Maneskin

But why should we care about Måneskin? It would be easy to answer "we shouldn't," but it's inevitable to get curious when a global phenomenon takes shape. And these four kids from Rome are exactly that, no doubt about it. Just open up a good old social media platform from the newly-minted Meta family to see it for yourself. In short: music industry insiders look as gaga as grandparents with a newborn grandchild. They whip out their phones and show relatives, strangers at the supermarket, random people on the subway, photos of Måneskin — "our boys." The patriots seem to have found a banner for exporting Italian-ness to the universe; a front line against Drew Barrymore, trenches dug against Jimmy Fallon.

Until recently, these kids were a mystery that belonged only to us. For a couple of years they simply looked like the latest incarnation of Italian-style Locura from "Boris," but in just a few months they've done something no other artist in the history of Italian music had ever even dared to imagine. And what's happened can't be chalked up solely to winning a couple of TV song contests. As the lens pulled back and the picture grew wider, the four Romans clearly tapped into some kind of global need. But a need for what, exactly?

With little more than a caricatured image, the band has pulled off the biggest revolution the Italian record industry has ever seen. A dream so huge it barely seems real: Europe, the US, American TV, duets with legends, opening for the Rolling Stones, world tours and sold-out shows. It's easy to imagine a not-too-distant future full of arenas and stadiums across the globe. Bigness: today's watchword. More is more, global village, New York and Parioli just a stone's throw apart, whether it's exporting a riff that draws crowds together or spreading a pandemic that scatters them.

But the band's runaway success has nothing to do with the music. Their fame exploded off the back of a cover of a cover and a song griping about teachers, built on a riff any random YouTuber guitarist could have improvised in a video ten years ago. And, to our own astonishment, we find ourselves actually missing Greta Van Fleet, who, for all their laughable derivativeness, come across by comparison as downright cerebral and layered.

Even though their output barely scrapes a passing grade even by revivalist standards, the real problem with the Italian Fab Four isn't the music. The actual headache is that these four twenty-somethings appeal to every generation.

Kids like them, teenagers like them, and so do their parents. Grandparents like them too, because today's grandparents aren't the ones who lived through World War II anymore, but rather the ones born in the thick of it, who either witnessed rock up close or made it themselves. They've got legions of defenders, keyboards and smartphones in hand, aged 50, 8, 60, 25, 70, 13, 10, 19.

But who do Måneskin actually sing for? Who do they play for? It's strange. They're an image that freezes a gorgeous aesthetic cliché out of time, out of space, out of content, and out of any depth whatsoever.

From an empirical standpoint, they don't really seem to represent anything or anyone. They're Italian, but they make English-language music. They sing partly in their mother tongue and partly in English. They do covers part of the time and originals the rest. They're from Rome, but nothing about that comes through except in their accents. They're 20 years old in 2021, but they make music that was already considered prehistoric by the end of the Seventies. They don't belong to any place, nor to any era.

Many have compared them to Abba, and at first that parallel might even have seemed convincing. But a closer look makes you think twice. Abba made disco music in the years of disco music. Måneskin, very academically, make a dork-simple hard/funk/rock in the years of post-everything.

And the result is a collective worldwide hysteria that (allowing for a sense of proportion, but come on, you get the idea) verges on Beatlemania (and there's even someone who's actually gone so far as to compare them to the Beatles, namely their mentor Manuel Agnelli). The worldwide attachment to this retro-obsession is so morbid it almost suggests some form of collective psychosis. So what's going on?

Rock's grandfathers, the giants we've worshipped for years in the cabins of our compact cars, seemed unable to wait to hand out candy and pat some potential grandchild on the cheek. From a thoroughly senile Iggy Pop to Little Steven, from Chris Frantz (sigh) to Simon Le Bon, plenty of them have pinned Damiano, Victoria, Thomas and Ethan's drawings to the fridge. "You know, I used to play too, you remind me of myself as a kid," they all seem to say at some big New Year's party. And in Italy it's even worse. From Agnelli himself to Massarini, from Guglielmi to Castaldo, among the veterans of alternative and classic rock the general mood seems to be always the same: they made it! Long live music, long live rock! "Our boys"!

