Hey Nineteen by Steely Dan had lyrics only good for picking teeth, but I don’t have time to reflect because the oblique keyboards of Perfect System send me in another direction: "Danny, it seems to me that the lyrics are actually an earnest excursus towards a perfect totalitarian regime!" "Ahhh, dear boy, what do you want me to say if not .... We're brothers 'til the end!". Suggestive, but I still don't understand if he's serious or is mocking me. How beautiful the time changes with those wind counterpoints that weave the structure of Capitalism: "Hey Danny, but that phrase: "You're just a middle class, socialist brat from a suburban family, and you never really had to work, and you tell me that we've got to get back, to the struggling masses (whoever they are)" is