What a comfort it is to snuggle into the past, what a relief to forget the present which is a mess and the future we cannot imagine. I feel Disc Paradise of Fedez, Annalisa and Article 31 and I see Cyndi Lauper carried on the Romagna coast in the 1960s, with Mina playing on the radio, soap bubbles, yo-yos, perhaps even landlines. After exhuming The hair by Edoardo Vianello, now Myss Keta built Perfume on the initials of Love Boat evoking a time when series were called telefilms and cruises weren’t cafonal experiences. The unz-unz of Rovazzi and Orietta Berti entitled programmatically The Italian disco takes you straight into an imaginary world between the past and the present, between the Arch-Romagna Casadei Orchestra and the Milanese Balera dell’Ortica.
What’s wrong with the songwriters? What are these nostalgic thrills, this desire for revival that runs through real and aspiring catchphrases? What is this wave of quasi-countryside and ugly but respectable songs, what is this lexicon far from the foul-mouthed vocabulary of rappers? Why have echoes of a distant past become the common feature of so many summer pieces? How is it that in the videos of these songs it seems to be simultaneously in 2023, 1983 and 1963?
Before looking for an answer, it’s worth stopping to look at the glass half full. Thanks to this wave of Italian nostalgia we have perhaps, I mean perhaps put the domination of the reggaeton-Latin catchphrase behind us, even if by now it is part of the national character and I expect it to return as in the films in which the monster seems to be stone dead and instead re-emerges from the waters for one last feral paw. Make a donation to the Fedez foundation, we owe above all to him the liberation from the hateful foreign yoke, to him and his expedition of One thousand, a crucial episode in the renaissance of the finally autochthonous summer song. Fedez did not start from Quarto, but directly from first in the standings, sweeping away the real army of reggaeton.
Perhaps we dismissed it as victims of a trauma too great to process, but in 2021, the Italian summer was still all exoticism and boom-cha ba boom-cha. Then came this paraculissima song with a distinctly tricolor refrain served by Orietta Berti acting like a grandmother who puts you back in line not with a slap, but with a smile. One thousand it certainly stood out from the other summer songs: it was an Italian piece and had an indisputably nostalgic atmosphere. What was not clear, except that it made Orietta seem capable of teaching good manners to Lauro and Fedez. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the announcement to the Italian people of the end of the Latin dictatorship and the beginning of the era of nostalgia when there were lire and time to make love (if you know, you know ).
“Do you know why my heart is beating? I saw my girlfriend doing reggae-reggaeton”, sang Aka 7even the following summer. The deluded did not know that the tormenting potential of that style was numbered. This was definitively understood when Fedez put together another coup, The sweet life with Tananai and Mara Sattei, eleven non-consecutive weeks before in classic, the dominance over 20% of the fiscal year. The title refers to our beautiful cinema of the past and to a whole dream era, melodies and backing tracks rehash the past, in the video directed by Olmo Parenti which is very Italietta of the boom the song comes out of a jukebox whose labels read Flavor of salt, The cat, If you are there. That is: an instantaneous 60s imagery that was yes vintage, but at that point it seemed almost new, immaculate and attractive in its respectable being. «He who sings prays twice», said Mara Sattei at hyenas quoting (perhaps) St. Augustine. Those who sing Italian and nostalgic collect four times as much, even if for now the new Fedez triangle, Disc Paradise, entered the fifth place in the standings and immediately dropped to eighth due to the overwhelming power of Tedua’s comedy. Fedez has already run for cover and in his Gruppettino Segretino on Instagram (a secret shared by 380,000 people, oh well) invites you to “streammare” the song like crazy. Prize: a tour in the backstage of Love MI.
In the era of catchphrases all alone, girls calientes and beach cocktails, the summer tunes took us to an elsewhere, neither city nor standardized coast, but an exotic and non-existent place, a Mojitoland union of all the clichés about the good life that we believe exist between the Tropics and the Equator. Now in the year of nostalgic and often shamelessly trivial catchphrases it is no longer enough for us to be elsewhere, we even want to be in another time. We want Italy and that it is the naive one of the 50s, the formidable one of the 60s, the carefree and spendthrift one of the 80s. The ’70s are fine, but only clubbing, leaving out political violence and the oil crisis.
It’s a matter of fashions that alternate and after all it can’t rain Latin catchphrases forever. Maybe you look to the past because it’s easy, for lack of an original style, because there isn’t another dominant contemporary musical current that is popular and at the same time usable in the summer. Or maybe it’s a matter of commercializing nostalgia. The under-somethings have to do with it. The idea is that when you can no longer imagine a future you end up taking refuge in the past, an attitude typical of historical periods in which the economy is shaky and comfort is sought in the things of another time. Someone says that it’s nostalgia for an era that preceded social media and it’s no coincidence that the phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when social life was limited and online predominant.
