Riccardo Cocciante is viral on Spotify, thanks to Paolo Sorrentino

There comes a moment when the chatter of the party that forms the backdrop to the scene is canceled out. A piano tour starts. Few notes, but right. The atmosphere is charged with melancholy and pathos, with a special tension. Parthenope, the protagonist of the film, played by Celeste Dalla Porta, begins to dance together with the other two protagonists, her brother Raimondo (played by Daniele Rienzo) and Sandrino (Dario Aita). Riccardo Cocciante’s voice adds a sense of yearning: “It was all already planned, ever since you secretly kissed me while dancing…”. Thanks to the new film by Paolo Sorrentino “It was already all foreseen” is becoming a hit by Riccardo Cocciante on the platforms.

The data says so. While yesterday.“Parthenope” has reached the top of the Italian box officewith 2.6 million euros grossed since it arrived in theaters on October 24th, Riccardo Cocciante’s song reached fourth place in the ranking of the most viral songs of the moment on Spotifty in Italyabove the various “Niente panic” by Ghali, “Per due come noi” by Olly and Angelina Mango, “Dark front” by Lazza and even the TikTok hit “Lipstick and coffee” by Sal Da Vinci. In the last ten days, daily listeners on the streaming platform have grown by as much as 349%, going from 35,063 streams on October 20th to 157,452 streams yesterday and exceeding 2.4 million overall listeners on Spotify.

Not bad though a song that has always lived in the shadow of the various “Bella senz’anima”, “Margherita” and ” Quando fini un amore”the successes that are traditionally associated with the name of Riccardo Cocciante. The story is a bit reminiscent of “Without a Why” by Nada: Paolo Sorrentino took it in 2016 from an album that the Tuscan artist had recorded eighteen years earlier, in 2004, with modest success. After including it in the soundtrack of the series “The Young Pope”, the Neapolitan director gave that song a new life: today “Senza un Why” is welcomed as a hit on a par with “Desperate Love” and “But what’s cold does” , when Nada sings it in concert. Sorrentino has always had a special feeling with the Italian singer-songwriter. In “Il divo” he inserted “The best years of our life” by Renato Zero, in “Loro 1” he had Fabio Concato make a surreal cameo to the tune of “Domenica bestiale” (in the scene in which Silvio Berlusconi tried to win back Veronica Lario having the hit dedicated to her by its author, who showed up at Villa Certosa). But here the operation is more interesting.

“It was all already foreseen” is not exactly an evergreen of Italian music and is not even one of Cocciante’s strong pointsunlike “Margherita” and surrounding areas. The song was released in 1975: Cocciante included it in an album, “L’alba”, which he represented a sort of decompression chamber between the two great successes that consecrated his career after the early experiments. The previous year the artist had published “Soul“, the album of “Bella senz’anima” and ” Quando fini un amore”, whose fiftieth anniversary last month he celebrated with a concert-event at the Verona Arena: “I recorded ‘Anima’ and the album was rejected . I was really desperate, full of doubts, the invitation to play together with Antonello Venditti and Francesco De Gregori, who were already known, at the Teatro dei Satiri, a place for only 400 people, came to my aid. It could have been a risk, my songs didn’t talk about social and political issues – he said – it was the 70s, it was an era of change and the public understood that, in my own way, I too was in revolt, I too I was part of that change.” In 1976 he would instead send the masterpiece “Concert for Margherita”, the album of definitive consecration.

The Cocciante of the album “L’alba” is a strange creature, divided between his prog and experimental roots and a more melodic, lyrical vein (it is no coincidence that Andrea Bocelli also made his own version of “Era Already Tutto Prevision”) He is at a turning point in his career.

You can feel it when you listen to “Era Already Everything Predicted”: it is a song that grows and transforms also and above all thanks to the interpretation of the singer-songwriter, who at a certain point begins to scream all his anger. The text, written by Marco Luberti, sounds like a sort of ideal sequel to “Bella senz’anima”. It is a letter addressed to a woman who uses and consumes men as she pleases, written by her latest victim: “It was all already planned / ever since you, while dancing / kissed me in secret / while he, who wasn’t looking / told his friends / of the things you know how to say”. In the film that woman is embodied by .Parthenope, beautiful without a soul, whose character experiences a turning point precisely in the scene in which “It was all already planned” resonates in the background (no spoilers): it’s no coincidence that the song comes right at the center of the film. The song has been inserted in its entirety: it also returns in the finale, when Stefania Sandrelli appears to play Parthenope as an adult. When in one of the interviews linked to the release of “Parthenope”, the one with Fanpage, he found himself talking about the involvement of the voice of “Bella senz’anima” in the soundtrack of his new film, Paolo Sorrentino limited himself to saying: “Perhaps, since they are songs that I listen to while writing the film, the film takes on that emotion”.