The Monkey's Paw Curls a Finger: A review of Rush! by Måneskin
I experienced a band I like become international rock stars in the span of about half a year so you don’t have to!
Part I: The (not universal) Måneskin fan experience
On the 7th of March 2021 I watched Damiano David, vocalist of the Italian rock band Måneskin, lift the Sanremo trophy. Witnessing one of my personal favourites (I had three that year) win a competition is very uncommon and I was half-convinced that the trophy was going to go to Ermal Meta. So imagine my surprise when, four months later, the band had this, a Eurovision victory and two viral songs on TikTok under their belt.
In the period between Sanremo and Eurovision, my Eurovision friends and I had been joking about “Måneskin world domination”, and Eurovision 2021 ended up being one of the strongest and most enjoyable editions I had ever watched (sans the Damiano David cocaine allegations). I began seeing people who don’t even watch Eurovision start listening to Måneskin, their songs were reaching global charts and they looked like they were having the time of their lives. It was, and genuinely still is, insane to think about the journey I witnessed this band make from their Sanremo participation announcement to international success. Our “Måneskin world domination” dream was coming true.
Though I suppose there is no rose without a thorn. ‘Beggin’’ was so popular it was driving me nuts. I saw discourse posts on TikTok about the band “queerbaiting”. The English songs were garnering success far greater than the Italian ones and I have read enough “How do you listen to music if you don’t know what they’re saying?” comments in my lifetime to know why. Self-aware enough to know it was cringe but stubborn enough to not escape it, I took on the attitude of a gatekeeper. I wanted Måneskin to succeed because my love for Italian music knows no bounds, yet it seemed like their connection to Italian music was becoming distant to their success. The thought of the two most popular songs being a cover made in their X Factor Italia days and an English song about being horny made me feel like the wider audience saw their music in a reductive fashion, and God forbid their career followed the direction of cheap hype and TikTok trends instead of the creative growth I had admired them for.
To my misfortune, that is exactly what they appeared to do.
I heard a leak of their first single since Eurovision, ‘Mamma Mia’, on TikTok a few days before release. It sounded eerily similar to ‘I Wanna Be Your Slave’. Given the popularity of the song, it didn’t surprise me, but at that point the joint effort of TikTok overexposure and the terrible Iggy Pop feature version had robbed me of any previous enjoyment for it, so I was no longer looking forward to the release. Despite this, I gave it a listen and, whilst the verses were irritating, I found the chorus sufferable. I don’t think I listened to it more than three times. Whatever I had appreciated about Måneskin in Il Ballo Della Vita and Teatro D’ira – Vol. I was not present in ‘Mamma Mia’. What was present was ultimately meaningless and audacious lyricism referencing sex, critics and the cocaine scandal. Although still as strong instrumentally as ever, this song felt more as if it were designed to be talked about than to be listened to.
It was around the end of the year that the band made a thread on twitter listing the big things that happened to them in 2021. It included winning Eurovision, releasing the ‘I Wanna Be Your Slave’ music video, playing at Global Citizen, releasing ‘Mamma Mia’, opening for The Rolling Stones and playing on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Oddly, Sanremo and the release/multi-platinum achievement of Teatro D’ira – Vol. I were absent from the list entirely, and Eurovision was not referred to by name but by “Our first international music contest”. I can understand having mixed feelings surrounding Eurovision given the cocaine allegation circumstances but, for goodness sake, it’s Eurovision. At 161 million viewers in 2021, It’s about as big as international music contests get! Some Italian fans were especially unhappy with all of this. There was not much reference to their success in Italy at all, leaving them, and some European fans of other countries, to feel as if the band had abandoned them for the USA. In this case, it was hard to disagree. I cannot imagine a world where the release of a music video is more important than winning Festival di Sanremo, the contest that inspired Eurovision to even be invented. Though, at the end of the day, it was a thread on Twitter and nobody even knows who wrote it.
