Ppseudonyms in San Remo. Perhaps today Lucio Battisti would call himself Batti and Gigliola Cinquetti would be Mezzochilo or Ola Five. The banal time of names and surnames is over. They don’t tell a story. What is there instead for Myss Keta, Ditonellapiaga, Salmo, Young Signorino, Highsnob, Ernia, Dargen D’Amico. Ghemon was inspired by the cartoon Lupine IIIprecisely to the samurai Goemon Ishikawa. Tedua (Mario Molinari) chose Albanian (“Te dua” means “I love you”). In the world of rappers, the noun is a creative act, a redefinition of oneself, say sociologists. A bit like the double identities of superheroes. Therefore artistic baptism is more of an identity than one thinks and should not be underestimated. But it took a while to get to Sanremo, where Little Tony and Bobby Solo were the pinnacle of invention.
Pseudonym competition in Sanremo 2023
This year, out of 28 entries in the competition (22 big and 6 young), at least half are accompanied by fantasios pseudonymsi, funny, cryptic. Someone is more interesting than songs. Blanco (Riccardo Fabbriconi)last year’s winner, owes its name not to Spanish but to a lactose intolerance revealed by his friend MohamedEgyptian pizza maker…
In the style of American rappers (Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy, 50 Cent, Dr Dre, etc.) we have Sethu, Will, Olly, Madame, Ariete, Ultimo (which could come first)Lazza, Mr. Rain, Colla Zio, Coma_Cose, Tananai, LDA. Better Mattia Balardi or Mr. Rain, thirty year old who composes the best songs when it rains? (who knows how he gets them during the drought).
Aries, the Ariadne who looks at the stars
Ice Ariadnewho in Sanremo will sing the melancholy and reflective Sea of trouble written with the indie songwriter Kolkata (alias Edoardo D’Erme), says that in 2019, sitting on the bed, she was looking for a stage name and thought about the zodiac sign: she was born on March 27th. Friends already called her Ari, it was enough to add three letters (ete) and look at the stars. Do you believe in horoscopes? “No, but I’m also the one who sees a description of Aries and thinks, Madonna, it’s really me.” In any case, the astrologers agree. Aries is the lucky sign of 2023.
The “glue” of Milan and the codes of Madame
Madame is certainly cooler than Francesca Calearo that cuts short on the name, obtained, he claims, by chance, from a code generator. More serious the decryption of Colla Zio, a young underground group (all under 25) competing with I do not feel like. Colla stands for “collective”, “Zio” stands for “Milan”. Andrea (Armo) Arminio, Andrea (Mala) Malatesta, Francesco (Lampo) Lamperti, Tommaso (Berna) Bernasconi, Tommaso (Petta) Manzoni, are five: «A collective, a situation, a thing, a glue, in fact». This summer they explained to Music Fun that “by dint of going around Milan and making collections for beers, bam!, the name came out by itself”.
Sanremo : Casino Theater of Sanremo . Final evening Sanremo Giovani 2022 . In the photo: Colla Zio
When the pseudonym is the fault of the grandfather
From Tananai (Alberto Cotta Ramusino), failed architect, we already know a lot. Last year in Sanremo he finished last with Casual sex and it was his fortune (27 million streams). In 2014 it was called “Not for Us”, then, after the manager changed, it was reborn as Tananai, nickname received from grandfather Pino: in Bergamo/Brescia dialect it means “useless object” but also, by extension, silly, stupid, petty pest.
Instead Marco DeLaurifrom Savona (metal + punk + hip hop), chose Sethuinspired by a famous Nile album, At the Gate of Sethu, or the gates of the Egyptian Underworld, manned by a thousand disquieting deities, gatekeepers and heralds. But Sethu, fortunately, is more interested in music than Egyptology. From the Underworld we come to the vegetative state with i Coma_Things (couple on stage and in life, pop stars with Flames in the eyes), pseudonym squared. Fausto Zanardelli, who first renamed himself Oedipus and then Fausto Lama, met Francesca Mesiano, former California, former DJ (they were clerks in a bag shop), and together they searched for the word that defined a state of mind. Coma was perfect, and Cose «fitted us». In Sanremo 2023 they sing The farewell (not between them we hope, they are cute).
On stage with the name of mom
Rosa Chemical, on Instagram Gipsiboirosa, model for Guccipolitically incorrect trapper, is at the registry office Manuel Franco Rocati of Grugliasco (Turin), with the year of birth, 1998, written on the forehead. Rosa is the beautician mother, Chemical a reference to the American band My Chemical Romance, born after 11 September: the singer Gerard Way sees the collapse of the Twin Towers, writes a song about it and forms a metal-emo-horror group which in 2002 tells, among other things, vampires in love (you know Twilight?). But the intellectual property of Chemical Romance must be credited to writer Irvine Welshthat of TrainspottingFor Ecstasy, a volume that collects three short novels with stories bordering on delirious, violent and without a happy ending. In Sanremo Rosa Chemical brings Made in Italy about sex, fluidity and polyamory, but without Welsh’s desperation, according to those who have already heard it.
Final of Sanremo Giovani Rosa Chemical
If inspiration comes from legends
Less tiring is the exegesis of colander (Lorenzo Urciullo, formerly of The Last Snack), name inspired by a popular Sicilian legend of the twelfth century, also sung by Otello Profazio. Nicola (Cola da Messina), called Colapesce for his ability to resist underwater, saw that one of the three columns on which Sicily rested was about to collapse, he decided to stay in the sea to support it, and it is still there. Possible interpretations: heroism, sacrifice, immortality.
Let’s cut it (name or surname)
Someone goes on simple, elaborating / cutting the surname, like Olly (Federico Olivieri), scion of the MTV generation, Will (William Busetti) e Lazza (Jacopo Lazzarini) or Zzala for those familiar with the linguistic inversions of rap, a precociously talented pianist (first single at 15) with Chopin tattooed on his calf. As Shari Boring, who had no doubts from a very young age: the surname was gone. Or how LDAnot the initials of a new drug, but of Luca D’Alessio, son of the legendary Gigiwhich has kept only the initials of the family.
Someone kept their name and surname in full: Leo Gassmanwith his family tree in full view, without suffering the encumbrance of his father and grandfather, but also Marco Mengoni (favorite) e Gianluca Grignani. No demographic contortion, what a relief.
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