Lorenzo’s primitive energy
In the past few days Jovanotti released the song “Monte Cristo”the first appetizer of the album (still untitled) whose release is expected on January 31st. For just under two months “The Disc of the Sun”released on December 9, 2022, remains Lorenzo’s last album. The following is the album review he wrote for us Ernesto Assante.
After some time of heeling, Jovanotti seems to have found a center again. In this umpteenth rebirth (the artist has never been stuck in one place for too long, and there are countless different Jovanotti who have occupied the scene over the years) the keystone seems to be that of a ‘solar music’ in which melody and rhythm are combined with colorful atmospheres, often danceable, and lyrics preferably in rhyming couplets.
Jovanotti embodies this formula in an album, “Il disco del sole”, which, compared to previous attempts, has a more stable dimension, greater security, evident strength and a more solid construction. Indeed, he does not embody it in just one album but in three (which if we add the ‘prologue’ of “Mediterraneo”, released only a few months ago and with ten songs inside, makes four) to testify to a period of particular creativity, of desire to communicate, to make music in his own way.
It’s a bit as if Jovanotti had ‘discovered’ music only recently, there is a primitive energy, a frankness, a truth in the songs of “Il disco del sole”, which still make it interesting. We could say that after the triumphal and beautiful “Ora”, of 2011, and the ‘conclusive’ “Lorenzo 2015 CC”, Jovanotti crossed a long desert, in search of a new dimension of his being and his making music. Research that had a ‘problem’ evident in the disconnect between his ‘live’ soul, perfect, engaging, enthusiastic, fun, collective, and the one he was looking for for the albums, with new sounds, a new simplicity, a reduction of superstructures, a freedom that made him move outside genres and the predictable. All this found its realization, and its balance in the Jova Beach Party shows and in the “sunny music” that found space in “Mediterraneo” first and in “Il disco del sole” now.
The definition of “solar music”, we know, is inextricably linked to Raoul Casadei, who when singing it said “This is solar music, which lights a fire at the bottom of the heart, if we are all together, we feel the desire to sing, we feel the desire to dance, with sunny music”.
And, although the musical distance is obviously abysmal, it is easy to recognize in these words of Casadei the same enthusiasm and vision of Jovanotti today: “After a period of forced detachment from music I woke up with the irresistible desire to make songs, without conform to what I heard around, without thinking about ‘featuring’ and ‘positioning’. In a rather wild and instinctive way I wrote pieces without having any strategy in mind, just the desire to share this thing that was boiling inside me.” The result is a torrent in flood, a flood of music that Jovanotti pours on the public together with a sea of feelings and sensations, mixed with different rhythms, sounds, colours, atmospheres, which have him, his life, as the only common thread his dreams, desires, pains, passions, entertainment. And everything is in perfect harmony with the climate of the Jova Beach Party, where “solar music” takes shape in a collective event where the aim is to bring together joy, beauty, music, dreams and love for nature.
Therefore, listening to the three works, “Il disco del sole”, his ‘Bootleg’ and the live performance all together one has the perfect image, complete and exhaustive, of what Lorenzo Jovanotti Cherubini is today, with all his qualities and his defects, with its limits and its conquests, a very different Jovanotti from that of “Ora”, and also, at best, from that of “Oh, Vita!”, an album which in some way opened up this research which today seems to have landed on one certainty. Lorenzo is only himself, but he is also Jovanotti, he is also the JBP pirate, he is the DJ and the rapper, he is the singer-songwriter and the interpreter, he is many things together and none of these to the end. It doesn’t care, cheerfully, about being in a single box, or rather, about being in any box in general. And he dives into his ‘sunny music’ hoping that many will want to bathe with him.
