Treccani pays homage to Rino Gaetano, “an authentic star”

The Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia Treccani celebrates the heir of Fred Buscaglione. Self -taught singer -songwriter, born on October 29, 1950 in Crotone but artistically raised in the Roman suburbs, Salvatore Antonio Gaetano – for all Rino – has been able to mix with irony and acumen theatrical activity and musical experimentation to become “an authentic Italian light music star”, as the encyclopedia of contemporary music, directed by the disappeared Ernesto Assante and by Sandro Cappelletto, is reminded. Heir of Fred Buscaglione, the first “proletarian singer -songwriter in the sense in which Pier Paolo Pasolini meant him”, Rino Gaetano imposed himself in 1975 with the 45 rpm but the sky is increasingly blue, followed in 1976 by my brother is the only child and in 1977 from the Aida album, where the secret of that nonsense only apparently incomprehensible is found that made it famous, in which the language of the language of institutions, of religion, politics, journalism and bureaucracy was made. He participated in 1978 in the Sanremo Festival where he proposed the most catchy and disengaged Gianna – who ranked third by selling 600,000 copies – instead of nuntereggae more, due to the long and explicit list of names of politicians and vips of the current affairs that the singer -songwriter in the song declared that he “did not bear anymore”. With an innate taste for the paradox “a little at Carmelo Bene” Rino Gaetano was sometimes derubbed to a simple note with a speckling flavor: Maurizio Costanzo presented him to Susanna Agnelli as “a songwriter who makes ironic songs, thus, playful, cheap, who will be dedicated soon to put in music perhaps the yellow pages because it makes the lists of names”. The writer and literary critic Enzo Siciliano, which later became president of Rai, who wanted to interview him in 1978 in the radio notebook transmission; Gino Paoli for whom he was “the heir of a certain type of nonsense, of Marinetteria, of the oldest surrealism”; And Antonello Venditti very tied to him. The album nuntereggae plus – published on 1 September 1978 – was the definitive consecration of a style that reached a mass audience because it faced the political -social criticalities of the moment with a disenchanted, desecrating and light look but no less corrosive. The cult of the figure of Rino Gaetano, who passed away in Rome on June 2, 1981 in a road accident, after a drop until the 2000s, continued to grow over time, making him appreciate as an author of first greatness, a songwriter with a free and unmistakable voice, capable of telling with sarcasm and lightness the paradox of an era and the complexity of a country, unmasking the contradictions without ever falling into the rhetoric.