Donatella Rettore

In my belly I've got a powder keg

("Sayonara")

Donatella had shattered into the blue or, worse, hanged herself over the bidet. But even what remained of her, the icy Miss Rettore, in 1982 was displaying unsettling suicidal tendencies. Commercial ones, first and foremost. Because only a kamikaze born like the Venetian singer could come up with (in Italy, no less) a concept album about the extreme act of taking one's own life, seasoned on top of that with philosophical musings on Japanese culture. But, as we know, the blonde vamp from Castelfranco Veneto has never gone in for half measures. So, in a kind of ideal war against herself, against her detractors and against the record industry that was trying to cage her, she decides to dress up as a samurai and stake everything on one throw. Even if, worst case, it meant taking a razor blade and slitting her wrists. From the sensational Estasi to harakiri. In less than a year.

Who knows, perhaps it was precisely the incredible run of the previous three years (an LP and three singles in the Italian top 10, plus victory at the Festivalbar with the song "Donatella") that gave her the confidence to allow herself such free experimentation. More likely, a trip to London during the Falklands War contributed, acting as a detonator of ideas, cues and reflections. The fact remains that "Kamikaze Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" is undoubtedly the most extreme and daring record by an artist who had already been on the scene since the 70s and who had never hidden her nonconformist spirit — see the 1977 Sanremo performance of "Carmela", a song steeped in political references to the Spanish Revolution, or that same year's "Caro preside", with its allusions to paedophilia and sexual harassment in the workplace. A often-forgotten taster of that irreverent cocktail served up starting with her first hit, "Splendido splendente".

This time, though, the former Donatella — one of the first Italian singer-songwriters, it's worth remembering — dares even more, openly challenging national hypocrisies and taboos with surreal, nonsensical and illuminating lyrics, written together with her inseparable husband Claudio Rego. But the album's sound also marks a new milestone for Italian song, through fascinating hybrids with the international synth-wave of bands like Blondie, Devo, Omd and Ultravox. Not that this was entirely new, to be fair, because beyond the easy-hook refrains, the disco/synth-pop/ska rhythms and the scandalous double entendres of songs like "Kobra" (which kept the tabloids of the day busy, along with her rivalry with Loredana Bertè), Miss Rettore had already done much to modernize Italian pop, reshaping it with her sharp scalpel into more glamorous and captivating forms, in tune with the vividly colourful spirit of the wild Eighties ("one of the first artists in colour", as Davide Bassi called her in his prescient monograph on these pages). A futurist diva of ambiguous sexuality ("Man or woman, ageless, sexless, she will grow") and an aestheticizing mask ("a shining vanity"), born from a cold fusion of glam, camp, new wave and new romantic currents.

The cover art already offers a clear summary of the album's themes: a Rettore in miniskirt, tall boots and a Japanese-style headband sits on some tyres, in front of a Mitsubishi Ki, a twin-propeller aircraft used in the Second World War by the Japanese air force, while in the background, against a yellowish sky, a kamikaze plane explodes amid smoke and debris. Suicide, then, read above all as an act of honour, like that of the aviators of the Land of the Rising Sun who hurled themselves with their own planes against the enemy, with the sole aim of killing, without fear of losing their own lives too.

Japanese philosophy – also explained through a small glossary of the more obscure terms included with the record – is the focus mainly of the first half of the tracklist, with tracks that musically evoke the atmospheres of the Land of the Rising Sun too. Among these, "Sayonara" is the most captivating, with its catchy riff synthesized from an ancient Japanese nursery rhyme that, amid rumbles and explosions, sets the stage for the entrance of a vocally explosive Rettore delivering her declaration of war, scarred by a rock guitar: “Io vivo di conquiste e di battaglie/ Mia moglie intanto lucida medaglie/ Chi si accontenta di pescar conchiglie/ Non ha nel sangue il mio rumore di ferraglie”. Meanwhile, the opening track "Karakiri" draws light from the aforementioned act of suicide, only to reveal its dead ends and unfathomable paradox, in a swirl of shadows staged by drunken keyboards.

Vorrei scappare, ma i peschi sono in fiore

La mano trema, Kaishaku aspetta me!

E questa terra, già vomita preghiere

Sento alle spalle, un grido: “Ahe!”

Karakiri!

The darkness then takes the shape of a storm at the start of "Oblio", before the narrative evokes surrender to God. A moment of reckoning underpinned by tragic piano, with the usual mocking riff cutting in here and there like a sliding tackle. Rettore plays among mirrors. The projections of her elusive self are suddenly cloaked in resignation. She is thus both prey and executioner of a comeback that isn't afraid to reckon with the banality of reality. A condition that, at the end of the day, still keeps her on the ropes. Her liberation therefore requires an unusual heresy. Donatella thus borrows from the beauty case of Western society a blade to turn only seemingly against herself.

"Lamette" remains to this day the manifesto of her sharp-tongued, mocking, out-of-line persona. A song that revisits the theme of the opening title track, flipping it into a faster tempo and a more charged mood. Barely three minutes in which the female counterpart of a Joker takes centre stage, mocking her own demons by rubbing them against her own body, in an irresistible new wave dance that would become iconic and inevitably influential.

Mi gioco tutto con candore e furia

E allora stop!

Senti come affetta questa lametta

Da destra verso il centro, zap!

Dall’alto verso il basso, zip!

Che gusto, che innesto!

In the second half of the tracklist, we find more disorienting, nonsensical songs, in keeping with her trademark dark humour. Such is the case with "Garage", whose blazing opening line says it all: “Io lavoro giù al garage/ Non ho certo un bel ménage/ Con il grasso e con la tuta/ Sono una donna unta”. What follows, over hammering punk-wave rhythms, is a caustic portrait of a woman subjugated by male-dominated culture, symbolised by a garage we imagine plastered with calendars of nude women, where seedy customers “con la mancia hanno il diritto di toccarmi il culo”. After the physical violence of war and bombing, then, comes the psychological violence inflicted on women, often unwitting victims whom Rettore, with her cynical sarcasm, almost seems to be pushing toward some form of rebellion – as, according to some interpretations, female homosexuality itself might also represent.

“Sangue del mio sangue”, on the other hand, sounds like it came out of a night of recording with Squallor. A long night in which she sets Bigazzi and his singing cohorts straight, leaving on the table lyrics that are elevated but no less erotic for it. Donatella stirs the waters of her “eighth sense”; her “mouth opens, full of air and saliva”. It's “the eternal hunger of a living soul” writhing amid the “clear screams of damned souls”, all for what is, after all, a rather theatrical little march. These are the last fireworks of a pyrotechnic show that, in the closing ballad “Giulietta”, turns into pure tenderness, transplanting the theme of honour suicide from Japan to the most classic of Shakespearean romantic tragedies.

A wild card in early-80s Italian discography, perhaps even too far ahead of the horizons of its time - but also prescient in shaping into a mainstream key that Japanese imagery which was just starting to take off back then - “Kamikaze Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” wouldn't match the numbers of its predecessors in Italy, but it still managed to break into the top 20. And the later (not to say belated) reassessment of Donatella Rettore's entire body of work through a postmodern pop lens will of course put her boldest recorded harakiri right at the front.

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13/03/2022