Black may be half, but the masterpiece is 100 per cent

I receive the news of the arrival, from 22 November, of a limited edition box set (999 copies), for hardened audiophiles, with vinyl LP. Shot to the heart, it is the legendary Nero A Metà by Pino Daniele, which becomes the first title in a 'series of publications dedicated to maximum fidelity of sound and packaging'. Directors Alessandro Massara, president of Universal Music Italia, and Pino 'Pinaxa' Pischetola, one of the most important sound engineers around. I won't add any more technical details: nor do I know anything about weighting, cutting and pressing and similar devilry and, above all, I don't need to. What counts, really, is the poignant memory of that album, sounds rolling through the speakers and headphones, that mystical photo of Cesare Monti to a Neapolitan big guy who, in just a few years, with obstinacy and irony, is disrupting Italian music (and in fact was mockingly peeing on the slow river, in the inside photos). That atmosphere, in short, of rage, vivacity, disillusionment and hope, redemption and enchantment, dialect transformed into instant poetry, tanto l'aria s'adda cagnà, which from the South, at last, came overbearingly, delicately (with immortal verses already in previous albums: 'Chi tene 'o mare 'ossaje nun tene niente') and pissed off: 'io vado controvento' (I go against the wind). And to say that he was only 25 years old Pino, at the time of Nero a Metà - which will also be the title of a documentary dedicated to him by Stefano Senardi, due on 4 January 2025 - even though he had already written the anthropological, and immortal, anthem Napul'è. There was (there is: those who 'caught' him back in the day know this) an irredeemable diversity that he carried with him, they were years of change and of a 'resistance' that he personified: he did not carry a message, he embodied it. And, now, fatally, he comes knocking again: 'Passa 'o tiempo e che fa / se la mia voce cambierà /passa 'o tiempo e nun te cride cchiù / e ti resta solo quello che non vuoi / e non ti aspetta niente perché lo sai / che passa 'o tiempo ma tu non crescere mai'. A prophecy, an illusion, a nostalgia. A masterpiece.