Alessandra Mussolini’s Album Is Actually Very Good.

With “Amore,” she created one of the most memorable Italo Disco and Citypop crossovers.

Alessandra Mussolini attempted several paths to stardom. Her aunt Sophia Loren mentored her, and in 1977, she had a minor role for the movie A Special Day, which both won an American Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and got an Academy Award nomination in the same category and the 1985 World War II film The Assisi Underground. In 1983, she posed for two international editions of Playboy magazine: the Italian one in August and the German one in November. 

However, her most genre-defining impact in pop culture came by way of music, an album with the title Amore exclusively released for the Japanese market in 1982. It contains songs in Italian, English, and Japanese

Production was helmed by Miki Curtis, a titan in the Japanese underground music scene, and musician and arranger Hiroshi Sato was featured as a pianist, while Seiji Toda was the arranger. In Italy, it was only broadcast more than a decade later, when Verissimo, a daytime talk show then hosted by journalist Cristina Parodi made the record known to Italian mainstream audiences. It’s a rarity worth quite a bit: the lowest listed on Discogs is $319.99

When it comes to Italian tracks, in songs such as “Carta Vincente”, the voice sounds like what you expect from Italo disco female singers such as Sabrina Salerno, Rose, or Alba. By contrast, “Insieme Insieme” sounds like something originally written for a dramatic singer such as Mina, which is apparent in the contrast between the languid verse and the highly dramatized chorus. “L’ultima Notte D’amore” would not have sounded out of place if sung by Mia Martini, as it has a ballroom-dance-like quality similar to her “Minuetto” and “Danza.”  “E Stasera Mi Manchi” is a mundane torch song where she just sings about how she misses her lover, even when she undresses. With the exception of “Carta Vincente,” all Italian songs have music and lyrics by Cristiano Malgioglio, and it’s unclear whether, ultimately, he wrote these melodies and lyrics with Alessandra Mussolini in mind or if the label just purchased some of his unreleased tracks.

The Italian tracks showcase also what the Japanese audience would expect from a pop Italian singer: languid melodies, orchestral flair and arrangements that would fit an appearance on TV, since Alessandra was (or was poised to be) indeed a TV personality. 

The Japanese-language ones such as “Tokyo Fantasy” and “Amai Kioku”  present vocals that are more drawn out in harmony with the synths, and they present modes and harmonies that ring quintessentially Citypop. By contrast, “Love is Love,” composed and written by the French-Israeli composer and musician Yaïr Klinger, retraces the steps of 1970s disco, and the lyrics have some tangential conceptual kinship with “I am what I am.”  Yaïr is also known as a singer, with singles such as “Allez, Viens,” “Va De Ville En Ville” and “Août” and he composed “Ein Davar,” Israel’s 2001 Eurovision entry. It should also be noted that Alessandra Mussolini was not the only Italian singer attempting to sing in Japanese: Mina sang “Wakare,” Giuni Russo performed “Sakura” with her signature blend of operatic timbre and belting; Milva sang “Ningyo No Ie.”

In all, it’s a seminal album of the 1980s, and not just for its inherent CAMP value. Regardless of whether Mussolini actually sang those songs or they were entrusted to some Japanese vocalists who had received the relevant voice training, it’s an album that shows the continuum between Italo disco and Citypop. Here we have long observed how genres and subgenres hardly existed in a vacuum: just like you can’t separate 1980s Italian pop from schlager, for reasons both market and cultural (as we explained last year), and Eurodance from Italo disco, similar considerations can be made about some genres of Japanese music, and that proves to be true when you consider Eurobeat. 

When it comes to Italo Disco and Citypop, the similarities we observed the most can be summed up by the central role played by the melody, over which producers then create their arrangements. For both musical traditions, at some point through their evolution, have been influenced by American music - something that brought the two together. 

The Japanese audience loved Italian music and artists especially in the early 80s, when city pop was rigging supreme; especially because Italian music sounds in some way familiar to them but exotic and different at the same time. Until the mid 80s it was quite easy to find in Japan records by Mina, Patty Pravo, Milva, Marcella Bella, Gigliola Cinquetti and many more. Some of these even recorded special songs only for the Japanese market, like Matia Bazar’s “Cercami Ancora” included in the Japanese press of the album “Aristocratica”; and the incredible “Love Attack” by band Pooh, a 9 minute long disco suite included in the Japanese release of “Hurricane”. Both these bands enjoyed an incredible popularity there, where they were truly considered superstars. 

In the years since the release of Amore, she dabbled in politics all the way to painting, but Amore remains an intercultural, genre-defying time capsule that contains some solid melodies and memorable riffs. Whether or not she was actually the one performing them is almost irrelevant.