It's worth mentioning that my miserable gatekeeper phase quickly dissipated, but my opinion on the band tends to fluctuate from critic to defender and I can find the opinions of the fans reasonable one day and hyperbolic the next. Where there is some merit to the claim that Måneskin are focusing more on their success in America as opposed to Europe, it’s quite a stretch to claim that they’re “abandoning their Italian/European audience” as some fans do. Many artists face this scrutiny as they seem to perform more dates in America than Europe (European Harry Styles fans shouting “LEAVE AMERICA” come to mind). In This Video, The Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins explains that, possibly due to COVID restrictions easing differently, it was a lot harder to tour in Europe than in America as promoters were less likely to take a chance on touring in Europe. Måneskin probably suffered from this as much as any other band.
However, to give credit to these concerns where it’s due, the band, or their management, have made some poor decisions over the past year or so. The biggest example is cancelling their appearance at the Reading and Leeds (R&L) festivals. They didn’t explicitly state why they pulled out, summarising it to “scheduling conflicts”, but it was clear that the conflict was with the MTV VMAs. I don’t think that the VMAs are unimportant, I can’t seem to find the nomination rules for the VMAs but I’m aware that some award shows require the nominated artist to be present at the event. If it were a single gig they had to move I would understand, but festivals like R&L don’t do refunds. Lots of UK fans felt as if the band were prioritising American promotional opportunities over the European fanbase with this move.
I don’t think the band themselves had much of a say in decisions like these. I’m willing to bet it was their management trying to ride the ever-shrinking wave of their virality. However, it seems as though chasing hype has made it’s influence on their newest album, Rush!. More songs reminiscent of ‘I Wanna Be Your Slave’, more English lyrics, more cocaine references. They started promoting the English single ‘Gossip’ weeks before it came out, yet Italian single La Fine got about two tweets worth of promotion. If Spotify hadn’t sent me a notification, I wouldn’t have even realised it was released. Just before the album came out, some lyrics from the project were revealed and the line “You said I'm ugly and my band sucks, but I just got a billion streaming song, so kiss kiss my bu- bu- bu- bu- bu- bu- butt” from ‘Bla Bla Bla’ picked up some heavy criticism. The English lyrics on previous works like Il Ballo Della Vita were not brilliant, but this seemed really bad. I just had to pray that these lyrics were ironic and that the rest of the album would be better than this.
Part II: Rush! Review
I was pleased to discover, on the first listen, that this album isn’t absolutely terrible. Gossip (featuring Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello) is one of my favourites, and the band explains that the song discusses a “culture of perfectionism” and “the devaluing of someone who doesn’t look “right”.”. However, without this explanation, it’d be easy to assume that these lyrics don’t stretch much further than “we live in a society” as they come across as very cliché.
“Welcome to the city of lies
Where everything's got a price
It's gonna be your new favourite place
You can be a movie star
And get everything you want
Just put some plastic on your face”
Along the same lines of societal critique, ‘La Fine’ is about Italy’s politics. Italy had recently elected far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, and the song talks about feelings of concern around living in a country lurching towards the right. Reading the translation for this song, I feel as if the band’s points come across better in their Italian songs than in their English ones, maybe due to avoiding lyrical clichés, or maybe just because I don’t know Italian and therefore cannot recognise Italian lyrical clichés.
“Forse l'unica risposta è partire
O restare a marcire”This translates to: “Perhaps the only answer is to leave, or stay and rot”
Other songs I enjoyed included ‘Own My Mind’, ‘Mark Chapman’, ‘Baby Said’, ‘Supermodel’ and ‘The Loneliest’. A lot of the tracks are fun and harmless and would probably be great to listen to as songs on a shuffled playlist.
Unfortunately, this is not a playlist, but an album. One that consists of seventeen tracks, many of which offer nothing but filler space to the record, in an order that provides no storyline or satisfying listening experience. The three Italian songs are grouped together near the end before ‘Mamma Mia’, ‘Supermodel’ and ‘The Loneliest’, the three singles released before the announcement of Rush!. A lovely ballad about a long distance relationship called ‘Timezone’ is followed by ‘Bla Bla Bla’, a bizarre song about a horribly toxic relationship, with some of the worst lyrics the band has ever written (yet I still managed to find myself not hating it as much as I expected with even Måneskin fans saying they disliked it).
