If it wasn’t clear, Ornella Vanoni has been playing in a league of her own for a long time. For example: to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, which she turns today, she has just published a version of a classic, I love youwhere she duets with Elodie and Ditonellapiaga, the biggest Italian pop star of the moment and one who represents its indie side, a prelude to a new album of reinterpretations to be released in October, Various. For any other artist, it wouldn’t make sense: at that age, usually, you’re out of the loop; tributes are fine, yes, but having an equal dialogue with the new generations ‒ who, for goodness sake, express respect, but that’s another story ‒ or embarking on new projects has never been seen. Instead, with her it’s normal, in fact it’s the basis of the reason why she’s so popular.

Another idea of ​​old age

It is not, then, that Vanoni has never been as good or popular as she is now: she is a pillar of our music, as an interpreter she started from the Milan of the cabarets of the late fifties and, changing skin, with class and a voice out of scale, she has always remained standing; if anything, it is that now she has reversed the life cycle that one expects from a character of that type. For goodness sake, she is not the only one: it is as if a congregation of wise elders was born, appreciated and looked upon with sympathy by everyone, generation Z first and foremost, from one of her long-time loves (more than reciprocated) like Gino Paoli to Roberto Vecchioni himself. But these, here and there, fall into the stereotype of the “grandfather” or the trombone who rejects modernity. Vanoni no, Vanoni speaks to us with the new (he told Elodie herself that he makes “a very intelligent use of his body”, while younger opinions than his do nothing but repeat that “in my day we didn’t undress”), he has progressive thoughts, he does concerts where there is a queue of artists who came after. He doesn’t seek homage, but dialogue.

But she is not a super-young girl, constantly reinventing herself, looking for a new easy success ‒ as if hers, when she was young, had been ‒ or for memes. And that is the key: there is no rejection of old age, although the role she occupies in music is ancestral, linked to a pop (women, that is, only as an interpreter) that is now outdated and thanks to her it sounds evergreen instead. There is acceptance. She does not hide live: she sings barefoot “so as not to fall”, she takes breaks that her age imposes on her, her voice, beautiful, is never clean, perfect, geometric as it was originally; precisely for this reason it is true. It is an awareness of old age, proactive and, if we look around, exceptional. Eroticism, one of his main weapons, has been put aside, and it was not easy, supplanted by irony. To hear it, here, is not to be surprised by a person who he shouldn’t make it and surprisingly he can do it; it is surprising how he enjoys this age, something that, no matter what age we are, we cannot do.

The voice of conscience

And then, above all, his superpower is to transform old age into vital energy. Beyond how he maintains lucidity on the issues of the moment, saying the thing right she has made the loss of inhibitions an added value, she has transformed herself into a voice of conscience, which supports things ‒ and here, again, the deadly irony that has developed helps her ‒ that many think, but do not have the courage to say, from the relationship with death onwards. Ok, this makes her irresistible on TV. But it is above all the still inverted game that amazes: you cannot and will not be able to review in Vanoni, but at most delude yourself into thinking you can be and live it like she does; with myths, after all, that’s how it works. Last pearl, from an episode of the podcast Pass by the Basement: “I smoke a joint or two before going to sleep, otherwise my brain won’t turn off.” There you go.

Then that’s enough, because all this talk about the character must not distract from a giant songbook that has crossed a dozen faces of authorial music, with peaks both in the areas of light ‒ the same I love you it’s a very current funk in the return of the genre, from Pino D’Angiò to Nu Genea, while Endless it’s the ABC of the piece of love ‒ and above all in the shadows, as the pieces on the depression that has taken her several times over the years tell, from the masterpiece Tomorrow is another day down. Because this extraordinary old age, Vanoni, has earned day by day, in a life of adventure that, who knows, sooner or later will end up in a biopic, in a six-hundred-page autobiography-brick with only anecdotes. We’ll see: for now, she doesn’t seem very interested in the past.