The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘Is Måneskin the Last Rock Band?’

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On a Thursday morning in July, the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way the writer Dan Brook’s generation experienced jazz.The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting in September, Måneskin brought this business to the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — on a multivenue tour, with their first stop at Madison Square Garden.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

I'm Dan Brooks, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. This week's Sunday Read is a story I wrote for the magazine about monoskein. They're a band of four very good-looking Italians in their early 20s who play throwback hard rock music. Honey, are you coming? They sound like a lot of bands from the post-emo era. It's this super-compet competent execution of familiar elements and structures that evoke 2000s rock with what I call an unswung boogie rhythm. So a boogie rhythm is eighth notes

but swung. And bands like Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, they often use boogie rhythms but not swung, played in clean time. Maneskin's tracks, like I Wanna Be Your Slave, I wanna be a teacher, I wanna be a singer, I wanna be a preacher, I wanna be a... and the Eurovision-winning Ziti e Buoni, are hugely popular in continental Europe. They're the biggest international music stars from Italy since Luciano Pavarotti, and they got there by busking on the streets as teenagers and then going on to win a series of talent shows.

Last month, they kicked off a big multi-venue tour of the United States with a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. And what's interesting about this band is that their core fan base is not closely connected to the American critical establishment at all. In fact, critics kind of hate Monoskeen. I first heard of Monoskeen through a scathing review of their most recent album, Rush, on Pitchfork. The article went viral after giving the record a score of 2.0 out of 10, and holding up the band as an example of many generally bad trends in music. The use of multiband compression, the predictable song structures,

the sometimes actively stupid lyrics. So when I looked them up, I was astonished to see how popular they are. They currently claim 8 billion streams across various platforms. As a Gen Xer who grew up in an indie rock versus mainstream rock dichotomy, I was sort of like, well, this is mainstream rock. But then I realized, there's not really any such thing as mainstream rock anymore. The last number one rock single was Nickelback's How You Remind Me in 2001, which makes Gen Z the first generation in about 70 years that has not experienced rock and roll as a form of pop music.

Instead, Monoskeen is making pop music that takes the form of rock, and that's why I was so interested in writing about them. So I flew out to Rome during a heat wave, and I spent many hours with Monoskiin and their impressively large management team. I saw their sold-out shows at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome and the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza in Milan. in Rome and the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza in Milan. On stage, they put on these wildly theatrical, carefully engineered performances filled with pyro and erratic spotlights, all of it emphasizing the return of the big stadium rock show.

One of the values of that performance is to call attention to the artificial or performed nature of it all. Monoskeen wants you to remember that you're watching a show. And it's very much a zero-irony presentation. So here's my article, Is Monoskeen the Last Rock Band? Read by James Patrick Cronin. The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere,

and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking. Not literally everyone, of course, but statistically. As if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures, and car horns known as Italian. To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin, arguably the only rock stars of their generation and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time, coincided with a heat wave across southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July, the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning, the band's vast management team was officially concerned that the night's sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9.30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s, which was too bad because there would be pyro. There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Monaskin's age. The guitarist, Thomas Raggi, played the riff to

Don't Wanna Sleep. The lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David, the band's singer and at age 24 its oldest member, charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria DeAngelis, the bassist, wore a mini dress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raji wore non-porous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Etentorchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise,

they sounded as if Motley Crue had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals. That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Monoskin only managed to confirm how hard rock and roll has to work these days to be noticed, and a viral pitchfork review called their most recent album absolutely terrible at every conceivable level. But this kind of thumbs-up, thumbs-down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin, the name is Danish, you can fire up the internet and add to the more than 9 billion streams

Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, etc. As for whether Måneskin is good, the Gustibus non est disputatum, as previous Italians once said, degustibus non est disputatum, as previous Italians once said, in matters of taste, there can be no arguments. You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience, the culturally, if not personally, familiar commodity of a stadium rock show delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro, 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame

that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine, kicked in on gasoline, a song Måoneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus. Standing alone on that hill, using your fuel to kill, we won't take it standing still, watch us dance. The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock and roll, which has established certain conventions

over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn't have to be real, you probably don't even want it to be, but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it. The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problems of fans' taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adalessed after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form

and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand. same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand, i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation, I'm 46, experienced jazz. The members of Monoskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Monaskin will take this business on a multi-venue tour of the United States, a market where they are considerably less known, whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

