How Calcutta’s “Mainstream” sounds when listened to ten years later
On November 30, 2015, a small independent Roman label published, almost to general indifference, the new album by a then unknown singer-songwriter. The album was titled “Mainstream”, the artist was a Calcutta, real name Edoardo D’Erme, who started from the Latin area which until then in national pop was known to most for being the birthplace of Tiziano Ferro. No one could have predicted it, but that release would end up revolutionizing the Italian music of the 2010s. It is impossible to define the precise moment in which we realized that something was changing: the revolution of Calcutta and of the guys from Bomba Dischi, as the label was called, was silent but radical, the result of a meticulous work of pop promotion although “masked” by do-it-yourself practices to make a pop star of that singer-songwriter from the lower Lazio that no one – outside of the Rome independent circuit – had yet heard of. The fact is that, at a certain point, in the autumn of 2015, Calcutta went from being a perfect unknown to being invested almost in spite of itself with the role of savior of Italian song, mired in cloudless skies, carpets of strawberries, windows among the stars and other clichés. Calcutta came to the right place at the right time. When “Cosa mi manchi a fare” began to be released on social media and streaming platforms, a single taken from “Mainstream”, many immediately recognized an unprecedented communicative force in that song. Word of mouth did the rest. His rise marked the beginning of something that would change the rules of the game. Ten years after the release of “Mainstream” we enjoyed listening to that album again. And to tell how it sounds today.
A voice out of place
«Gaetano told me that we live in the ghetto…»: this was how “Mainstream” opened in 2015. The lyrics are those of “Gaetano“, the first of the eleven tracks contained in the album. Ten years later, the force is the same: disruptive and dazzling. A round of chords on the piano, that awkward voice, that mystery: “Gaetano who?”. For the record: it was Gaetano Lo Magro, a friend from Calcutta, organizer of the Reb (Roma Est Bene) evenings at the Arci Fanfulla 5/a club in Rome, at Pigneto, the same guy who appeared on the cover. «I made a swastika in the center of Bologna but it was only to argue», sang Calcutta. A phrase that seemed absurd at the time, now sounds almost prophetic in its provocative intent.What do I miss doing” we wrote here, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its release, which preceded that of the album by two months: that arpeggiated keyboard riff (a toy piano from Yamaha), hypnotic and repetitive, minimalist and crooked, has become the sonic mark of a generation. “Milan” And “Lemonade” retain a charm that time has not diminished and demonstrate how “Mainstream” is still current. In a landscape saturated with over-produced voices and records, predictable choices, glossy sounds, Calcutta’s interpretation remains a breath of fresh air: fragile, spontaneous, always a little out of place.
Songs like generational manifestos
And never mind that, to quote the lines of “Frosinone“, Frosinone is no longer in Serie A and Pope Francis is no longer there: those small portraits of ordinary everyday life and those stories on the margins, as we described the “Mainstream” songs at the time, have become generational manifestosthose of the indie generation raised on bread and hardship. However, when indie was still genuine and not a caricature of itself: “And now I have to put Bologna in the lyrics / otherwise my indie piece won’t be understood / and I have to dress up as a rabbit or a Martian because it’s very indie”, he would have sung Savastano shortly thereafter in “Indie song”, with a video inspired precisely by that of “Frosinone”, perfectly photographing the beginning of the drift. By the way, the “From the Worm” which gave the title to one of the two instrumentals of the album, one of the most frequented circles by the hipsters of Pigneto and that Borgata Boredom (the music scene of the eastern area of Rome in those years) which inspired the aesthetics and imagery of “Mainstream”, no longer exists. reality seems to have taken an even more dazed turn than the images sung on the album: «Say hello to your mother who has returned to Medjugorje / and I don’t care about your father, listen to De Gregori / I don’t like that type of people, no, I really don’t like / Taranta, Celestini and BMW».
A “power slap” that is (still) needed today
The label that published “Mainstream”, Bomba Dischi, whose fortune the album made, today collaborates steadily with the major labels that distribute its works. Indie itself, in the meantime, has effectively become the new pop: a pop that “Mainstream” has helped to redefine, changing the coordinates of Italian song. «He did exactly what he felt like doing at a time when music was practically dead, and young promises had little chance of emerging except on TV. It changed everything. It has been a comet star in recent years. Who knows when the next one will be,” the record’s producer, Marta Venturini, told Rockol. In 2015 the reference author of the Italian mainstream was Francesco “Kekko” Silvestre of Modà, who regularly wrote songs for Alessandra Amoroso, Emma, Annalisa, Francesco Renga, Anna Tatangelo, Dear Jack, Bianca Atzei. At the Sanremo Festival that year Silvestre had three songs competing as an author: “Una finestra tra le stelle” by Annalisa, “Il solo al mondo” by Bianca Atzei and “Libera” by Anna Tatangelo. Today the situation is not much different from then. At the last Sanremo Festival, 70% of the songs were signed by eleven recurring authors. Davide Petrella is everywhere: «Carried by the feats / thick, same names / carried by the rit. written by the same authors / and every year the bar is lowered / I try to do limbo with my head touching the ground / I remind you, child, who would you be with this slap / without Sanremo, without the summer, without Petrella / patience is over», sings Marracash in the emblematic verses of “Power slap”. And so “Mainstream”, ten years later, sounds like the last, true moment in which someone managed to move the axis. Who knows, maybe the time is ripe to give Italian pop a new “power slap”.
