Vasco Rossi
Buoni O Cattivi

THE REVIEW

It's a bit like stabbing your musical father, but there it is: since the dawn of time, once the child has undergone the musical initiation and been vaccinated against traditional light national-pop music, dad Rock & Roll lets the son walk on his own legs.
I think the good old (terribly old, musically and mentally) Vasco has been a good dad for many: but if, at first, his songs weaned people musically, now they prevent young Italians (rockers and not) from progressing towards decidedly healthier shores, simply because they are always the same, and therefore decidedly worse.
Musically, Vasco can't give anything more because he has already given everything: melodies that straddle rock and pop, always the same, both in the same album and between various albums (Anymore, just to give an example, closely resembles, in the introduction, Quanti Anni Hai), embarrassing lyrics (Buoni O Cattivi Non E' Vero/Prima C'E' Il Giusto E Sbagliato Da Sopportare: a new thread against moral Manichaeism or simply a creative block from andropause?).
Analyzing the tracks up close makes you fiercely impassioned: Come Stai, whose (ab)use made by advertising describes better than a thousand words why it was written, Non Basta Niente, a song about the sufferings of a finished emotional relationship, which, in intentions, should serve to soothe the sorrows of a potentially heartbroken listener, in practice may increase them because it transports him into a conceptual void between DJ Francesco and Pappalardo, dragged adrift by affective clichés worthy of the worst Gigi D'Alessio, provoking the same emotional transport one has when watching the mating of moose.
As the songs go by, the score of self-referentiality and Neanderthal clichés about the man-woman relationship doesn't change: the damned man who drinks a whisky in Anymore, the slow song E...., with its floral similes and sexual allusions (Il Tuo Piacere Che Si Smuove Lento, already heard in Gabri, except there it exploded with its own), and Senorita (Prendi Una Mano/Mettila Qua/E Vedrai Che Qualcosa Succederà) simply convey the idea of a sad man, hostage of his overused character.
Before the suspicion arises that this last one coincides with the private Vasco, before having to be ashamed of him as we already have to do with other national-pop symbols (politicians, the national football team), it is best for him to stop, and for his mental age to coincide with his biological one, to face a healthy old age, but yes, maybe messing around here and there with some twenty-year-old, but without writing songs about it, making money from it, and making a whole stadium dance for it.
Ethical philosophy from a Textbook and verbal pornography, this is what the album offers: nothing that cannot be tackled a thousand times better in an essay by Kant, Kierkegaard, or Spinoza, or in a film by Eva Henger. The music, then, is optional: turn to the Backyard Babies for true rock & roll without unpresentable intellectualisms.....