May 9th was almost over without any news from Liberato, who for years has chosen that date to reappear, at least with his music, because nobody knows his face, nor his identity.
At 23pm, however, the profile photo on social media changes, the red rose turns black and white and is held, gracefully, by one hand, and a copy, simple, direct, as usual: “Liberato sings again”.
The same succession of small events, small clues, that had accompanied, in 2019, the release of “Liberato”, the debut album that included the first singles distributed on the platform and five new songs presented as five parts of a medium-length film, naturally directed by Francesco Lettieri, who is an integral and fundamental part of the Liberato project, the one who contributed decisively to creating its iconography and, consequently, the viral myth.
This time too, Liberato's seven new songs are presented through five video clips on YouTube, a new medium-length film that has already collected almost one hundred thousand views in about ten hours. He can only be seen in a few sequences, sitting at the piano, still protected by his black bomber jacket, the hood of his sweatshirt covering his head and that white writing, "Liberato", in the font used by Napoli fans for their banners.
Once again Liberato redoes the make-up of Neapolitan neomelodic music, squeezing it until he extracts its romantic essence, with its ancient beauty, mixing it with ultra-modern sounds that however do not lighten its raw and profound poetics in the slightest.
Who Liberato is is a question that even the most loyal audience has stopped asking, there has been talk of Livio Cori, of Davide Panizza, founder of PopX, of the young poet Emanuele Cerullo, some have even hypothesized that he could be an inmate of the juvenile prison of Nisida and some, even, Calcutta.
All hypotheses are probably wrong, but over the years, especially at the beginning, they have inflated the myth of Liberato, who is almost certainly the fruit of the work of a collective, rumours even say he is resident abroad and only of distant Neapolitan origins.
A secret that risked being broken when for two weeks the name of those who enjoy the rights to Liberato's music was freely available on the SACEM website, the French SIAE, which Liberato preferred to rely on for the collection of royalties relating to his work, perhaps precisely to maintain his anonymity.
But the game only serves to keep interest alive in a music-making era in which the product you sell is as important, if not less so, than the packaging you sell it in.
What remains instead is an album that pushes itself once again further, into a musical territory in Italy that is still almost unknown, deserted, that draws an epic and definitive imagery, simple and popular, singer-songwriter even if electronic and contemporary. In a Napoli which, dialect aside, represents the perfect setting for Liberato's timeless stories, a city that manages to be pure avant-garde and at the same time fascinating, engaging, unique vintage.
But above all, the Liberato project removes that cloak of mystery from the mechanisms of current music, conceived, designed, produced, promoted and sold in a new way, which foresees a pop narrative that goes beyond the music itself.
A demeaning modality from a certain point of view, especially for those who are fond of a more classical path and, above all, strongly tied to the music product, a path that rewarded those who did it well and trashed the improvised; but that today presents new and exciting forms of promotion, of communication, important to study to understand perfectly what the new codes of modern discography are.
Article published on May 10, 2022 - 17:59 pm
