Scialpi
Un'ora con...

Hello guys!

Welcome back after several years to the pages of our favorite website. For those who, especially the younger ones, may not fully know me, I refer you to the old reviews from more than half a decade ago, while to my friends from that time I simply say: I missed you just as much as you missed me. And forgive me if the style may not be as lively as it once was, but over these years, I've been going to bed early. However.

However, for a while now I've been haunted by ghosts of conscience and feelings of guilt for having abandoned my mission without reviewing an artist and performer who, in the early eighties, opened the doors of perception to pop-rock and new wave for me and many of my peers: I'm referring to Giovanni Scialpi from Parma (b. 1962), who, within a few years, rose to national glory, in a time when English was poorly taught in middle and high schools (I believe up to the gymnasium) and not everyone could master the language as they do today, when every teenager has their study holiday in England thanks to various low-cost options and assorted offers.

Among Scialpi's main merits was the ability to introduce Anglo-American styles and languages to the Italian masses, at the crossroads between Brian Ferry, David Bowie, and Ric Ocasek, aiding the cultural enrichment of a listener who might have been simple, perhaps not very inclined or attentive to foreign novelties (I recall that at the time, LPs were mostly imported and hard to find), yet was seeking an alternative to the stale vein of the singer-songwriters of the seventies, as well as to the mainstream pop melodicism of Sanremo artists like Cotugno, Christian, or Fogli, and, not least, to the alternative pop which was already niche, from artists like Garbo or Faust’O.

In this, the primal sense of Scialpi's operation: a cultural operation in the sense that he was, in my view, the product of a fully conscious commercial and qualitative strategy aimed at synthesizing, even technically, the typical Italian melodicism with avant-garde arrangements for the time, not forgetting a wise and almost futuristic use of synthesizers, thus projecting the listener toward a future as seductive as it was unsettling. One might be tempted to say, in certain aspects, apocalyptic.

A new wave sometimes naive, sometimes not, daughter of Blade Runner and rock clubs, perhaps, the kind that would not have displeased Pier Vittorio Tondelli if he had truly noticed him and attributed him the rightful role in “Un Weekend Postmoderno”.

I clearly remember that Scialpi at the time, even at Sanremo, scandalized the respectable and parental audience not only for his way of dressing – fringed leather clothes, studs, almost like a softened and dandy Rob Halford – but also for the themes and lyrics addressed in his songs, in which the tension of the era of refluence, of glasnost was exposed, symbolizing on one hand the inherent need of young people to break norms and, on the other, the very fear of taking the responsibility to write, personally, history and its developments.

Fear, uncertainties, that Scialpi – perhaps indebted to Joy Division and Bauhaus here – was able to represent with effectiveness and awareness in a time when others faltered with excessive optimism, convinced in essence that after the tumultuous seventies, the eighties were the beginning of a golden era, heralded by the Drive-In, the Alfa 75, the snack bar, and the possibility to earn a high school diploma at private schools, doing three years in two.

From this beautiful anthology, let us recall some tracks that demonstrate what I’m trying to prove to you. Starting with the splendid Rocking Rolling (1983), a much-played anthem well before the advent of Duran and Spandau, the line where Scialpi sings, "they buried us here/under the metropolis/locked in a metro that never leaves/no shows/no more shows/no more dancing/no more singing", is significant, before leading us to the explosion of the eponymous chorus, highlighting an almost resilient dimension of rock, understood as rhythm, suggestion, even before as content. Personal memories, but Scialpi's appearance on Discoring, in those years, had the same effect as snow in April: luminescent, sudden, disconcerting.

Intimate is the single Coffee and Cigarettes (1984), where the disorientation of those years is expressed with tones at the crossroads between Carver and Mastronardi, almost connecting the Po Valley and the States, singing, "we are islands in the ocean of loneliness/cities are archipelagos where love sinks/ down the sidewalks a heart rolls", up to the nihilistic disorientation where "Cigarettes and coffee/nothing more/ a bit of smoke rising/love takes the senses but makes no sense". What burns never returns, I would venture to comment; if Scialpi hadn’t said it all with words better than mine.

The difficulty of placing oneself, the same anxiety of being protagonists of a future that is certain in its occurrence, but not in its being, stands out even more clearly in the subsequent No East – No West (1986), a courageous attempt to break free from the binary scheme that the Wargames era forced one to follow, especially in the passage where Scialpi declares "I have no flags/I don't believe in them at all/ where is pure air/blow until the wind rises", reaching a chorus that explodes in a linguistic crossover "No east no west/we are the best/everyone in the world will have a place/no east no west this is my land". Compare this piece with the almost contemporary "Terra promessa" by the then young Ramazzotti, and understand how Scialpi was the bearer of a libertarian and liberating message certainly, but not entirely peaceful: “this” is my land, highlighting the need to seize the moment and reorient day by day, without succumbing to messianism and ideological illusions.

I will not go further in the analysis of individual tracks (among which I recall at least the rhythmic “Numero 106” and the mature pop of “Pregherei”), leaving each of you the pleasure to discover or rediscover an artist who, over the years, has still adapted to the times and adapted his style to the needs of modern pop, continuing on an artistic journey that lasts today under the renewed stage name of Shalpy.

Those who already know Scialpi and his pieces, do not yield to nostalgia and the thought of times gone by. Instead, dust off the great Rocking Rolling to survive, with music, the silence that exists.

Ubiquitously Yours

Il_Paolo