Valerio Scanu
Per tutte le volte che..

Hello guys! Welcome back like in the old days! I want to start by saying that my unexpected productivity doesn't imply my return on the site in a stable way, as I've essentially completed my "mission" several months ago.

On one hand, it's a period where I'm taking some vacation time, so it's not difficult to spend a few minutes for you at the computer, especially in the evening; last, but obviously not the least, is the fact that this Sanremo Festival - which I watched briefly, I even missed the final, but then caught up on YouTube - has, for many years now, marked a clear revival of Italian pop which, back then, I used to discuss with and for you, urging me to look for, in the songs of a few days ago, those pieces that are already classics.

We've already talked about Pupo & Company, now my appreciation goes to the winner, Valerio Scanu, on whom I would finally like to focus, apologizing to you for this long, but necessary, introduction, which perhaps clears any expectations (for those who appreciate me) or distaste (for those who don't appreciate me).

Together with last year's winner, Marco Carta, Valerio Scanu represents what we can now define with solid certainty as the nouvelle vague of Sardinian melodism, all the more interesting when considering how Sardinia has never really offered us singers of genuine caliber, overshadowed by the traditional tenores that Peter Gabriel liked so much, and who are not very marketable to the general public, or by some authors who rode the Sardinian epic to build an unfaithful new frontier, or hypothetical but phony west (De André with "L'indiano", '81), or by those who have attempted unlikely crossovers between traditional singing and Sanremo pop-folk, certainly interesting and worthy of memory, but somewhat lacking stylistically, almost cloying over the years (Bertoli and Tazenda).

Sardinian music has thus been conditioned in recent years by these dangerous precedents - leaving aside the ethnic research of Maria Carta, ça va sans dire - and by the risk of following the path of a dangerous and artificial plasticization, not unlike what happened to the coasts of ancient Hyknusa by well-known speculators (and employers).

The risk seems to be averted precisely by youngsters like Carta, and especially Scanu, who, with their carefree faces, a certain cheerfulness and joviality expressed in wide and open smiles to the public, have ingeniously taken the path to the Continent (towards Naples, or Rome on the Baglioni side, the unconfessed model of all these neomelodics, as an epigone of ancient Claudio Villa) drawing from the sources of the neomelodic style, filtering it with a personal approach, a child of a certain island culture, not coincidentally discovered and strengthened by Maria de Filippi's academy.

Let's take "Per tutte le volte che", worthy of winning at Sanremo, and consider its lyrics, where the description of a love story - according to the classic Sanremo clichés, which still pay off in competitions like these - are enriched by a particular attention to nature and its secrets, so dear to the singer's Sardinian roots: consider from this perspective the effective refrain "us covered under the sea making love in all/the ways, in all the places in all the lakes worldwide/the universe that chases us but now we are unreachable... and imagine how, in the singer's vision, love for the current beauty is integrated, with a sort of synesthesia, with an immersion in a dimension other than the human one.

It may seem trivial, you might say, yet, I emphasize instead, this innocent phrase disguises, in the subtext, a sensitivity almost Leopardi-like, where I would replace the Marchigian hedge with the Sardinian cork: just as the Poet of Recanati claimed to grasp the Infinite while "sitting and watching, interminable spaces beyond that", suggesting, according to a minor but not trivial thesis, having already transcended the earthly dimension, and being "beyond" the hedge, so does our contemporary young epigone seem to surpass an earthly dimension, to grasp the Whole.

With the difference, here prosaic and certainly more akin to the average listener's tastes, that Scanu reaches the Infinite by "making love" with his beauty (giving everyone the illusion that doing like him allows for it, therefore in a consolatory key, neoromantic as the cliché imposes) while Leopardi perceived it in a solipsistic, solitary outburst, romantic in the sense that literary and philosophical criticism attributes to the term.

The parallelism could obviously continue, emphasizing the repeated refrains referring to the Universe, a clear counterpoint to Leopardi's Infinite, or again to the sea, a clear reference to the Poet's shipwreck, revisited as the shipwreck of our Scanu, possibly aboard a Sardinia Ferries ferry, with the sticker prominently displayed on the Golf.

Exactly the reference to the sea, made by a young man from La Maddalena like the fresh winner of Sanremo, does justice to a different perspective of seeing those places, emphasized by the great Eugenio Montale and picked up, if we look closely, by De André himself, who saw something metaphysical in lonely and distant Sardinia, but imbued with negativity, a place to lose oneself in one's interior mists, detached from everything (take, for example, "Amico fragile" written down there).

Indeed Montale wrote, in "The house by the sea," how "it's rare that it appears in the mute calm/among the migrating islands of the air/the rugged Corsica or Capraia," adding, in contrast to Leopardi's Infinite and in the name of sad skepticism, how "perhaps only he who wishes to be infinite, this you can, who knows, not I," to reach the tragic, maritime awareness, for which "the path ends at these shores/ that the tide gnaws with alternating motion/your heart nearby that doesn't hear me sets sail perhaps already for eternity."

To Montale's intimate turmoil, all imbued with the dark and obscure side of Sardinia (that many writers have developed in the '900s, but let's not exaggerate), Scanu responds with his frankness and simplicity, replying, almost a century later, in that same Liguria where the Poet was born, that "as if a cold day in full winter we weren't so cold naked because/us covered under the sea making love/but now we are unreachable", seeing in the sea an immensity different from that of Montale, but also from Don Backy, where it is possible to immerse oneself, get lost, in a drift of senses and soul, lived with one's beloved.

Leopardi, Montale, and certain Italian melodic pessimism are thus overcome in the name of a sentimental directness that enchants, where the sea - never too dear to the Sardinians, who were never great navigators - is seen as a means of communication with the world rather than a barrier and source of isolation.

An enchanting song, in short, both in the text and in its intimate break with tradition, which however feels familiar due to the harmonies, the alternation between meditated verses and the explosion of the refrain, the alliterations that make making love in all places and in all lakes a sort of nursery rhyme for adults, deserving, for these reasons, of the victory at the Festival, as well as being elevated to a small contemporary classic.

I already hear the distant echo of those who criticize me, whispering "Paolo, what do Leopardi and Montale have to do with Scanu? And, above all, why bring up the two poets to talk about this kid? Why so much success for such a banal song I'd like to tell you?" to which I allow myself to reply, in all honesty, that "in any case then, people, do you know what they want? In the end, they want Christmas with snow, and to make love in all places, in all lakes."

Infinitely Yours

Il_Paolo