Vasco Rossi
London Instant Live

THE REVIEW

Well, objectively speaking, we're dealing with a bit of a joke here.

It's one thing to release a ton of live albums like Prince De Gregori has done (by the way, has he stopped? No... he'll release one with Dalla... and let's hope for it), who still plays Dylan-like games with his own creations, twisting them, lengthening them, shortening them, dancing around them, doing work like a magician, a provocateur, a flash of word and note... it's another thing to feed us yet another version of "Stupendo" or "Albachiara", all so similar, distinguishable only by the different drummer's arm and some slight variation in the guitar solos.

Truly, between albums and DVDs, they can't be counted anymore. Also because Vasco has discovered the formula, and this -managerially- must be acknowledged, and part of the formula is having at least three-quarters of the concert always the same. It works, and nothing else. Vasco is a perfect factory, one of the few that certainly haven't had to resort to layoffs. He relies on a thousand things, and there's a long discussion to be had regarding that..., but the fact remains that among these thousand things is surely the habitual nature of an audience that knows what it wants. And it wants, essentially, always the same stuff.

A bit like when you go to certain trattorias that you've known forever: let's go there because they make good agnolotti.

And Vasco does his thing well, and to claim otherwise is madness. Because you can do well, indeed, excellently, something that by now can be said to be, objectively, modest.

Let's definitively forget the young, brilliant, and provocative author (who, if he had met poor Gaetano’s fate, would be praised as a genius by all today's detractors - and blind exalters of Gaetano -), and focus on the "factory", that factory of money, of dreams, of habitualness, on that pagan mass that we all, at least once (if not many more), have professed and celebrated.

A mass that's objectively engaging, perfectly organized and conceived, absolutely professional in the most Anglo-Saxon sense of the term, for better or for worse.

In short: a ritual, a sort of national monument of a nation that it represents and is represented beautifully. With its banality, its imitations, its flashes of genius, its infinite laziness, and equally infinite cleverness.

Charming and unbearable as Italy is.

And this album, for the umpteenth -and decidedly useless- time celebrates the Oration well, fairly well, or excellently as usual.

And it's no surprise that it's successful even though it doesn't deserve it much, or maybe, being the umpteenth rehash of the same old dish, doesn't deserve anything at all.

Just as I don't believe anyone (over sixteen) was surprised when Blasco came under investigation for tax evasion (the big kind, stuff of large boats, to be clear...).

It's Italy, baby, and we are an easy people, of insecure folks, little creatures who, fundamentally, love tight cages more than fields to run on.