Vasco Rossi
Vivere O Niente

"Vivere o Niente," sixteenth studio album by Vasco Rossi, was released on March 29, 2011. Recorded between Bologna and Los Angeles, as has been customary since 1993, it consists of 13 tracks (12+ghost track).

It is a well-packaged musical product right from the album cover artwork, where an older Mr. Rossi is behind the wheel of a car, intent on outrunning unwanted pursuers. This is, according to Rossi himself, the attitude of every artist who "escapes from standardization and certain conservativism, from some powers that don't want you to speak and want to block you." Fleeing from conventions, society's restrictions, and roadblocks of commonplaces.

When facing a Vasco Rossi album, it's good to clarify that behind this brand is a team of people proven over the years, led by the historic producer Guido Elmi, author of most of Vasco Rossi's music alongside Tullio Ferro (formerly of Luti Chroma), a musician unknown to most but the creator of some of the best music in Vasco Rossi's repertoire (Splendida giornata, Vita spericolata, Liberi liberi, Gli angeli, just to name a few).

The album, overproduced and well played by excellent musicians, presents the usual musical formula: heartfelt and melancholic ballads alternate with cheerful and ironic rock tunes. Extreme sweetness and bitterness on one side, mockery and swagger on the other.

In the first category, we find the opener "Vivere non è facile," a soft ballad with a melancholic progress enriched by a pleasant if brief guitar solo; "Starò meglio di così," a suffering text for the beloved's abandonment set to decent music by Tullio Ferro; "Dici che," introduced by a good bass line, in structure it recalls "Le cose che non dici" from "Nessun pericolo...per te" (1996); "Vivere o Niente," the album's flagship track, which starts with a delicate arpeggio that contrasts with the suffering and bitter vocals before exploding into a shouted refrain reinforced by guitar embellishments ("Guardami/io sono qui/e te lo voglio urlare/io sto male"). Frank and direct, Rossi strikes right at the listener's gut, sharing the desire to vent existential distress; "L'aquilone" is musically a sort of Emilian tango supported by a reflective text targeting the frenzy and precariousness of the world; "Stammi vicino," a sweet ballad in which Rossi describes the need for having beside him the long-awaited woman, closed with an excellent bright and talking solo by Stef Burns.

Moving to the more rock sector, "Manifesto futurista della nuova umanità" (an undeclared cover of "Holiday" by Green Day) stands out, a track with an 'important' text in which Mr. Rossi, after stating that "the easiest thing would be to never have been born," in the refrain declares his atheism by highlighting how "it will be difficult not to make mistakes/without the help of higher powers" then sketching a cure for man's disorientation without God: surrender to one's emotions ("I've made a pact, you know, with my emotions / I let them live and they don't take me out"); "Prendi la strada" is instead an invitation to throw oneself into the life's sea of experiences with courage, seasoned with a pleasant micro-piano solo; in "Sei pazza di me," a boastful and macho track, the highlight is George Lynch's cameo, a guitar hero from the '80s (ex Dokken); "Non sei quella che eri" is instead a track in the style of "Delusa" with a dry drum and guitars in the foreground. The album closes with the ghost track "Mary Louise," a "Susanna" for the new millennium.

"Eh già" and "Maledetta canzone" are episodes whose absence would go unnoticed by anyone.

If the rock tracks result in a well-crafted and manneristic exercise, where Rossi plays the boaster and the young-at-heart, inspiring a smile, the 'serious' tracks are instead pervaded by a tragic and bitter tone with a vague existential flavor, well expressing the Rossi-thought: life has no meaning, we are born by chance, and can only choose whether to face the challenge of life or choose not to live. Light-years away from a true rebel, Vasco Rossi ends up fully embodying the average man who basks in his mass conforming nonconformity, the common man living without any certainty, devoid of ideals and principles, adrift in a world lacking meaning and purpose. Yet, it's exactly this mediocritas that has decreed his mass success for years, besides an undeniable talent in revealing himself to the common man.

Far from being an artist who goes against the grain, Mr. Rossi is in fact the prototype of the modern man. With his songs, he describes and clearly captures how/where the herd goes: towards a mass nihilistic drift that has now reached its peak. More than escaping from conditions, or from "some powers that want you not to speak," he seems to be fleeing from himself. Just like, for that matter, the modern man.