The Connells
Ring

You may have realized by reading almost all of my recent reviews, but for the love of verbosity, I'll state it: I'm nostalgic for the nineties. When I was sixteen and was neither fish nor fowl nor soy... When I tried to be more eclectic, confident, a leader, an entertainer, simply charming, and instead stood out precisely because I was a blond, scared, awkward, half-agoraphobic little gay guy, and to top it off, with a moped without a muffler.

They, in love not with me, but with their own mental state and their own ideal, which coincidentally more or less aligned with the male beauty standards of the time. Inside me, I felt like a volcano destined to explode, and deep down I couldn't wait to do so, and my inability to break out forced me into a limbo of inadequacy, ill-preparedness, inaccuracies, stammering: all this was a great fortune, it must be said.

In the '80s, a loser like me wouldn't have even been considered, yet in those nineties, the more of a loser you were, the better off you ended up. Let's try comparing adolescent existence with chart-topping music... You didn't have a penny, drank like a Nibelung and smoked like a Turkish metalhead? Women are something with fishnet stockings to be bent over? Guns n' Roses. Plus, you haven't washed your hair in a year and a half? Then Guns n' Roses plus Piero Pelù! When your long-sleeved shirt got stained with sauce on the belly, you threw another shirt on top, but the darkest one you had had little sleeves? Cobain! Your white Converse were no longer white, and you could be smelled coming from afar? Like the blonde guy from the Lemonheads who, in the video clip, jumps into the tub with his girlfriend with all his clothes on: in the summer, with Converse on my feet, I went to the beach every day, and I swam in them; back home I showered, dressed, put on the still-soaked Converse and left the house again.

Neither before nor after was it so easy, and above all, so cheap. Nowadays you have to pretend to be a Renault manager even to go out with a Romanian girl, and the Russians want to give me lessons in Italian style... In short, nothing goes right for me. I recognize that, as much as I've tried to come along well, the subsequent versions of myself haven't rendered enough.

Ah, the beautiful nineties... Antiheroes becoming heroes, losers winning, shadows turning into emblems, misfits becoming icons; and sex, like all the other things for which one has innate modesty, emerged along with all other "interiorities": pulling out your dick was like exposing "your inner self"... I miss those years, and I miss the easy life, even though back then I didn't understand it, even though I wanted something superior at the time, knowing it would be more complicated to live.

Today, no publisher has published my efforts, the band has split, the group is a memory, it's been a while since I visited any English-speaking country, today I don't drink anymore, today I'm left alone at the bar wanting to change the world and myself while the Romanian waitress brings me pineapple juice with airs, I think back to the Connells, this band from North Carolina that started in the eighties and would never, believe me, never have had a globally successful album if not in 1994, and then inevitably fell back into obscurity, even though they may have released, before and after that, many other albums, some who knows?, perhaps even better.

A band that could never have changed the planet's fate, traditional guitar-driven root and pop rock, rich in acoustics and with some jingle jangle. With a singer with a soft voice and a pair of glasses that makes him look like a supermarket accountant. An album to sing along to, from the first to the last verse. One you can listen to even if you haven't shaved, perfumed, or slicked up. Even if your favorite jeans have been at the laundry for a week, because the lady wants money, but work... A bit like me, all things considered. Making peace, therefore, also with the laundry lady, who belts out Baglioni songs at the top of her lungs while ironing. I, on the other hand, sing "'74-'75", and think back to when I broke it out with the guys at the bonfire, in total drunkenness, waiting for the right moment to pull out my dick too. And it came off well, because we had played it a million times, in even worse psychological and physical conditions.

I wonder if one day someone will sing "'94-'95" and make a video like the Connells', where you see what the seventies kids looked like twenty years later (after forty, you know, everyone is responsible for their face)... Faces and smiles of people perhaps serene, but who lack the light in their eyes from their black-and-white photos, two decades ago.

Someday, if life goes as it should, I too will be that way.

I finish my pineapple juice and head to the newsstand: who knows if they sell Russian courses on DVD!