I’ve seen people talk about how much they hate ‘Bla Bla Bla’ and ‘Kool Kids’ but the track that annoys me the most (Besides ‘Mamma Mia’) is ‘Feel’. The lyrical content is entirely meaningless, even the band confirm it in the “Spotify storyline” and have nothing else to say about it. This type of lyricism, using words for how they sound over what they mean, works if you can make the instrumental sound good, but there is zero flavour to the music. It feels so empty, and you could not possibly convince me that this song needed to be on the album.
In ‘Kool Kids’, Damiano puts on an accent reminiscent of an English punk singer and shouts about what cool kids do and don’t do into the mic for just under three minutes. The whole song comes across as ridiculous, more like something a band would perform if they were on MTV and severely pissed off, then never talk about again. Måneskin explained that the song was written three days after Eurovision and recorded when Damiano was drunk. Amidst the cocaine allegations and criticism artists are fated to receive after winning Eurovision, the anger expressed in the song is understandable, but to whom is this anger directed at? The press? Eurovision? People who don’t listen to rock? There’s no clarity, it just feels like they’re angry, with a generous amount of swear words and some random lyrics about bassist Victoria De Angelis’ emetophobia and sexuality in the middle that would feel out of place if I had not already lost all sense of what this song is attempting to do.
“But cool kids they do not vomit
Or at least not in front of Vic
I know you think she's a hot chick
But I'm sorry she prefers hot chicks!!”
I skipped ‘Mamma Mia’ on every listen. The intro still puts me off enough to refuse to give it another chance. God bless.
Overall, I didn’t dislike listening to the album. I will save some songs to my playlists, but I won’t want to listen to it as a whole again, and I fear that this is the purpose of this project. Bloated and incohesive, to be shuffled and added to playlists on streaming services, as opposed to being embraced as a full record. As a friend pointed out, songs like ‘Kool Kids’ feel as if they band are simultaneously trying to prove something to the world whilst shouting about how much they don’t give a fuck. It’s a shame, really, because they shouldn’t have to prove anything. They are brilliant instrumentally, even better live and have all the potential to create fantastic records as Teatro D’Ira - Vol. I Showed us. So where is that energy here? The project features the biggest production and songwriting team that Måneskin has ever had, many of whom have a long list of credit for chart-topping pop hits but not much experience with rock music at all. People who are trying to write the next big hit rather than people who share the band’s vision, and in the process are turning the band who were expected to bring a fresh new era of rock to the 2020s into a pop-ified caricature of both themselves and the aesthetics of rock n roll.
Using a Radiohead metaphor (because I will explode if I don’t, fun fact) I believe that they’re in their ‘Pop Is Dead’ era. Edgy lyrics with well made but not particularly ground-breaking music. I was referencing the MTV Beach House performance of ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ in the ‘Kool Kids’ comparison, which I suppose also contributes to this metaphor. I want to believe that they still have a lot to offer and are just releasing this project while they’re in the slipstream of virality. They’re all in their early 20s and have their whole lives ahead of them. They have enough time to decide one day that they want to start making music that displays their abilities more than the image that has been manufactured for them. I’m just glad that the music on this album was on here and not the possible Teatro D’Ira – Vol. II, a project that would feel way more disappointing to view like this in comparison to Vol. I.
And what about me? If the band have found so much success then why should my opinion matter? Well it actually doesn’t, really. So many fans love this album and found the viral era of Måneskin way easier to swallow than I have. Shoutout to those fans who I see in my Spotify friends activity actively listening to ‘Feel’ whilst I slag it off. If Måneskin were to continue to make music I don’t like, I would just have to hand my Måneskin fan baton over to these people and I’d go back to listening to the music I do enjoy. However, I experienced them go from an up and coming Italian band to International rock stars in just half a year, so for as long as they maintain that place in my heart they gained in early 2021, I will continue to write about them in a way that satisfies my opinionated, music nerd soul.
I’m so happy that the band got the success that they wanted, but if it were now up to me, I’d put the Måneskin world domination aside and focus on the music again.
Rating: 50/100
Thanks to:
Ludo (Streichedelic on Instagram) for the point about the band appearing to be trying to prove something to the world.
Moon for helping me research the songwriters.
My other Eurovision friends for grammar tips and general support while i infodumped every conclusion and roadblock I came to writing this.
Sam Allen from What Does She Know?! for inspiring me to get this Substack and start writing.