Francis Renga and Henry Ruggeri were guests of SPOT – The Podcastthe format hosted by Michael Monina And Maximilian Longo which is recorded live, outdoors, at Spot Music Fest of Bareggio, in the Arcadia Park on the outskirts of Milan. An exceptional episode, because this time only Monina is at the helm, and because there is not one guest on stage but two, two rockers of the same generation, two voices born within the bands, the Decibels hey Fearalways accustomed to saying uncomfortable things.
What emerges is less an interview and more a long conversation about the profession: how you grow old making music, how discography has changed, why today an artist no longer has time to make mistakes. We start from self-irony and end up talking about artificial intelligence, passing through five-record contracts, talent, streaming and Sanremo.
The four stages of a singer's aging
The episode opens with a gag that immediately sets the tone. Enrico Ruggeri lists the four phases of aging for those who do this job: the first is when they start calling you maestro, the second when they start giving you career awards, the third when you arrive on programs like Domenica In and everyone stands up to applaud you.
The fourth, he jokes, is when you die. With the gloss that that fourth phase, at least, “you don't fully enjoy it”. From there the conversation shifts to the topic of age, to twenty-year-olds who call them maestro and embarrass them, to the fact that becoming a maestro, after all, is only the beginning of a descent.
Renga and Ruggeri: Two rockers who say uncomfortable things
Renga And Ruggeri they have more in common than it seems: coming from bands, a certain idea of the stage, and the habit of saying things that make people angry. In an era where everyone takes a stand on everything every day, they talk about two different strategies for defending themselves from themselves. Enrico Ruggeri talk about the phone “as a pusher”without social media, and of the iPad as the only contact channel, because it forces you to stop and leaves you a few more seconds to reflect before writing.
Renga, for his part, says he can't lie: if they ask him a direct question he can't answer with what he doesn't think, like most do, and so he prefers to keep quiet. On the silence of De Gregoryboth choose not to add what they really think, happy that someone else said certain things in their place.
When record companies had patience
The heart of the episode is the comparison between two eras. Ruggeri remembers signing in 1983 with CGD a five-album deal. It meant one specific thing: you can make mistakes, you can not like it right away, we believe it and we will have patience, money and manpower for you. The major labels invested in the growth of an artist, because when records sold they really sold, and a hit could raise the record company's building by one floor.
Today, they explain, the mechanism is reversed. The record company no longer builds anyone: it waits for the boy to arrive with the hit already ready and invests in a finished product. Anyone who doesn't perform immediately is out, because behind them there are ten others who have made the same choice. Seventy singles are released a week, the album is less and less worthwhile, and a record is released above all to gain visibility and do concerts where the public then asks for the old songs.
“You have to believe it”, the most hateful phrase
Among the most direct passages is the one on advice to young people. Ruggeri he says that the most cloying answer he hears given to eighty percent of singers is to believe it, to believe in themselves at all costs. For him it's an empty formula: the real problem is that the question has changed, no longer how do I make music but how do I become famous.
Hence the reasoning on the short circuit between talent and reality, on the moment in which people became famous simply for being famous, and on the misunderstanding that if a known person hums something then anyone thinks they can do it. They quote Georgie And Paola Iezzifeatured in a previous episode of SPOTand their work a X Factorto think about how talent and reality are confused today.
The time to make mistakes no longer exists
The point the conversation returns to repeatedly is time. The two recount the first one hundred and fifty concerts performed without hearing their own voices, with ruined speakers and improvised sound engineers, in front of an audience that didn't necessarily go crazy for them. It was apprenticeship, and it was the way to learn to be on stage.
Today that passage no longer exists. Ruggeri he says he accompanied his daughter to a concert and was struck by the fact that the band on stage had never changed the effects of the guitars throughout the show, a sound identical to that of the rehearsal room, because they had reached those levels too quickly. The risk, they say, is that without the time to make mistakes and face it, at the first problem, at the unfilled arena or at the empty ring of Sanremoyou end up in burnout and depression.
The system that will collapse is artificial intelligence
Regarding the future, the reading is almost apocalyptic but with a way out. For the two, the system will implode at a certain point for economic reasons: the radios cannot handle seventy singles a week, the younger audience no longer listens to the radio and gets into the car with headphones, and the same goes for streaming. Added to this is artificial intelligence, capable of infinitely multiplying that mechanism of catchphrases constructed on the table by putting together four successful pieces from the past and a few words of appeal, until the market is saturated.
The conversation ends on a lighter tone, with the anecdote of Ruggeri on the voice assistant who, in the car, intervened alone in the conversation by offering him a playlist to relax, and on the disturbing sensation of being listened to continuously. A joke to tone things down, after an hour of lucid and disenchanted analysis on what making music has become today.
