Why do the Sanremo songs all have the same authors?
So is it true that the songs competing at the next Sanremo Festival are written “all by the same authors”, as reported by the ever-present Codacons? Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, but it’s not just Ariston’s problem. We’re getting there. The numbers, more or less, have already been given – for example the music critic Michele Monina a Striscia La Notiziabut also Il Sole 24 Ore in this analysis – and whoever was at the meeting with the press for the preview listening, scrolling through the list, will tell you that they had a shock: the same eleven authors composed 66.6% of the songs in the competition, that is, twenty out of thirty. Almost no one showed up with a unique piece (just Brunori Sas ei Modà). Ok, the team game won which, for goodness sake, has always existed, except that we all bet on the same team. And here too, God forbid, there have been gurus since the dawn of time without whom it seems impossible to write or produce music, until proven otherwise, which promptly arrives. This time, however, the figures are impressive.
Pop that wins cannot be changed
You will hear the names from Carlo Conti’s voice from February 11th, but you already know them, because they are – really – always the same: those behind the successes of the previous editions but also of the summer, from the unforgettable pieces to the most horrible ones ( indeed, one often wonders how the same people manage to write, among many, Tango and any paraculata on the Mojitos). However, it depends on the combinations, but we are there: Federica Abbate here signs seven (!), Davide Simonetta five, Jacopo Ettorre, Davide Petrella and Jacopo Lazzarin four. At three, together with Paolo Antonacci (son of Biagio, in great demand), among others, there is Blanco, the only one on the list to have great success as a singer: the others try with mixed success (in Petrella, with the pseudonym of Tropico, it went well), but they work mostly in the shadows, they are considered the magicians of verses and choruses and they get to put their hands everywhere. They’re very good, of course. They give that “extra edge” to the pieces. But seen like this it is a sign, a blackmail, an obligatory passage. A funnel.
At least one of them, in fact, appears this year in the songs of Fedez, Tony Effe, Achille Lauro, Giorgia, Gaia, Elodie, Rose Villain, Sarah Toscano, Shablo, Serena Brancale, Joan Thiele, Clara, Francesco Gabbani, Emis Killa, Irama, Rocco Hunt, Francesca Michielin, Noemi, The Kolors and Rkomi. How is this possible?
It happens, we were saying, not as a cause, but as a consequence: for a few years, let’s say from the pandemic onwards, Italian pop has slipped into a spiral in which the same models are replicated – in fact at Ariston don’t expect surprises: either there is the hit with the four-quarter drum, or there’s the ballad – using the same sounds, the same references and the same structures. The result is music that is the same, immobile, increasingly arid, with a few exceptions and just as many cases of successes that break what are ultimately unwritten rules (Dardust is one of the few, as an author and producer, to have succeeded with Angelina Mango’s boredom, but this year with Clara it doesn’t seem incisive). At the base there is a certain laziness of those who make decisions. But also the fear of not being broadcast on the radio and not being included in the playlists of streaming platforms, which in turn are very careful to label genres and singers and to be on the safe side: in short, it is a snake that bites its own tail, with a public that is not stimulated and an industry, in general, that relies on the usual suspects, with guaranteed returns, to strike an iron – that of music in Italian – which has never been so hot.
A passive artistic direction?
Conti, who said in the press conference that he only later noticed the excessive concentration of the usual authors, shrugged his shoulders at the issue. Sin. The point is that it is a structural problem (because it is): Sanremo has become the most visible and profitable stage of Italian music, where the pop scene pours in and, devoured by the anxiety of pleasing at all costs, travels the road more beaten. Meh. On the other hand, it must be said that one would expect a minimally different behavior from an artistic director: more research, yes, and more variety, compared to a lot of thirty competitors of which only eight (!) are competing. ‘Ariston for the first time. He has immense power in his hands and, on balance, he has managed it in a very passive manner.