Google “millennial nostalgia” and “generation z nostalgia” and you will mostly get marketing articles explaining, I quote one, that «the constant use of technology and social media is positively correlated with an increase in chronic stress, anxiety and depression among post-millennials. And this is where nostalgia marketing comes into play as “loneliness and anxiety can make consumers more likely to become nostalgic and enjoy idealized visions of the past.” Even of what they have not experienced. Indeed, especially of that, because it lends itself to being idealized. Perhaps even songs like marketing play on an emotional vulnerability and propose models that appear simple and reassuring in a world that has become complex and disturbing especially since we have all become, shall we say, more sensitive. We imagine the 60s or 80s happier than the present and snuggle into this vision.
It’s not just a question of marketing. Nor is it retromania, as Simon Reynolds codified it a dozen years ago when speaking of other music. It’s retrotopia, which is something different. If I were Zygmunt Bauman would say that retrotopia is the double negation of utopia, «a vision located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but not yet dead past, and not tied to an unborn future». Moreover, it arrives at the appropriate political moment, in which those who govern us have won the elections by promising to manage the complexity of the present by evoking the model of a happy country that no longer exists and perhaps never was. We feel like individuals condemned to defeat and therefore “the hopes for improvement, once placed in an uncertain and clearly unreliable future, have once again been reinvested in the vague memory of a past appreciated for its presumed stability and reliability”.
According to an Ipsos survey, 54% of Generation Z and 53% of millennials, the main age groups targeted by nostalgia marketing, would have preferred to be born in their parents’ era. I find it incredible, but maybe songwriters know it’s true and therefore recover fragments of a popular heritage that only a few years ago seemed unworkable because it was uncool. It’s not about aping it, it’s about evoking it in songs that sound contemporary. I feel it in Italodisco by the Kolors, another programmatic title and text that says: “I’ll play the Righeira bass if I go towards your eyes”. I even feel it in Strawberries by Achille Lauro and Rose Villain, upbeat and exotic singsong, yes, but with a homely exoticism, more Italian Group than Jamaican collective, and if you want also in Nice boy where Rosa Chemical, the most bizarrely arch-Italian pop singer under 30, puts pearls and piercings on ‘O sarracino leveraging the familiarity of a song that is in the nation’s DNA. In the standings in Italy there is still and could remain for a good part of the summer the different catchphrase A bit of joy which evokes other times and another Mina, as well as Sea destination by Tiziano Ferro refers to the summer of Luca Carboni more than that of J Balvin.
I even feel it in My love by Annalisa, which will have as reference the 2010 piece by Alexandra Stan Mr Saxobeat (which incidentally is sampled in Black glasses by Ava, Anna and Capo Plaza), but in the very vulgar tum-tum of the base in the refrain the burina echo of the remix made by Bob Sinclair for You start making love by Raffaella Carrà: the great beauty of a vanished Italy is back. With a little imagination, Raffa also seems to be evoked in the sexy but playful and never vulgar friccico of “she kissing him kissing her kissing me” (perhaps there is also Ambra from I you Francesca and Davide, but we are slipping into the 90s). In the summer of 2023 it is once again beautiful to make love from Trieste downwards, there is no longer any need to take a Rome-Bangkok flight.
There would also be Morandi and Jovanotti singing about “Italian beautiful people” and after all the singer of Open all doors it is memory made flesh of a beautiful and lost homeland that many regret because it is stubbornly cheerful. Coma Cose evoke the time when California was a child in a video full of wraps, arcades and bathing establishments that looks like a home movie from the past. The evocation of the past becomes personal in theOrange juice of Madame, with the singer who recalls when she was an “immaculate child” and “I held you by my finger while running in the meadow”, she who a few months ago made the list of her sexual fantasies calling them Love. These are just a few examples. Other songs will come out and will be Latin, others have come out and do not express this sense of nostalgia and Italianness, but a trend can be glimpsed, a shift towards nostalgia as Svetlana Boym defined it, a feeling of loss and disorientation which is also a love affair with one’s own fantasy. It is not an Italian phenomenon, it is “a global epidemic of nostalgia, a sentimental yearning to be part of a community with a collective memory, a yearning desire for continuity in a fragmented world”.
According to Guardian, nostalgia would instead be a way to redeem the past in the light of the concepts of empowerment and gender fluidity. From the past decades, that is, we would only take the parts in tune with contemporary feeling, and therefore Kate Bush’s evolved pop is fine, but not, say, hair metal or other non-queerizable phenomena. It seems to me too elitist a reading to be applied to those who sing Disc Paradise on the beach with a croissant in hand and still wondering what the letters QIA of LGBTQIA+ mean. What seems to me to unite many music, lyrics and melodies is instead the idea that one can escape from the present through the evocation of a painted past subjected to a process of emotional colouring.
One chord at a time we are creating the postcard of a remote and happy Italy, and there we take refuge for the three-minute duration of a catchphrase. But then, as the one there sang in the 80s, we have to come to terms with the life that chimes.
