Sarcastic and irreverent, in two words: Edoardo Bennato

Edoardo Bennato on November 20, 2020 he released what remains his last album to date, “There isn’t”. A record released in the midst of the pandemic in which unreleased songs were alongside songs – rearranged – among the most well-known and significant in his discography. Below you can read our review.

Five years after releasing the convincing “Pronti a salpare”, a new album by Edoardo Bennato is released. It’s called “Non c’è” and it’s equally convincing. The Neapolitan singer-songwriter’s new album is what is defined as ‘a double album’, and at least half of it is new. In fact, the album contains eight unreleased songs which alternate in the tracklist with the revival of twelve classics from his repertoire, rearranged and reworked for the occasion.

The manifest intent is to underline the thematic continuity that has existed in his work for almost fifty years now, and the fact that old and new are not that different and can interpenetrate without any difficulty. What Bennato denounced or indicated or just commented on in his songs some time ago is completely (in many respects, unfortunately) current. This is the main reason why listening to the twenty songs that make up the setlist of “Non c’è” runs as smooth as silk and as fast as a train on a fast lane.

Presenting the album to the press, the 74-year-old Neapolitan musician was keen to explain, with a certain justified pride, the continuity of his lyrics which can be defined as timeless and, in some ways, anticipatory even though they refer to different contexts. The most clear example – but it is not the only one – can be found in the incipit of “Bravi Ragazzi” – a song published on the 1974 album “The good and the bad” – which seems to be intended as a comment on the period of closure we have experienced and that we are (albeit to a lesser extent) still experiencing today, ‘One in the morning/there’s a curfew/And to think that at the beginning it almost seemed like a game/Now there’s no more time to think/Everyone inside, closed to wait’.

The common thread that unites these words with those of the new “Maskerate” (‘Mask up in conferences, in official speeches and to set a good example, everyone is well gagged’) or “Reality cannot be this” is completely evident ( ‘This love cannot be virtual, it needs words, whispered words. Words that only you can hear, it needs the streets and the whole world to discover’), written and performed together with his brother Eugenio. In addition to his brother, the Neapolitan rapper Clementino also participated in the album, who instills energy in the anti-racist warning “L’Uomo Nero”, and his friend Morgan, piano and voice in the overwhelming “Why”.

“Sleeping Beauty” is yet another love letter sent by Edoardo Bennato to his city, Naples, and to the south, to all the south. He defines it as “a fairy tale, the sleeping beauty is Bagnoli waiting for the prince’s kiss to wake up”. While the song that gives the album its title is a ballad aimed at young people who are urged not to give up on their dreams even when reality seems to have taken a completely different direction.

“Non c’è” is an album born from the months spent in lockdown, an event so ‘beyond’ that no later than the first months of this 2020 it would have been traced back solely to the plot of a film to be included in the science fiction-catastrophic genre.

An event that led Edoardo Bennato to reflect and reconsider, like all of us, the priorities of existence in light of what is still happening. Bennato’s “Non c’è” focuses on and photographs our reality, schizophrenic and paradoxical, using a lexicon that knows lucidity and ignores compromise. It is an evergreen of our song that takes from rock, blues, folk, pop as much as is needed to place it at the service of the style that has always characterized it: sarcastic, provocative, irreverent, iconoclastic, in a word: ‘Bennatian’.