Yello
Solid Pleasure

THE REVIEW

On the age-old question of the music to play at one's own funeral and the opportunity to leave the idiocy with the last word.

___________________________________________________

If we have managed to loosen our grip, we haven't done it enough. If we never believed ourselves to be anyone special, we still believed ourselves to be something.

Yes, I know, said like this it seems simple, a Sunday thought or a little phrase that you might read in a fashionable women's magazine. After all, everyone is very good at underselling the essential.

In reality, however, it's not simple at all. It's not like you can get away with saying "yes, it's like that", oh no, anyone can do that, even me.

Thought, as we know, should be practical, useful that is to live better, and the problem is that all the "yes it is like that" are continuously contradicted by experience, at least by mine. That's why I'm sure I will spend the rest of my life not understanding a damn thing.

I imagine then that death will make it clear to me. "What was the point - it will say to me - of running around so much, trying to be smart, advocating furiously for those four skimpy ideas when half an idea would have been enough?"

Ah gentlemen, the advantage of being dead is that you understand things instantly.

Not to mention that the dark lady after the lecture always shows you how it's done. Like in that movie where a little man, once dead, floats (oh how he floats) and chuckles (oh how he chuckles) suddenly at peace.

"Now you've loosened the grip, haven't you Johnny?"

It's that being dead you live very well.

At worst, there's only a bit of anger left, unloadable, in the form of a joyful piss, on the head of the first jerk passing by. As long as you don't want to exhibit the sacred flow on the day when certain heads are never missing, that is, on your own funeral.

"I'm pissing on all of you, and from a considerable height," said the guy.

Speaking of funerals, I'm planning mine (menu, speeches, playlist, and so on), for at least thirty years.

You should know how many disordered fantasies have ignited me from time to time only to be irremediably discarded.

The one that, in its essential elements, I offer you today is just the latest of a hundred versions that have succeeded over time.

And so here is a little boy reciting one of those nursery rhymes that have always been in my heart. The choice is wide, but at the moment, my favorite is the one of the four old ladies...

"Din don campanon, four old ladies on the balcony, one who spins, one who cuts, one who makes straw hats, one who makes silver knives to cut the wind's head."

After the nursery rhyme, here comes the funeral speech delivered by the one who will have the task of honoring me in front of the crowd. I'm talking about the greatest bar rhetorician in all of Romagna, that is, Mister Flying Dick.

What he will say, I imagine, will be something like: "the world is so absurd that it is worth it to be more absurd than it" and he will say it, I'm sure, much much better than I am doing now.

And finally, last but not least, the music...

Until yesterday I would have said various Nick, Syd, Tim + that little Velvet song where Nico sings like a punished child. Today, however, thanks to the Yello, I've changed my mind

It's that, listening to them, I asked myself: if when we're dead we float and laugh, if nursery rhyme and oration, that is the first act and the second act of the ceremony, turn towards the absurd, shouldn't the music also be made of the same stuff?

________________________________

Yello Yello Yello the name makes you laugh a bit and the fact that they're Swiss makes you laugh even more. If I then think that their front man looks like an aristocratic/wave variant of Inspector Clouseau and the other one, with all those little mustaches, a twin of the Sparks...

Ah, I forgot, in this first record even a certain señor Peron is part of the party.

Anyway, if you want to know something about the music, think of a fabulous and stupid copy-paste, then take the Kraftwerk (and maybe also the Residents) and multiply by that strange kind of muppet on the cover.

What you find here is a terrific mishmash of well-done jokes...

Sarcasms of one minute/crazy rhythms/parodic voices/little choirs just for the sake of it...

And again: polkas for toy instruments/senseless dub/fragments almost Eno/ almost disco catchphrases/ almost serious avant-garde...

And hear ye hear ye, although only here and there, almost songs...

All under the sign of a fabulous anarchic taste and the coolest stupidity there is.

With sound words close to pure meaning.

Naturally for my funeral, I will extract only the silliest numbers, delightful useless machines in love with their gears of joyful madness.

Little songs with appropriately (and mirably) titles, like "Bimbo" or "Bananas"...

And so, I repeat to you, for that fateful day, no Nick no Tim, no Syd. No little Velvet song with Nico singing like a punished child.

For once, let's kill the moonlight too.

I can't find a better way to say goodbye than with the words of "Bananas", here they are, all for you:

"Le le lee

I mono wayso jambo pe janga poje

Onte myo sobo jo maame jauo peijosau

Kokonipi jao sobo jambo, jambo pomi peso

I go bananas

Bananas to the beat

Au revoir...