I want to understand, this concert on May 1st. The more you go up to the level, the less we talk about politics: it will be that in 2025 it is a mess looking for a job, being young, keeping and the rest, and it will be that therefore small fish have evidently more aware of the precariousness even as musicians – or do they only have less to lose? – But, here, the more the Rai3 marathon has gone on, the more the fateful messages have been delegated to the interventions of conductors (some more rhetorical, as always, others less: Ermal Meta is the most lucid) and to the unions, to the point of leaving space almost only for music. Because, in short, you know it: on May 1st it became the Festivalbar, indeed Sanremo, with a direct transfer of artists from Ariston to San Giovanni. And ok, the renewal wanted it, the numbers were affected by good, the square is full of boys and girls of the Zeta generation and yet something we lost on the street.

What was missing

We said: politics, or at least the social. Not that to stay on that stage it serves to show who knows which curriculum, to be leftist militants or other, but at least understand where you are and that, in short, it is not a situation like the others, and that your set cannot be like all the others who always propose themselves. At least a “good May 1st”. Instead, nothing, sometimes not even that: sfilze di hit one after the other, without feeling, as if we were a great promotional spot. And again, in a historical moment of the genre, where it ends that, with so much disengaged music, they are the various interventions of the conductors who seem, at times, out of place. Strange.

Better, in this sense, the afternoon live, where the younger or niche names play it well – very good Anna Castiglia and Giulia Mei, but also the same Gaia and Patagarri, or Leo Gassman with Hello beautiful. Clear, the cast this year counted about fifty names and it was a ministry that did not do justice to the names involved (very good songwriters like tooth and Giorgio would then have deserved more), so there is also to start thinking, perhaps, of a more stringent selection, to the benefit of all, without necessarily losing representing them. But at least, often, many have had a sense.

From the evening, with the big names, it seemed all a parade, in which very few have affected and offered a centered set compared to the occasion. Brunori Sas comes to mind with his irony, while a Lucio Corsi – moreover thrown a little there, just three pieces in a year which, come on, is his – was transparent, however engaging. Giorgia too: as a beautiful voice as always, the stage if he eats it, the medley with his successes also keeps, but we could have heard it everywhere, so. And Ghali himself, who has never been afraid to expose himself on themes such as inclusion, war in Gaza or social justice, and instead the concert was torching in this sense, in the face of the charity of a overflowing talent. Because this is not any stage. And the same goes for the various – good, again, we would miss – Lightning, Gazzelle, Carl Brave. If there was to comment on the performances itself, we would say that they were all good at getting away with an event that, historically, is a conglomerate of technical problems; But this is not the point, or in any case not only.

It was more expected even from those who, in the end, were the real two great guests, namely Elodie and Achille Lauro. She, always active in the field of rights, got away with some phrase of circumstance and a performance that seemed mostly a trailer (successful, but we talk about this) of the next concerts in the stadiums. He, declaredly attentive to the story “of the last” and “of the suburbs”, took the embrace of his Rome, he sang Young unconscious As the song deserved, as if it were a consecration (it is, it seems), but at times it gave the impression of talking more for itself and for its history than for May 1st.

A structural problem?

Then, we would miss, the public will surely have liked, the mode was above all that of karaoke for the Zeta generation and with such a cast it is difficult to make mistakes. It would have been nice, however, to have emotionally more intense moments, or in any case centered: a truly sparty performance was missing, I throw it there, a marracash that with Peace is over He just told Italy and the world like few, including precarious workers, and having it on a stage so would also have been symbolic. But the truth is that he first is a huge exception. The concert is, by the same admission of the artistic direction, “an emporium of what Italian music is today”: it does not make sense to continue to call the groups of thirty years ago, it is right to update itself and the truth is that, simply, this is what goes by in the convent. Beautiful songs – some also beautiful – But too often they stopped thinking big, that they want to testify an era, and are content to turn the day. And this too, if we want, is an indication of the crisis of a labor market, theirs.