Gianluca Grignani puts aside anger and resentment
Gianluca Grignani sixth act, or rather sixth album. The title, “The King of Nothing”. The release date, June 10, 2005. What follows, and which you can read, is the review he wrote for us 19 years ago Paola Maraone.
To put it in a big way: to hell and back. After having experimented – musically and, above all, otherwise – everything that came into his head Gianluca gets back on track and makes a stop. At home, with this “The King of Nothing” which closely resembles the atmosphere of “Destinazione Paradiso”. In between, about ten years that were certainly not useless, during which Grignani grew from a personal and experiential point of view, inventing records between India, New York and Milan, without ever losing his roots and his slightly 'provincial while cultivating the great cosmopolitan dream.
And now, here he is: with a few wrinkles and perhaps a few more gray hairs, but all in all still him. Having given up the role of the “bad boy” for some time now, our man started a family, married Francesca and gave birth to Ginevra; he dedicates a song to both of them – “Bambina dall'spazio”, which opens the album – with tender, tender and at the same time convincing lyrics, as only he can and only when he is in a state of grace: words of love “for my wife and my daughter who are the same woman and for all women, Martians.” If he says so.
From a musical point of view, “Il re del niente” is a well-made album, without frills and with very little use of machines – recording with instruments played in the studio but live, a sort of electro-unplugged: some small margins open to the new and otherwise a simple album without being simplistic; an album that does not betray but which flows pleasantly, without jolts, on the CD player's platter, in which incisiveness and the idea of ”surprise” are fatally penalized. This is a record which, as was to be expected, arrives comfortably third in the rankings, without effort, but in which it is difficult to identify songs so powerful as to obscure the shadow of the others; rather in “The King of Nothing” the sensation of sound continuum and an impression of extreme internal coherence prevail.
Choice of field? Randomness? Or more simply, is Grignani – now – unable to do anything else? No, we don't get to say that much: the impression is rather that he really has returned home, to trace the end of the circumference of his personal circle after so many years spent wandering here and around, to close a journey that began a long time ago. Putting aside anger and resentment, trying here and there to get angry (“Who cares”, against show-biz and “The earth is an orange” with its ecological message) but perhaps without believing in it too much.
And boasting an illustrious collaboration: the one with Andrea Guerra, son of the poet Tonino, with whom Grignani composed “Che will be of us”, included here as a bonus track and winner of the 2005 Saint Vincent Award for Cinema. Then of course there is the song that gives the album its title, “Il re del niente”, which is a bit of an ideological manifesto: “I too sometimes feel profound discomfort, because I feel like a seller of smoke”, explains Grignani in the presentation of the album, “but even through futile gestures or words we all try to emerge from mediocrity”. Ah here.
