<<I appreciate a lot of Italian music, but I respect very few of the musicians who produced it. Off the top of my head, Freak Antoni comes to mind first, the unstoppable Fiumani, Grignani (the only real person in a scene of cardboard puppets), some punk bands, but mostly Califano. The Califfo is to Italian music what Spawn is to comics: the dark protector of the underworld, the defender of the dignity of the outcasts scorned by everyone, those societal refuse too rotten even for a literary re-evaluation by that Pasolinian bourgeoisie that worshipped thieves and prostitutes. If de André was the singer of the last, Califano was the singer of the penultimate, the patron saint of cocaine addicts, bar alcoholics, slot machine halls, shabby dance halls filled with divorced sixty-year-olds, greasy trattorias, and taverns inundated with stale smoke and the whores of card players. Practically, all of Giacomino Seminale's poetics forty years earlier. But unlike de André, the bourgeois half-fascist on a trip with prostitutes who wrote songs about stories only heard from others, Califano lived the tales of defeat he narrated in his own skin, always immersed in real life even when it led him to uncomfortable situations and friendships: among the last, the best of all.>>