Nina Zilli And Dada they were guests together of SPOT – The Podcastthe program of Michele Monina And Massimiliano Longo recorded live at Spot Music Fest of Bareggio, in front of the audience of the young artists of the festival.
In this episode the hosting is entrusted to Monina alone, and the theme that keeps the two guests together is one: how much it costs, in discography, to decide not to be changed.
“You're too good, too beautiful, you're a little pissed off”
The sentence that opens the episode Nina Zilli he heard it from one of his managers, who he also describes as very good. It wasn't a personal attack, he specifies: it was the way a certain type of discography reasoned, with their minds screwed in one direction only. His response was to choose independence, with the knowledge that freedom has a price, but that price is willingly paid when you can write what you sing and arrange it exactly how you want.
The band broke up on the day of “50mila”
One of the funniest anecdotes concerns the end of Chiara and the Scuri, the band with which Nina Zilli, then still Chiara, had logged kilometers in the van. She brought a new song into the rehearsal room, the guitarist couldn't find the chord and told her that the piece sucked. She left and disbanded the group. That song was 50nilawhich the next day he went to record together with Hell And Kiss from God: the first three singles from his EP for Universal.
The manufacturer who refused to produce it
That material arrived at Carlo U. Rossiproducer who Nina Zilli he only knew it from reading the name on the back of the Italian records he bought. His response was unexpected: this girl did everything by herself, he said, I don't have to produce this record, send her here, sing and I'll mix. And he was paid by the day, six hundred euros a day, when he was getting incomparably higher prices for an album.
On the rest, she says, luck also had an impact: she was ready, with eight songs already written, at the exact moment Amy Winehouse arrived and that type of sound returned to the center. Without that timing, she admits, they would have continued to tell her she was crazy.
Dadà, from coffee in the studio to writing for others
The path of Dada starts from a completely different point. He comes from the classical guitar and from studies that he defines as combed, then abandoned because it was too tight. She says for the first time that at the beginning she brought coffee to a recording studio: one night when a song wasn't released and the air was heavy, she knocked on the door and someone asked her if she knew how to write songs. He replied yes, and from there he began to write, for years as a ghostwriter, without signing what he produced for others.
The contact with the discography instead comes from a door in the face. During one outburst they told her that, if anything, she should have heard those things Big Fish. She, who didn't even know who he was, looked for him on Instagram one bad night and sent him an audition. Big Fish wrote back that he had never heard a sonic identity tainted like that, and signed her a week later.
The decade without a female body in Italian pop
Monina brings the discussion to a specific period, from the mid-2000s to the end of the 1910s, in which women's bodies simply did not exist in Italian pop: artists flattened in jeans and t-shirts, without their own imagery, while the only female representation circulating was that, often sexist, of rap lyrics.
Nina Zilli she recounts the discussions about her hair before Sanremo, with the record companies asking her if she was sure to present herself like this. And she gets to the hardest part: what she defines as an artistic rape, when a record company made her sing a horrible song written by others with a producer she hadn't chosen. Hence the decision that no one would touch his music anymore.
The mask as an amplifier
Dada addresses the same topic by subtraction. In his projects, from Simpering built on the Neapolitan grimace at work on fairy tales, she wears baggy clothes and masks, so that it is not clear where her body ends up. The mask, she says, is always read as a shield, while for her it is an amplifier of what she already has inside. With a paradox that she personally verified: even dressed from head to toe in nineteenth-century drapes, she was still sexualized.
Advice for those starting out
In closing, an indication to those who want to make music. Dadà, who has taught children for seven and a half years, focuses on imperfections: they are the ones to be noticed, treated and validated, because that is often where everyone's voice lies. Nina Zilli adds the time factor, with the most concrete example possible: she wrote her first song at eleven years old, 50,000 kisses at twenty-five. In between, a lot of apprenticeship and a good dose of iodine tincture, because your knees will break anyway.
