Vasco Rossi

The track that launched his climb to success, but also the ironic instrument of a revenge served up straight from the country's most mainstream stage. "Vado al massimo", for all its lightness, is a pivotal song in the story of Vasco Rossi's rise to stardom, as well as one of the earliest examples of Italian-style "dissing".
When he took the stage at the Ariston in 1982 with "Vado al massimo", Vasco Rossi was not yet the national phenomenon he would become in the years that followed. He had already released four albums, from "Ma cosa vuoi che sia una canzone" to "Siamo solo noi", by way of "We're not exactly the Americans" and "Colpa d'Alfredo", but his following was still concentrated mainly in the North, across Emilia, Lombardy and Piedmont. Sanremo represented the chance to break out of that local dimension and win over a far wider national audience. As he would recall years later, his goal wasn't just to become known, but also to shake up an environment he saw as stiff and formal: "I wanted to stun them, provoke them, and desecrate that stage with irony and provocation."
Indeed, on that quintessentially mainstream, populist stage, amid rigid rituals, overblown sets and mandatory playback, Vasco came across like an alien. And yet that very stage, seemingly so far removed from his world, would prove decisive for his career. Starting with the "settling of scores", or proto-dissing, aimed at one of his famous detractors, contained right there in "Vado al massimo".

At first glance, the song Vasco Rossi brought to the Ariston stage during the first of his two appearances seems light-hearted, almost summery, laced with reggae inflections that were, in those years, also finding their way into Italian music. A reggae from the Po Valley, so to speak. Behind the apparent breeziness, though, lies a very precise jab. The lyrics feature an enigmatic "tale che scrive sul giornale" ("some guy who writes for the papers"), the target of lines that, at the time, few immediately identified. That "guy", in fact, had a first and last name: Nantas Salvalaggio. A journalist, writer and founder of Panorama, he was one of the most authoritative voices in Italy at the time. In December 1980 he had watched one of Vasco's first television appearances, as a guest on Pippo Baudo's Domenica In performing "Sensazioni forti", and had been scandalized by it. In the pages of Oggi, he published a scathing invective that went well beyond music criticism: “I was sitting in my armchair like the Pope, a nice Joseph Roth book on my knees, when my daughter pressed the button on that cursed box, and on the small convex screen appeared the jovial, Pinocchio-like face of Pippo Baudo. In short, it was 'Domenica in'. Anything to object to? Was it the Baudo-esque vocabulary and mannerisms that bothered me? No, there's worse. I sat through the live segments from Bologna (the stunt-car drivers, the acrobats of the wheel) without trauma, and the suburban choirs from the Giuseppe Verdi theatre in Busseto. I even enjoyed the clowns' bragging antics and the 'commemorative holy cards' of John Lennon. But then, like a handful of guano to the face, appeared a 'little band' that I would gladly send on permanent tour to Siberia, Alaska and Tierra del Fuego – Salvalaggio's article went on – the star of this 'band', which couldn't be more messed-up if it tried, is a certain Vasco. Vasco da Gama? No, Vasco Rossi. To describe him I'd need the pen of a Grosz, a Maccari: a real dimwit, actually a rather ugly dimwit, unsteady on his legs, with the smoked glasses of a zombie, a drunk, a... 'stoner'. One doubt remains: what if he was faking it? What if he wasn't drunk or high at all? No, no: a true artist, even when playing a 'zombie', a gutter tramp, a piece of human wreckage, still puts the spark of genius into it; that leavening that redeems you from the ugliness of the mud, the horror the character embodies. Instead, that wretched Vasco was 'horrid by nature', horrid in the raw state.” The accusation, in short, wasn't just that he was a drug addict, but that he was inciting young people to use drugs. A view fully in tune with the moralistic, conformist rhetoric of an Italy that was gearing up to respond to the turmoil of the Years of Lead with the so-called “backlash”. “I pictured the hundreds of thousands of beardless, submissive kids who soak up whatever comes out of the TV, as if it were cough syrup,” Salvalaggio's reprimand theorized – and he himself was only 58 at the time.

The article caused an uproar and even prompted an unexpected response: that of Novella Rossi, Vasco's mother, who wrote a disarming letter, recalling her family's dignity and the honest work of her husband, who had recently died, defending her son's honesty against accusations she considered gratuitous and offensive: “I have no words, also because I didn't study much and wouldn't know how to make myself understood, but I hope you never have to read such atrocious, brutal and gratuitous insults about one of your own children – Vasco's mother wrote – It must already be sad enough to earn a living the way you do. My husband died not long ago from exhaustion, he was a truck driver his whole life, but he honestly never had to hurt anyone to earn his bread and put his son through school. Vasco is neither a... nor a saint, but he is honest like his father, and that's enough for me. I hope your wife and children can think the same of you. Best regards.”

Vasco, on the other hand, preferred to serve his particular “revenge” cold, savouring it a few months later on the most famous stage in Italy, in front of millions of TV viewers. In the lyrics of “Vado al massimo”, Salvalaggio was turned into a nameless character, the target of a mockery as obvious as it was ironic: “Meglio rischiare che diventare/ come quel tale, quel tale/ che scrive sul giornale”. And then, in the second part of the song, after “vado al massimo” turns into “vado in Messico”, comes the new jibe: “Voglio vedere se là davvero si può volare/ senza rischiare di cadere/ D’incontrare sempre, sempre quel tale/ quel tale che scrive sul giornale”.
A full-blown rapper-style diss, applied to the Italian singer-songwriter tradition. Not the first one, though. Back in 1976, Francesco Guccini had already turned a song into a settling of scores with an adversary. In “L’avvelenata” he had directly called out critic Riccardo Bertoncelli, guilty of having trashed “Stanze di vita quotidiana” and dismissed him as “a has-been artist”: “What can I tell you? Go on then, do as you please, there will always be, you know it well/ a failed musician, a pious soul, a theorist, a Bertoncelli or a priest talking nonsense,” the Maestrone had declared in the closing lines of his song. In 1982, Vasco Rossi picked up that lesson in spirit, but took it to different ground: the poppiest stage in Italian music, that of the Sanremo Festival.

The Sanremo competition, in an edition hosted by Claudio Cecchetto with Patrizia Rossetti, brought him no immediate satisfaction. “Vado al massimo” in fact finished among the last places in the final ranking, won by Riccardo Fogli with “Storie di tutti i giorni”. Technically Vasco didn't finish last, since eight contestants had already been eliminated in previous evenings, among them Claudio Villa, who contested the rules all the way to taking legal action. The real breakthrough for Vasco Rossi would come the following year with “Vita spericolata”: another entry coldly received by the jury, which even ended in second-to-last place, but destined to become a permanent fixture in the collective imagination of Italian music, laying the foundations for a career as a national superstar.
Whether Rossi and Salvalaggio ever reconciled is not known. It's hard even to imagine it, given the gulf between the two – generational and otherwise. What remains is the curious fact of that sardonic dissing ante litteram, which buried once and for all the nineteenth-century notion that a singer could corrupt the young. Or maybe not.

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25/06/2026