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From album
Ovunque proteggi
Vinicio Capossela · 2006 · Track 7
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The story behind
The first time you listen to Medusa cha cha cha, you get the feeling that someone is telling you a story while dancing. It's not a song that's played; it's one that's lived: the bass traces wavy lines that seem to draw waves, the drums advance with a rhythm that strays just when you think it's going to fall into the beat, and Vinicio Capossela's voice weaves between the words as if each syllable had a life of its own. The hook isn't in a single riff or a catchy chorus, but in that mix of cha cha cha with something darker, as if the Caribbean rhythm had slipped into a party in a southern Italian village and ended up dancing with death. It's not music to listen to in the background: it's to pay attention to every detail, because each instrument seems to be telling its own part of the story.
They recorded it in 2005 at the Officine Meccaniche of Mauro Pagani, a place that already smelled of experimentation. Capossela had been silent for nearly six years since Canzoni a manovella, and this album, Ovunque proteggi, came out like a hurricane: the Targa Tenco crowned it as best album in 2006, and the following year the magazine Mojo ranked it second on its list of the best in the world, just behind Savane by Ali Farka Touré. But before all that, there was a performance in January 2006 at the Chiesa di San Carpoforo in Milano, where the sound of the instruments coexisted among the walls of a church. The song itself lasts 4:57, but in those minutes, decades of stories fit: the cha cha cha is not just a rhythm, it's the disguise something older uses to sneak into the present.