The result is a genre that is a true neophile’s delight, a smorgasbord of idiosyncrasies. In his memoir, Italo Disco: History of Dance Music in Italy from 1975 to 1988, producer Raff Todesco (Time’s “ Shaker Shake”) enumerates the elements to a successful Italo song, including synths, a lack of guitars, an embrace of technology, and, perhaps most notably, a “catch,” by which he means “something that was unique”-a vocalization, a strange sound, a weird way of singing. Heard the first or the fiftieth time, an effective Italo song makes you wonder, What’s going on here? What’s going to happen next? This is a style so reliant on novelty, it can shock from measure to measure. Zanetti’s performance elicits the same response as the best songs in Italo disco, the genre that Savage would come to exemplify.
His expression, sometimes punctuated by a grimace, is so intense, its projected passion feels potentially murderous, like that of a chronically misunderstood loner in a giallo. He balls his hands into fists and hides his face again, only to re-emerge when, about 75 seconds into his song, he begins lip-synching lyrics that have the syntactical incoherence but emotional clarity of someone talking in his sleep: “When you find the light to an upset shade away/If you’ll never, never let me go with every melody…” Zanetti, though, is very much awake, his eyes wide open and barely blinking. He rises slowly, arms outstretched at his sides, index fingers pointed, then drawing them together in front of his chin. Suddenly, a jolt: His right hand pounds the ground and his left points behind him to 8 o’clock. After eight motionless bars, Zanetti raises his head and looks into the camera.
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