Singles and charts

You had to wait until the first days of August to be sure the miracle - or tragedy, take your pick - had actually happened. Saying so any earlier would have been reductive, or at least premature. Put like that, the whole thing might sound like a boomer take, and that word alone is ugly enough that even typing it feels a bit off. Anyway, like it or not, this year Italian summer has no official earworm hit. That's right: not even a silly little tune, like "Sesso e samba" by Tony Effe and Gaia blasted across every channel last year. Absolutely nothing. Just a wave of suggestions, mostly forgettable or vaguely provocative. A title to start with? "Maschio" by Annalisa. And then contenders burned out at the first puff of black smoke, like "Pronto come va?" by The Kolors, or little tunes not suitable for anyone over sixteen, like "Désolée" by the fast-rising Anna.

Some brave soul will say: what about the duets between Fedez and Clara or Serena Brancale and Alessandra Amoroso? The first is stuck at a few million on YouTube, and the other reaches ten, but taken over two months, so really "few" to be taken seriously, and above all negligible compared to the numbers of past summer hits. There's also a potential last-minute hit: "Halo" by Neapolitan rapper Samurai Jay. But it's more of a decent little tune for TikTok dances than a genuine song for the beach umbrella. So what happened? Why hasn't even a new "Italodisco" come along? Has a chain that's been running since 1969 with Riccardo Del Turco, and arguably long before that, really been broken?

The numbers for the singles officially in the running to become the earworm of 2025, compared with last year's, streaming figures being what they're worth, show a thirty percent drop. As Lubrano would say - though of course Anna's fans, and Annalisa's too, won't remember him - the question arises naturally, and in this case the answer is more or less this: "it's the record industry's fault." Nothing more "banal" than that. Because the sheer volume of singles, and especially EPs, unleashed in recent months by the mainstream labels - virtually all of them based in Milan - has saturated a market that was already overflowing with carbon-copy releases.

In just a few years we've gone from barely understanding anything, with her kissing him, who kisses her, who kisses me, to understanding absolutely nothing at all anymore. The earworm of the Italian summer of 2025 is thus a multi-headed creature, or rather a fruit salad of hits from the last one, two, three summers. Maybe even four. From "Devastante" by the pop-"operatic" autotune singer Olly to "Ridere" by the carnival-esque Pinguini Tattici Nucleari, you can jump straight to "Vamos a la Playa" by Righeira. All in the blink of an eye. There's no temporal consistency whatsoever. Thank goodness jukeboxes barely exist anymore, or they'd have short-circuited worse than their old pinball-machine buddies. A drama within the drama, really. What's more, there's no trace of a single verse capable of uniting grandparents and grandchildren, as used to happen every year from June to September. There's no track able to capture the family mood between the shoreline and the dune - not one to sing all together with heartfelt passion, but at least one everyone could recognise themselves in before diving into the water. Because you can hardly picture someone over 50 humming: "Non farti illudere da questo rosa bubblegum/ Se mi fai male, giuro che farò il double". It's honestly unimaginable.

So the very soul of the summer earworm has vanished - the thing that once used to erase the generation gap, like one giant karaoke session. Sorely missing, too, is a Festivalbar to give some meaning to summer melodies. Times have sadly changed, and on TV what dominates now is more or less this: "Temptation Island" (yes, we shudder). It happens because light pop music, as it used to be oddly called, is now confined to bloated festivals sponsored by whichever industrial giant is in charge that year, all indistinguishable from one another and utterly toothless.

What incredibly lifts the spirits of the aforementioned boomers, who need a summer earworm just as much as their kids do, is the impossibly clean-cut face of Alfa with "A me mi piace", i.e. "Me gustas tu" by Manu Chao redone by a high-schooler singing about Sundays at the stadium, self-esteem, serotonin, with some la la las thrown into the bridge just to wrap it up. In short: a watered-down cover of a very old hit, telling us in no uncertain terms that the 2025 summer earworm simply doesn't exist. It's also pointless to think "Chill" by Ghali could be it. We're still nowhere near the record numbers of the past. "Tutta l'Italy" by Gabry Ponte? Don't even try: it's been around for six months already, so it doesn't count.

The situation is thus "tragic", unless all Italians decide together, perhaps on Ferragosto, to listen to Anna, the one true queen of the summer given the numbers, and send her into low orbit. Which, truth be told, is fairly unlikely, given that the country's average age sits around 46 - more or less the age of the writer, who, before wrapping up this piece, listened twice in a row to "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimora, and did so not so much to remember the summer of 1985, but just to go oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh at a strange little breeze in a season that's climatically absurd, unreadable and as undecided as the singles that can no longer manage to tan themselves the way they used to on the beaches of a country that doesn't even have a stupid little tune left to hum under the beach umbrella. That utterly banal little jingle, quickly forgotten on the way home, when you're stuck bumper to bumper like sardines on the Autostrada del Sole, the asphalt brings you back down to earth, and the joy of rolling around in the sand is already a distant memory.

Ride the wave of great music

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