Less Tradition but Same Fierce Competition at San Remo

SAN REMO, Italy —  The vocalist wore green rubber pants and croaked to the classical punk sound of a violin, cello, bass and saxophone. “Your smile disgusts me,” he bellowed, turning a well-known fable on its head. “Kiss me. I want to turn back into a toad.”

Who let this scruffy quintet into Italy’s premier song festival?

Few institutions better exemplify Italians’ fear and loathing of change than the San Remo Festival. A striking feature of the songs in this annual contest, first staged in 1951, has been the monotony of their sentimental lyrics and bel canto style.

But this year’s festival, which ended last Sunday, produced evidence that Italy’s musical mainstream is becoming slightly less Italian.

The winners, 1989 champion Anna Oxa in the veterans’ competition and teen idol Alex Britti in the newcomers’ division, were true to Italian tradition, dazzling judges with the brilliance and purity of their vocal cords.

But Quintorigo, the iconoclastic quintet of 20-something punks, took the critics’ award for newcomers and the overall prize for best arrangement among 28 finalists in the five-day contest.

Just as novel, and nearly as popular with critics, was hip-hop artist Elena Cataneo, 21, who slinked across San Remo’s glitzy stage on the Italian Riviera in dreadlocks, baggy jeans and orange-tinted glasses.

“In general, Italian people love a good melody; you end the melody singing ‘lalalalaaaaa’ and you will always win San Remo,” said Max Gazze, another unconventional artist who sang his way into the competition.

“But the festival is trying to adapt to the tastes of younger Italians, and those tastes are more atuned to American, British and international music,” he added. “They want to hear something more international from Italian singers.”

In the country’s nightclubs and recording studios, artists do produce neo-folk, jungle, hip-hop, new wave and other sounds jarring to the traditional Italian ear. They just don’t sell many records.

For a people who claim to love music, in fact, Italians buy few recordings of any kind--one per person in 1997, compared to 3.9 in Britain and 3.6 in the United States. Many Italians tape their favorites off radio or television; officials say 20% of all records sold in Italy are pirated.

A bigger problem is Italy’s atomized distribution system. Most retail outlets are family-owned shops, and that makes nationwide promotion more expensive than most records could recoup in sales.

But Italy does have a national TV network, RAI, and San Remo is its biggest annual spectacle. Wrapped in a splashy, over-the-top variety show featuring supermodels and Nobel Prize winners--Mikhail Gorbachev was on this year--the song competition draws 17 million viewers in a country of 57 million.

“San Remo is a giant promotional machine,” said Marco Cestoni, general manager of Virgin Records in Italy. “There’s no better way to create a star.”

Indeed, the festival launched Domenico Modugno’s 1958 single “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare),” which went on to sell 22 million copies worldwide, and the mercurial career of Andrea Bocelli, the 1994 winner here and a contender at last month’s Grammy Awards.

Record companies spend up to half their budgets promoting contestants, who each compete with a single song never performed before. From among hundreds vying to get into the show, a jury this year chose 26 artists affiliated with Virgin, Universal, Sony and other labels.

The two remaining spots went to Quintorigo and Cataneo, winners of a sing-off staged by the San Remo Academy of Song among 1,500 artists who had never cut records.

With so much hanging on one performance, the pressure is enormous. In 1967, a singer named Luigi Tenco shot himself to death after losing here.

“We’ve been nervous for months,” said Quintorigo vocalist John De Leo. But rather than winning, he admitted, the idea was to mock the musical establishment.

“This song expresses our determination to be ourselves,” he said. “If becoming a prince means accepting certain traditions, we’d rather remain toads.”