Samuele Bersani
Manifesto Abusivo

The Illusion.

The great illusion that someone skilled, like Bersani, knew how to keep alive.

The illusion that the world of singer-songwriters wasn't over.

But it is. And I'm not just talking about a fashion phenomenon, but much more. I'm talking about a language, the ability to tell a world in three minutes. About enclosing a great story inside a very small box. And having, as a frame to the painting, the famous "sense of the song," that harmonic sensitivity that lets you say what you need to say with complex simplicity, thus enchanting the literati (the "intellectual bastards" of Brunettian memory) as much as being sung in the shower by anyone.

It's an era that has ended. People like me have to come to terms with it.

Samuele Bersani, first with "Giudizi Universali", then with the crazy and useless Sanremo participation with the perfect "Replay" and its nice container ("L'Oroscopo Speciale") deluded us more than anyone else.

Cultured language but not pretentious, sense of the song, beautiful voice, Romagna cheerfulness mixed with Tenchian melancholy.

Then, after the watershed of the greatest hits collection, the normal decline ("Caramella Smog" and "L'Aldiqua"). A passion for dissonant or almost constructions. The loss of the song structure or, rather, the exaggerated nerdiness of the song structure. The spasmodic search for that "something to say," which is in reality the most difficult step for the survival of singer-songwriting.

An educated decline, no doubt about it. Nothing comparable to the end of Dalla or Daniele, to that "Bennato-like drift" which made some of the greatest musical geniuses of the seventies and eighties unpresentable.

But, unfortunately, Bersani’s past is also not comparable to that of Dalla, Daniele, or Bennato.

Considering Capossela's "Da Solo" another sign of highbrow collapse, one is forced to draw a conclusion: the two who carried on, apparently developing, the classic singer-songwriter discourse, namely Bersani and Capossela, have started to show their limitations like a countryside magician's trick.

One cannot deny that even in this "Manifesto Abusivo" there are real flashes of greatness and pure beauty. But they are hidden inside too many architectures, too much baroque flourishes. Nothing inside here is memorable after the first listen. Nor after the second, or third.

And the initial impression is dramatically confirmed.

In the end, it's not classic song. It's not "deconstruction" of the song (Waits over there and Capossela here have done much more and better in the field), it's not pure singer-songwriting, or at least not anymore in the traditional sense.

So, what is it? It's hard to say, and unfortunately, it's hard to be interested in saying it.

The only true merit is that inside Bersani's albums there is no trace of pandering, of eye-winking at youngsters, easily achievable tricks and tactics also abused by some of the ex-greats.

But the open question is this: has Bersani given and done enough to be declared a great, or an ex-great? It's unpleasant as music enthusiasts to be asking ourselves the same questions as the PD... (hopefully forgivable joke).

In any case, returning to the album, it's needless to say that it is objectively well-written, with a lack of soul that is a crime for a Romagna native. All of it played and packaged excellently (but find me today a product aesthetically less than perfect...).

Dylan will die with plenty of children, my friends, but evidently no grandchildren.