Meanwhile, the (few) kids in elementary school who play music want to learn their bland riffs, and twenty-somethings blast them at full volume outside universities.

But it's precisely this across-the-board success of Måneskin that conceals something distorted.

They give it their all. Damiano sings like a dream, Victoria is a bass heroine with a tremendous girl power that surely means something significant for girls the world over. Thomas and Ethan are the school nerds who made it.

They give it their all, as we were saying, to present themselves as "a sign of the times," to make their mark riding the wave of the here and now, but the problem is that the band pushes one notch further toward the classicization of that mushy mess we've always called rock. Classicization, meaning its definitive embalming inside a nice eternal display case. Its being put on show, its actual funeral, complete with a tribute to the corpse.

Their staunch defenders (or followers, if you prefer: fans no longer exist) see in them the rebirth of something that, as kids, before they'd ever heard of the tax office, they used to call rock. But everything changes so that the riffs can stay the same. The band is the latest proof that rock has met the same fate as jazz, opera, or the visual arts.

Movements of rupture are a young person's game, until they become reactionary.

Bebop was music for degenerates to anyone born in the mid-1800s. Rock was scandalous to anyone born in the early 1900s. Early punk was disgusting to, well, almost everyone. And today's trap is likewise a proudly generational language of detachment. Movements have always worked this way: if your parents like it, something's wrong.

Yet fifteen-year-olds the world over are diving headlong into worship of a band barely older than themselves that nonetheless sounds like what their parents and grandparents used to listen to. Freud, where are you?

Today bebop is clearly ancient history. Charlie Parker and electric Miles Davis? Same thing. Baroque music is like the Mona Lisa. Picasso is like Raphael, Basquiat is like Van Gogh. Led Zeppelin like Nirvana. Does anyone remember the individual revolutions these artists represented? It's all one big dust cloud called "classic."

The classic is the past, and the past is one and the same tangled skein. It's art history. And where there's art history, there's a museum, and Måneskin are nothing more than one room in that museum, a touring Louvre of rock culture, what rock will be from now on. More than that: what our memory of the entire music of the twentieth century will be from now on. Seen from this angle, these kids don't even represent the end. They represent the beginning of what comes after the end. The beginning of a future in which music no longer even speaks of its own present, in which art is simply a memory, speaking of memory. That's the worldwide need driving the success of this touring super-musical dressed up as a band: the need for a reassuring absence of the present.

Anyone who was 15 in the early 2000s knows that "the death of rock" was already a pretty overused refrain back then. The four champions of "X Factor" confirm a further shift that's been underway for quite some time now, ever since everything became liquid, ever since the Net enveloped us: it's not just rock that's dead, it's the generational need to build a musical identity that's over. Music "as we know it" isn't a genre, it's an attitude. It's not rock, pop music or pop: it's a bigger melting pot, it's the record-industry era. A dead language killed off by the silicon age. Something to study in school and watch reenacted in historical tributes, slowly broken down by the "destruction of the various particular realities," the one true guiding principle of globalization.

Kids today have no use for music, for a movement that belongs only to them. In this sense, the lack of any truly meaningful stylistic proposal becomes an asset for Måneskin: people don't like them for the music, but in effect for a kind of non-music, for an extraordinary, liberating, supreme ability to make absolutely no decisions, to impose nothing. To be generic.

In a globalized, futuristic, pandemic-stricken world, Måneskin are the perfect soundtrack for diluted alienation. A Frankenstein show out of step with its own time and place, one that shuns depth in favor of a masked ball (of life), made for kids who are aging in place of their own parents. A near future in which music is no longer a beacon in the search for identity, no longer marks out any counter-culture through which to find hope in a desperate world. It's just a blurred, distant shadow, drained of all emotion and put on display in books. Nothing more than photographs from the past to adorn the Metaverse that, relentless, is coming to get us.

Ride the wave of great music

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