Aside from the jovial air, the extravagant look, the non-sense jokes, the dance-like rhythms, and the dark glasses that he never abandons, Dargen D'Amico is the "social commitment" part of the Sanremo festival.
A not too invisible thread links his 2022 participation with Dove si balla to this year's participation with Onda Alta.
There he sang "Mediterranean nightmares, what a bad end you stop at the border", this time "we are more than life preservers on the boat. The high wave is coming, we just have to pray until it passes".
Migrants, yesterday and today.
"Nomadism is a theme that belongs to me - says the 43-year-old artist on the eve of the singing event -. The familiar one, for me who have parents originally from Sicily, and the one that involves others. Because we all struggle to understand which is home ours. In 2023, migrant arrivals exceeded 150 thousand units. Emigration is an essential part of existence. No one was genetically born here."
A theme that develops throughout the week of Sanremo, with the Dargen Newsstand which every day at 10am will distribute a comic strip created by Daniel Cuello and at 6.30pm will host meetings with industry experts such as Cecilia Strada (ResQ Onlus) or Alessandro Porro (SOS Mediterranee rescuer), but which also has its own development within the album Ciao America (Island Records), which comes out on February 2nd on the platforms two years after Nei dreams nobody is monogamous and consists of 13 tracks with the collaborations of Guè, Rkomi, Beatrice Quinta and Vincenzo Fasano, drawing on the Italian songwriting tradition with continuous research that passes through genres, from electronic, to pop, to classical music.
A layered album, which highlights the anxieties that belong to contemporary society.
"Hello America is a cumulative title - explains Dargen D'Amico -, when I was working on the songs I noticed that there was a tendency in writing to references to family ties. To mine, when as a boy, with a certain youthful lightness, I called Hello America moment, the occasion in which letters from emigrant relatives were read. But it is also a synthesis of what I do: Italian music that takes advantage of some musical styles of the USA, without the style prevailing. And, finally, it seemed to me to summarize this moment that the world is experiencing, with the passage of the (economic) scepter from the West to the East, and therefore Hello America.
A photograph of a sunset that also fixes our country, now at the mercy of inaction for at least 30-40 years."
Dargen divides his time between writing and producing, "but I enjoy producing and not writing. Yet producing doesn't clarify anything for me, while writing puts me in front of answers you weren't always looking for, it gives you the chance to meditate. Writing is a sort of personal hygiene for throwing things out. Even as a teenager it allows you to solve without knowing what."
The theme of nomadism, of migration, is also the basis of the choice of covers for the evening in Sanremo: together with the BabelNova Orchestra it will pay homage to the music of Ennio Morricone (The Crisis), with the lyrics of his songs Modigliani (story of an Italian who emigrates abroad, and also the first piece - discarded - which he presented in Sanremo, "I was always curious to understand how the machine worked") and Dove si balla.
"It's an attempt to give another point of view to tell the same theme in more depth."
Because Dargen doesn't believe in limits, much less those set by the music market.
"If I can go to Sanremo, it means that there are no limits. Even if in the end I almost ended up doing this job by chance.
I was convinced that I would write for Italian cinema, but cinema wasn't so convinced."
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