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Rating: When one talks about Como, they talk about a great Crooner, perhaps the Crooner par excellence: the one who has drenched and will continue to drench the fantasy nights of our mothers.
He was the slick minstrel who gently accompanied our elders on the dance floor when approaching a woman was a titanic and monstrously shy endeavor... unlike today, with the deafening noise, always too much skin exposed, the chewing gum that clashes thoughts and words in a postmodern mire of sex and high heels.
I wish I were born in the times when this music was listened to and people loved each other thinking they were at a College-Party in the States... the same cars, the same, utterly fake idea of happiness, while the powers deployed ballistic missiles and our old bastards risked being incinerated because of a Khrushchev or (even worse) a Kennedy.
These songs are immortal pearls... of course, there's "Magic Moments," with its dream-like, Lynchian twist: a Blue Velvet too tight for our times, too intensely Classy to be fully appreciated.
There's the mythical "Chi-Baba-Chi-Baba My Bambino Goes to Sleep" reminding us of the ties of blood and imagination that still tyrannize our dirty colonial European imagery, gently yes, but always conquered.
Love and hate, this is the feeling that binds us to this imagery: a magical and typically star-spangled world where a handsome, slick man (how many of them can be found today?) sings impassively and romantically "When You Were Sweet Sixteen" immediately transporting us back to those times of Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and "family station wagons" parked in the driveway.
A delicious apple pie: this is the true essence of these touching ballads, imbued with honey that doesn’t displease, so much they seem to be sung, and indeed they are, by a dead man, by a specter from four thousand years ago, covered in dust, who from a crumbling wax museum moves and recites without tourists coming to find him... alone and forever. The added value is all here: in the disturbing potential that these songs evoke in hindsight... like in a photograph: an elderly man holding a book, the photo is very old, the title of the book is: "We the Dead Who Awaken".
Listen to Perry Como and you’ll also find yourselves in the ride of withered and dead memories.
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