Fai Rumore: a triumph of hope
I wanted to write a blog post about Fai Rumore by Diodato, specifically his performance of it at the Eurovision 2022 Semi-Final concert in Turin last night.
I wanted to write it but, as I started putting together a potted history of the song, it felt dry, it felt boring, the worst kind of writing. It felt like I was just regurgitating facts that, if you’re reading this, you probably already know (and, even if you don’t, you could Google them). The words I typed couldn’t do justice to the rush of emotion I experienced while watching the performance. I was frustrated, like, why can’t I translate these feelings into text? Isn’t that what being a writer’s all about? God, I’m useless. So I had a tantrum and stopped. As usual. But I think the reason I failed so hard was because I was scared. Rather than write what I really felt, I just put down a bunch of drab, lumpen words on autopilot.
You see, I was brought up in an environment that ennobled suffering above all else. If you felt happy or content, it was because you were lazy, bad, shameful; you’d somehow cheated your way out of the eternal struggle that is life. As someone raised in the awkward space between social classes, I was warned to basically keep quiet at all times; to never tell anyone I had too little, in case they looked down on me for being poor, but also to never tell anyone that I had anything of value, in case they took it from me. This extended to emotions. If you feel happiness bubbling up, hide it at once! The good people will see you for what you are — lazy, cheating scum — and the bad people will try to take it away because, well, they’re also lazy, cheating scum. EVERYONE, in fact, is lazy cheating scum and the only way you can avoid that fate is to suffer for all you’re worth. I know, right? It’s incredible I’m not Catholic.
So I stumbled over my words when thinking about Diodato’s performance because it made me feel a disgusting emotion I’d not felt for a long time: hope. When I watched it and tears welled in my eyes, they weren’t tears of sadness but filthy, dirty tears of joy. And the only way to wash them off was to get all British and stiff upper lip and be like “well, ahem, quite, yes, that was a jolly good show, old boy, let’s discuss the mechanics of it”.
The past two years have been difficult for most people in the world. COVID-19 has changed the way we live, work and think and most of us haven’t even figured out how yet. Regardless of your opinions on the pandemic, it will have changed something in your life. Radically. For me, it put me in a state of being that — as depressing and hateful as it made me feel — was natural. Suddenly, I was “right” to be anxious, to be terrified, to be angry. All these emotions were a default state to me. I’d spent years fighting them, bashing them down, striving to get rid of them and then COVID — with its global threat, its lockdowns, its daily messages of terror and the enormous suffering I saw it deal out around the world, — let me feel them. It let me get used to them.
Even something like Eurovision, which has always been a beacon of brightness, lost its glow in the pandemic era. 2020’s Europe Shine A Light broadcast — a compendium of contestants singing from rooftops, on empty streets, in dumpy bedrooms and sterile studios to, at best, a masked skeleton staff — was one of the bleakest live TV “celebrations” of all time.
Oddly, 2021’s contest, which attempted to bring things back to “normal” felt even gloomier. Yes, it was Eurovision and yes, it had some great songs, but it was Eurovision performed to a half-empty arena (ouch, those acoustics), with entrants dropping out because they were infected, with these constant little reminders that the pandemic was still at large, still a threat. The half-normal felt somehow bleaker than the Great Abnormal of 2020. Like, “is this all there is? is this the best we can expect now, forever?”
Last night’s Semi-Final was therefore the first “real” Eurovision for years but I still felt a shakiness, a mistrust of it, like “will it ever be real again?” I hadn’t got excited, like I usually do. I wasn’t feeling it… until the interval. Until Diodato sang Fai Rumore, and suddenly… there it was. The magic. A magic that’s hard to explain but a magic that’s unique to music and unique to the way a song takes on a life of its own once it’s in the hands of the world. Fai Rumore is a song that’s taken several forms, with several meanings, but last night’s was its strongest, like its final form (if you’ll pardon the Dragonball Z analogy).
When Fai Rumore was written, COVID was just a twinkle in a rogue bat’s eye. It was a song about the unbearable, horrible silences of a broken relationship approaching its end. It was a lover’s plea for the “noise” of love to come back, knowing that it may never. When I first saw the video and heard the song, it washed over me a little. It was a solid enough ballad with a strong vocal but, including national finals, there were hundreds of other songs to hear and enjoy. Until there weren’t.
