Madly in love with Italy

Having Italy to return back into the fold and reenter the Eurovision Song Contest has been pretty much every fan’s wet dream for over a decade now. Their absence from the competition has been such a stretch for most of us to endure and it has left us far beyond the point where we start to idealize Italy’s previous contributions, rating them as better, stronger, more groundbreaking and of bigger importance than how they perhaps were judged by their present.

Perhaps that’s why most people couldn’t deny their disappointment when Italy’s comeback entry was revealed a couple of months ago. Did we wait such a long time for this? This isn’t at all what we expected! But what did we expect exactly? Cause isn’t this jazzy number pretty much as Italian as it gets? What do we really know about the contemporary Italian music scene nowadays? Can you with your hand on your heart look us in the eyes and tell us you pay much attention to it? Don’t think so.

There’s plenty of aspects we absolutely love about this song. Then there’s a few things we hate and a couple of features we just don’t understand the first thing about. That’s funny, because this describes exactly how we feel about Italy in general. It captures all those mixed feeling we have towards this country, how very appropriate we think.

We love the fact that the bosses over at the Italian broadcaster clearly didn’t give a tosser about what kind of entry the hardcore fans wanted. It’s a daring and cheeky move, which might pay off or just as likely crash and burn. Genre-wise we would label the song as something reminding us of the Neapolitan cantautore tradition with exponents such as Pino Daniele and Paolo Conte, not too shabby in other words. What bugs us with this entry is kinda hard to pinpoint, but it does have a tendency to impress us less and less. That’s the danger with songs being too much in your face, we might grow tired of it too quickly after the novelty has worn off. And come on, going half and half in English and Italian is such a sell out, we feel jilted by that move. The sequence with Robert De Niro and Monica Bellucci in the promo video we don’t get at all, and yeah we know, it’s a show off since the song was actually included in the soundtrack of the film Manual Of Love 3. But to include these clips in the promo video looks corny and makes us think the song can’t stand on its own feet.

And a small piece of advise for Raphael, he should really do something about his hair. Should score him a few extra points just to get that sorted, we reckon.

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