“Because Sanremo is Sanremo”. This was the catchphrase theme song, composed by Pippo Caruso, of the '95 festival (and since then it has become a symbol of the Festival), a polite little tune accompanied by that clever phrase, a wink that entered the homes of Italy and remained there and, if you were a child, you would find yourself repeating it to your brother without even having understood it well, shrugging your shoulders like adults, "because Sanremo is Sanremo".
Here we are. But what is Sanremo, this Sanremo, besides being, tautologically, itself? It is a very boring show, of gargantuan length, full of jokes, jokes and shows and poor in songs (ranging from the always present and always the same Renga to the bad Dolcenera, passing through Finardi) .
It is the gray stage (illuminated like a downtown disco) chosen by the 64-year-old Celentano, who swings on himself with the stage presence of a crutch, to launch demagogic arrows and settle private accounts amplifying them in the largest sounding board in Italy, and then remembering, between one bullshit and another, at least that he still knows how to sing, while the national chatter is enriched by the murmurs on Belen's dizzying split and the fundamental question: "does she have panties or not"? (the answer is yes, as the detailed photo gallery of La Repubblica kindly reminds us).
Meanwhile the "fuck" is wasted, and then deprecated (even Morandi, to keep up with the times, uttered a rather alienating one in the opening), and when DJ Martin Solveig is asked to sing one of his hits from a few years ago from the Ariston audience, usually plastered like a technical minister, a small crowd of young people, perhaps paid, stand up to clap their hands, swaying out of time.
In all of this there is Morandi who tries with embarrassing results to support the Usual idiots, the Rai executives in the front row who don't know exactly when to applaud, the opinion poll jury (which found itself, after the inconveniences of prime time, at vote with pen and paper) who makes the wave like the curve at the derby of the heart e the good Papaleo who tries to fill, with his natural sympathy, the gaps in the screenplay of the authors, among which the name of Moccia stands out (honestly I can't say in what sense).
“Because Sanremo is Sanremo”, and perhaps this is precisely the problem. Sanremo is Sanremo, and has been for 62 years, it is a very old show that is always the same, profoundly tired and Christian Democrat, anchored to the cultural canons of generalist TV which proceed and update themselves at the pace of a sleeping turtle. while the obsessive calculation of audience ratings transforms the audience at home into a collective algorithm of inert consent to an illusory state culture (?).
And yet, despite this, despite being a dinosaur outside of any real time, somehow Sanremo remains an involuntarily updated mirror of Italy, a show below sea level that draws an unreal and self-referential world and speaks a language of its own and which, however, despite all this, still manages, monstrous and distorting mirror, to reflect a culturally impoverished country.
One feels conniving to write about it, accomplices in some way to the redundant celebration of the useless, of an event by now merely tautological (“Why Sanremo is Sanremo”), which is an event only as such, by acquired right and not renewed. For a week he occupies newspapers and television, and then disappears in his vanity because nothing has changed (and everything, indeed, always remains ready for the eternal return of Pippo Baudo), a perverse leopard still convinced that he is the salt of the world, escorted on his slow annual journey towards media oblivion by the usual tired little theater of precooked controversies (with trimming of commissioners) and the perennial chorus of voices, like this one, which deprecate, criticize, denounce boredom and senselessness. And then they come back, this year like every year, to deprecate and criticize and denounce, waiting for we don't know what. Maybe that from the last row, shy, another one will rise, with a different voice, to say that we can be better than this.
