Paolo Conte
Paolo Conte

Happiness – beyond being “a glass of wine with a sandwich” or “a crazy song that makes me sing” – is walking Giulia home, returning at two, lying on the couch, and discovering that no one on DeBaser has reviewed this album.

Unbelievable. How is it possible, you wonder.

Perhaps Giulia is right, who says that Paolo Conte makes her feel sad. She says that instead she "really likes listening to Ligabue, rather than Vasco Rossi, rather than Biagio Antonacci". As for me, what makes me sad is this damn “piuttosto che” with a disjunctive value. To be precise, it makes me as sad as boiled vegetables, the circus, and Baustelle. At most, all three together.

Indeed.

Perhaps seeing Francesco Bianconi while eating a portion of unseasoned chard, sitting on the stands of the Medrano Circus, can hope to dent the sense of affliction that the phrase “piuttosto che” evokes in me. The fact remains that Giulia is 22 years old. And many ways to make me happy. Actually, come to think of it, just one. But with thirty variations, that in comparison, the Goldberg - forgive me, Sebastia’ - seem written by Tony Santagata. Giulia, to keep it short, is the kind of woman one cannot resist. If you ask her, “Did you really think it was sensible to get a tattoo there?”, she gives you those big eyes and answers: “oh come on.. what’s wrong with it? It’s just a tattoo on the neck”. And never mind if it’s a uterus tattoo… Uh?..

The review, you say?..

Here it is: This album is something like that. Like a scream. Like a liberation. Like shouting “I’ve always liked the Motoguzzi!” at a Harley rally. Like opening a delicatessen on the Temple Mount.

That’s what this album is. And the review could well be concluded. And those who want to understand have understood. If it weren’t for the fact that the question, in the end, is always the same. That is: “But reviews, good God, are they written for those who already know the album or for those who’ve never heard it?” And the answer, too, is always the same: “For the first ones.” The second ones should listen to the album, damn it. Instead of rummaging around the Internet. And then, maybe, we’ll talk about it together.

What is this album, as we were saying. Singing at the top of your lungs stopped at a traffic light, with the person in the car next to you staring, taking her to lunch at a seaside restaurant with a red-checkered tablecloth and a jug of white wine “chilled that goes down well like this big sky over us”, crossing the plains giving a ride home to our sleeping lady after a night in the dance hall, getting photographed with the pigeons at Piazza San Marco to spite our cousin “who's been to Rome and makes us feel jealous”, an island full of palms and bamboo where “lying in the sun to dry my body and face, I look paradise in the face”, it’s a woman in whose eyes “shines the night of a lifetime spent watching the stars far from the sea, and your era, and mine, and that of the grandfathers’ grandfathers, lived in the years pondering a day at the beach just to avoid dying in the shadows of a dream, maybe in a photograph, far from the sea, with only a geranium and a balcony”. And if you never had one like that, a woman, I wouldn’t know how to explain it to you. “Why talk at all,” they would say in Rome. It’s a good album, essentially, for when you're left with just a great desire to escape. And no chance of buying a vowel. There, that’s what it is, this album, as we were saying.

It’s also the first one called “Paolo Conte”. And here the discussion gets serious. After this (1974), two more will come (1975 and 1984). Do you know other singers who have named not one but three albums after their own name and surname? It’s reminiscent of someone who, on the phone, continuously doodles their signature… Paolo Conte, Paolo Conte, Paolo Conte... It’s one of the reasons why I love to think of him as the “Priest of Inappropriateness”. More than “Unvollständigkeit” sung by Einstürzende Neubauten... The “Trilogy of Mocambo” – which indeed appears only in the three albums named “Paolo Conte” – is the most genuine hymn to feeling unaccepted. This is the true “Singer of the Inferiority Complex”. The “Theorist of Feeling Out of Place”. The one coming from the mists of the Asti countryside and that “when you speak, it’s to judge me and my misfortune to reproach me with”, who has “always been ignorant […] and you have studied and despise my world and me too”. The one who, dressed up and with an invitation ready, roams dance halls, ballrooms, and other dancey venues hunting for some older lady (“They say that South American dance helps one open up” – “Is that why you use it with mussels?..” the Asti man seems to say)."