Yet, in Italy, a country that was hit early and hard by COVID, Fai Rumore became an unexpected anthem of early pandemic life. There were videos posted online of Italians SCREAMING it from their balconies at one another. It’s hard to know exactly why it took off like that, as it’s always hard to pinpoint the origins of trends, but somehow the lyrics fit perfectly. Suddenly the horrible “silences” described in the song weren’t about doomed lovers. They were the silence of lockdown, of unexpected and total isolation, and the chorus’s plea of “make noise, yes! because I can’t stand this unnatural silence / And now I don’t want to do without this beautiful noise you make” felt uncanny. We all wanted to return to the “beautiful noise” of life as it was, one way or another. It was yearning of a whole other kind.
Diodato’s performance for Europe Shine At Light was probably the most elaborate of them all, as drone cameras shot him singing to an empty arena, at night, in Verona. It was a heartbreaking sight, wrenching all the pain out of the song. There was sadness for Diodato himself, of course, feeling that he would never be able to perform this song to a Eurovision audience, that he’d never get his ‘true’ moment, but there was sadness for everyone, in the sheer absurdity of just belting it out to no one like that. In this performance, it felt like whichever meaning you applied to the lyrics, the conclusion was a tragedy. The relationship would crumble, the world would never be good again. It was all pain. The song, even with the grandeur of Diodato’s voice echoing through the rows and rows of empty seats, had never sounded sadder.
Flash-forward to 2022. Last night in Turin. As part of the interval act, ESC let Diodato sing Fai Rumore in front of an arena audience. And it was a revelation. It stole the show, blew the roof off and earned any other clichéd idiom you care to throw at it. He started off singing softly at the piano as shadowy, socially distanced figures brushed past him in the dark. Then something truly exceptional happened. As he moved into the first chorus, the entire arena erupted, belting out every word along with him. There’s just this split-second moment you can see in his face. He looks totally taken off-guard, like he’s about to burst out laughing or crying, but he swallows it down and keeps singing.
From there, the performance shifts up a gear. He stands up and the song builds, as it always does, with the dancers moving gradually closer and closer until they’re touching. In the second chorus, the dance is so expressive, just these jagged movements of pain and expectation and excrutiating desire to touch and then there it is. The money shot at 2:45, a magnificent moment where they form a cluster of people, all touching, and lift Diodato skywards and the camera shoots it from above and you suddenly realise what’s been happening. That the whole choreography is isolated people coming together. It reframes the lyrics again, a third time — no longer do they feel like they’re bout a doomed inevitabiliy. In this version of the song, the lovers find their spark again, the world finds its way again, the isolation ends. Things actually end up right. It’s remarkable considering nothing about the song itself has changed, but its meaning has completely inverted.
The power of the final chorus, as the dancers writhe against once another, Diodato joyfully touching them all over and singing with every last ounce of his might, is a triumph. He’s soaring. It’s hope at its most incendiary. To be able to harness all that emotion he must’ve been feeling and actually channel it into his art, to give the performance of a lifetime. That’s true artistry. That’s exactly what I was failing to do when I tried to write about it. It’s such a skill to swallow down the raw, ugly, messy feelings and transmute them into gold. Diodato can do it. I can only aspire to.
For Diodato, the opportunity to finally sing his song and get the most incredible reception possible must’ve been amazing, but on top of that, the performance signified new hope for everyone. I felt it. I honestly did. I felt a rush of optimism so uncharacteristic and so intense that, while I wanted to write about it, it made me frightened. Like “what if it’s time to stop flogging myself? what if it’s okay to maybe just let a little joy in?”
Because yes, I know. The pandemic is not “over”. COVID numbers are still high in many parts of the world but, crucially, its effects, one way or another, mentally, economically, socially, will be with us for years to come. I know the world, in many ways and for many people, is a far worse place than it was before. Even outside of COVID, there’s the horrendous war in Ukraine, myriad political crises, spiteful and petty culture wars, the mounting threat of climate change, God knows what else, take your pick from doomscrolling through today’s menu, monsieur.
But watching Diodato sing Fai Rumore made me feel like one day these things will pass. That, whatever the future holds, there can be SOME light in the darkness. And it’s not shameful to feel that. I have to believe that. Even as I type this paragraph, I can feel the fear and the shame creeping up, I feel like I need to suffix what I’m saying with negativity, making sure you know that I’m feeling not just my own suffering but the suffering of the whole world, because otherwise I must be some head-in-the-clouds idiot who deserves all he gets for taking his eye off the misery ball.
But all I’m saying is for the four minutes that Diodato sings, I can actually switch it off. I can actually feel hope. I can actually feel joy. That’s the power of music, that’s WHY Italians were yelling this song from the rooftops in their darkest hours. That’s why I want more people to watch this performance. All the people who think Eurovision is silly, all the people who only watch the Finals, all the people who don’t want to listen to foreign language music, just take 4 minutes and watch this, and feel this. Allow it in, no matter how hard you feel like resisting. You’ll feel better.
