Why at 90, Ornella Vanoni is still a model of freedom in pop

Time is not a straight line. None of us has ever experienced it like this. Time is a circle: we live it every day, every year, when a season changes, when day follows night and vice versa. Of course, lives begin and at a certain point end, like the thread that the Moirai weave and at a certain point, inexorably, cut. And yet, within this small segment of history in which we live, we are continually tempted to see the circularity of things. Music is the only art that can delude us into thinking that these geometries coexist: every song has a beginning and an end, but inside it is full of recursive structures, hooks like a leitmotif or a chorus that bring us back to the starting point. And no music manages to capture this squaring of the line better than pop: an infinitesimal fragment of time, two or three minutes, to autosuggest that after the tail, things always return to the head. A magic ring from which we cannot look away. After all, if we still talk about “records” even in the era of the dematerialization of formats, it must mean something. Perhaps precisely because of this ontological contagion, music as a cultural macrosystem also goes on in cycles: we talk about fashions and we huff and puff because the eyes of nostalgia make us believe that there are no more original ideas, but the truth is that as social and cultural animals we need to regularly update our point of view on a given issue, to do a check on the state of our aesthetic values. Of these cycles, Ornella Vanoni has seen a lot in her 90th birthday today. And precisely because of what we have just said, now that the singer is preparing to write another chapter in her long story, her example can help us orient ourselves.

Precisely because it lives in inexorable cycles, pop does not tolerate maturity.let alone old age: while for almost all the arts we appreciate the “mature” phase of a career, in music we reason the opposite. It is marketing that pushes us to reason this way, for at least 60 years now: pop music is a fast consumer product, made for young people and their attention spans have always been very short; once one cycle ends, another immediately begins, like disposable bottles. But it hasn’t always been this way, because the proposal of music for adults has also found rather central spaces in the imagination and in the market. And few decades have openly embraced this adult spirit like the ’70s, probably the decade that best allows us to frame the greatness and importance of Ornella Vanoni.

When in 1976 he released his masterpiece album La voglia la pazzia l’incoscienza l’allegria with Toquinho and Vinicius De Moraes, Ornella Vanoni has already passed the age of forty and at least two artistic lives. Brazilian music, which she has embraced for about ten years and which has become her trademark after her unrivaled version of L’appuntamento, seems to allow her to perfectly embody an era where everything, suddenly, has become terribly serious and personal: pop stars are elusive; bands are all the rage and their music is often impenetrable, yet it breaks through in the charts; a feeling that the best is behind her creeps in – after all, it is the decade in which the soundtrack of American Graffiti, a tapestry of a golden age in the form of a compilation, is also very successful in Italy. Looking through the charts of the time and seeing Baglioni and Battisti, Barry White and Papetti, De Gregori and De André, Pink Floyd and Pooh dominate, makes one suspect that a gap had opened up between the generations that even the little bit of very mature disco music that had arrived at that point in Italy was unable or did not aspire to fill.

It seems like we are talking about a non-existent fantasy, given how we are used to the media power of (super)young people today. In 1977 Ornella Vanoni tries something that only Mina had dared to do a few years earlier: a double concept album, but fully pop. His project, two LPs entitled Io dentro and Io fuori created in collaboration with the New Trolls, showed off the artist’s two faces: on one side the smiling and sensual mask, on the other the tearful and serious one. The basic ambiguity of the profession of singing songs, apparently frivolous and childish, acquires a meaning that is anything but banal in that decade so , and not exactly within the reach of any boy or girl with high hopes. This approach to a profession apparently so frivolous and childish as singing songs is exactly the reason why Vanoni’s example is still valid. And the fact that Vanoni’s next project starts precisely from a song contained in Io fuori cannot be a coincidence.

A new version of the song Ti voglio was released on Fridayrecorded with Elodie and Ditonellapiaga. That song, a perfect example of a disco pop groove built to create a sensation rather than a speech (a “vibe” piece ante litteram) was a rather explicit declaration of intent on the freedom of a woman to love and express herself with her body, and even today it would sound revolutionary. We have seen over and over again, applied to Elodie, the prejudice according to which a woman who shows her body should not be taken seriously artistically, as if those expressive, artistic and – why not? – even promotional choices placed too onerous a mortgage on her future. Even more importantly, within the era in which it came out and in relation to the other tracks (see the “ragazzi nati di ieri” of the splendid We), the fact that the speaker is a mature, adult woman and not a young girl: if today we still have discussions about the sexuality of forty and fifty year olds, we must remember that at least some of the arguments had already been raised by Ornella Vanoni a lifetime ago.

Ornella Vanoni

The figure of the singer has not only not lost credibility celebrating sexuality and the body, but she wrote a new page in her career and in Italian pop culture. And not just with her songs. The year that double LP came out was the same year that Vanoni took part in a very famous photoshoot in Playboy, for which the singer and actress was the artistic director. A courageous and significant choice, if even decades later it is difficult to find an interview in which she is not asked about that fact. Itching curiosity? Maybe, but having put her body at the center of attention as an adult and free woman in ’77 has set an important precedent, thanks to which today we can take with a pinch of salt any argument about the lack of seriousness of an Elodie.

The lack of inhibitions, after all, is part of the charm that still today attracts us to Ornella Vanoni. Today we smile and root for her when we hear her speaking without restraint with Fabio Fazio or from a stage: someone, not very romantically, may even speak of senility. But this freedom is the same that has made her change her artistic course more times than almost all her colleagues, certainly the younger ones who today fear more than anything to move away from their “brand”. Vanoni’s “brand”, on the other hand, is freedom itself.