I think the genre thing is like, Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. We can do a metaphor. If you eat fish, meat, and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you'll be like,

wow, potatoes, I like potatoes, potatoes are great. But potatoes have been there the whole time. Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy. The implication was that Rock, like the potato, is here to stay. But what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone's favorite? Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is Rocket 88,

recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm band in 1951. It's about a car, and in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock and roll emerged, a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods, and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously. Although, and possibly because rock started as black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British invasion of the mid-1960s, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium progressive era, Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, that now constitutes the bulk of classic rock radio, gave way eventually

to punk, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat, and then glam metal, Twisted Sister, Guns N' Roses, and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans. It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock's cultural hegemony began to wane. As the 90s

progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as rock to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback's How You Remind Me in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the aughts, The Strokes, The Killers, Kings of Leon, constituted rock's last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than number four. Let us say then that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That's a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock's advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry. Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing guitar hero.

The members of Monoskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school. David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ads seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle call audition for the Italian version of The X Factor. They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum. In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song Zitti e Buoni, whose title roughly translates to Shut Up and Behave, in that year's Eurovision

Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe. And Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and I Want to Be Your Slave broke the British top ten. A European tour followed, as well as US appearances at festivals and historic venues. This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovision live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage and members of the media accused him of snorting

cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It's exactly this kind of incongruous detail, this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine, that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin's presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States. They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much,

and then it's not pure rock and roll because you're not in a garage looking ugly, DeAngelis says. The more conservative side, they're shocked because of how we dress or move on stage, or the boys wear makeup. She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics, the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous, and the more tolerant, if not downright desensitized, American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because, like many rock stars before them, most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raji told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university,

just to try to understand, what is that? One question that emerged early in my discussions with Monaskin's friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor, Jeremy Larson, wrote that their new album, Rush, sounds like it's made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150 and seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom, for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom, en route to a score of 2.0 out of 10. While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album Remain in Light, score 10.0, and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop, commercial elements of Rush, e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression, left him unable to do. This perspective reflects the post-90s rock consensus, PNRC, that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that

rock is not just a structure of song, but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock's earliest days as black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal. This adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the 60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called alternative. Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian mini-tour, I had lunch with the band as well as two of their managers, Marika Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on The X Factor, and Ferraguzzo was its musical director. Around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moisa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue, and creative playground that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote, and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for

Moizza, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity, basically describing the concept of vertical integration. Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of Rush, along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moisa, Ferraguzzo played for me Mona Skin's then-unreleased new single, Honey, Are You Coming?, which features many of the band's signature moves, guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style, but also has David singing in a higher

register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo's phone, and it sounded clean and well-produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it. The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good. There's hundreds of people

working and talking about you and giving opinions, DeAngelo said at lunch. So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything. Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band. Resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves, and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an MBA make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass. The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge

of certain eras in American rock history, but were only dimly aware of others. Raji, for instance, loves Motley Crue and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise, and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Mona Skin's timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock, most respected by Anglophone critics, was produced by independent labels that did not have strong

overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the emo era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie, punk, DIY period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC. The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That's the whole point of being a snob, and snobbery is obsolete anyway. Digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them.

The longevity of rock and roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80 Rendering the fan versus society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe And the economics of the industry, in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music And the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life. Yet rock, as a cluster of signifiers, retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives,

rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, etc. Also, like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe. In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin's show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000, was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted.

Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60 and a half and said she had skipped a reservation to see Da Vinci's Last Supper in order to stay in line. When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want, she said. The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black t-shirts on the pitch

became a field of multicolored ponchos and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of I Wanna Be Your Slave, briefly rolling to his back, while DeAngelis, who is very good at making lips parted in ecstasy-type rock faces, played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr. The rain stopped in time for Cool Kids, a punk-inspired song in which David affects a cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock and roll. Cool Kids, they do not like rock, they only listen to trap and pop. These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably

be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like, I like doing things I love, yeah, and cool kids, they do not vomit. Cool Kids was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance, and then, as the band walked off, to make we're-not-worthy bows around Raji's abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semi-choreographed, but management assured me that the cool kids were not professional dancers, just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these cool kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sarah, two young members of a monoskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sarah put it, they allow you to be yourself. me they loved the band because, as Sarah put it, they allow you to be yourself. When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorka, who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn't, said, Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself, but you don't know that at first. You feel like you can't. You can be yourself, but you don't know that at first. You feel like you can't.

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics. The part that is maybe independent from time itself. A continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned, when the response to your demand to rock and roll all night and party every day is, great, exactly, thank you. In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century,

to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that. Thank you.