Until, at the height of alienation, we see him walking away sweaty from the center of the dancefloor. And when Califano ends with a “I’m ditching you… going to park my butt on a stool”, he bursts out with: “Yes, I’m more and more distracted And even more alone and fake And the restlessness and the bows make me an orangutan that moves with the grace of one not convinced that the rumba is merely a joy of tango”. And while Paolo is still there, panting and lounging on one of those braided plastic chairs, we seem to hear approaching the skewed piano à la Poulenc of the piece to which Our Man entrusts the very delicate task of opening what is probably his most authentic album, that is to say, “Questa sporca vita”. And he begins serenely with: “If I didn’t have this life, I would die”.

And you already understood everything. And you can’t wait to hear the second one. Which, incidentally, is that compendium of being two called “Sono qui con te sempre più solo”.

I am here with you, increasingly alone, feeling all the estrangement of two placed there, in an ugly maroon parlor, I do not speak, no... excuse me? Pardon...

A “psychopathology of the daily couple”, one might say. The eternal debate of "How can love and peace endure?" Here it is, the true “Manual of Harmony”. Other than Schoenberg... My grandmother used to say that loneliness alone is ugly, but being alone together can’t even be described, how ugly it is. “Alone Together,” said Chet Baker, who played the trumpet well, but however, didn't make roast potatoes like my grandma...

“But however,” also used to be said by Wanda, whose full title, if I’m not mistaken, is: “Wanda (keep a straight face)”. And Wanda, if she hadn’t been called Wanda, she would have been called Marisa. And she’s the kind of woman who, when you least expect it, hits you with: “What are you thinking about?”. Then to Wanda, like to Giulia and Marisa, she likes Ligabue. And she’s also the kind of woman who posts on Facebook “A true friend is not the one who gives us a rose, but the one who helps us remove the thorns”. Stuff like that. And then she clicks “like” on her own posts. And yet, dear Wanda, I am an always-sad person but I enjoy being surprised happy together with you.

And so, having left behind a very credible “Billionaires' Union,” instead of being confronted with a green Milonga, we find ourselves with “La fisarmonica di Stradella”. “What is the Po Valley from six o'clock onwards? A fog that seems like being Inside a glass of water and anise, indeed...” Cutting through the Lowlands, reflecting on the meaning of life, the big systems, and why, damn it, your own woman habitually falls asleep in the car after every Sunday night dance. And it’s up to us to drive her home, crossing Broni, Casteggio, Voghera. A crossroads of thoughts and sensations with the Argentine name of Oltrepò Pavese and it is a place of the soul, before even geographical, or a geometric place of equidistant points from the axis where “all the harmonicas of this plain were born and someone plays them like this”. “But how so?”, it says. Like this.

Just like when Your Cousin First comes back from her trip to Rome: “unbuttoning her paletot, she told about the whole trip... when she described the bidet too, we felt like two useless pieces of cloth”. And the Milanese drawings of Gadda of the Adalgisa seem to peek out, without wanting to be sophisticated... And The Accordion Girl, and Wave on Wave, and The Bachelor. Not a trifle. To swiftly arrive at A Day at the Beach, a true prequel to “Genova per noi”. We, “who are down in the countryside and rarely have the sun in the square and the rest is rain that wets us. It’s Macaia, monkey of light and madness, haze, fish, Africa, sleep, nausea, fantasy”. The collective dream of a generation that feels small small. I came to see this water and the people that are here [...], I search for reasons and motives for this life but my era seems made up of a few hours.

This indisputable masterpiece of Italian music closes thus, with La Giarrettiera Rosa, an anthem to femininity and play. That of whom, as in a Rossinian finale, seems to remind us that life is a wonderful thing.

At least until you're allowed to distinguish it from the hips.