I can’t think of a better album to listen to in the summer while playing Italian card games than Kanooch’s “Roma, City Story.” If you are fond of Rome and the City Pop genre, you will love this as much as I do. Drop your favorite in the comments.
*Track List:*
00:00 Cappuccino No
02:59 La Bocca Della Verità
05:51 Saint Peter’s Square
09:46 Trevi, Trevi
13:14 Lemon Spritz (Via Imperali)
15:51 Romanaccia
18:41 Gelato Alla Panna
21:51 Scooter For Two
24:11 Sciopero Amore
*Concept, Lyrics, and Production by:* Kanooch
*Music:* Various Yet To Be Credited Artists
About Kanooch:
I discovered Kanooch, a 1980s lyricist and music producer, during the Covid-19 pandemic. I received an unexpected moldering box from Tunisia. The address was unidentifiable, but one word caught my eye: “Kanooch.” My nickname, Cannuch, a shortened version of my surname Cannucciari, couldn’t be more similar to this word. Inside was the most amazing body of work I had ever heard.
Kanooch had just died and had no one to pass his effects on to. His surviving sister, Astrod, must have found me on Google through my nickname. She left little explanation and no return address, so I’ll never really know why this gift was bestowed upon me.
There is almost no information available online about Kanooch. What little I found came from clippings Astrod included in the box of LPs. He ran a small LP import business that succeeded in smuggling pop music into the communist bloc during the 70s. He circumvented pop music bans with an ingenious method of double-layering the grooves of the record. If you dropped the pin at the start, you would hear a dramatization of Stalin's famous speech of 19 August 1939; however, if you dropped the pin at exactly 2:32, you could hear the best pop music of the decade. This innovation bankrolled Kanooch’s true dream of writing pop songs for major recording artists.
In January 1980, he flew to Japan to insert himself into Paul McCartney’s tour using phony credentials his communist contacts created for him. Unfortunately for Kanooch, McCartney was arrested upon his arrival for possession of marijuana. Instead of crushing his hopes and dreams, Kanooch found himself immersed in Tokyo’s newest music craze, City Pop. He had little understanding of Japanese but decided that this new music could find massive success in the Western pop scene.
Kanooch never seemed comfortable recording music in his native language. Instead, he “hedged” his music between a potpourri of styles and languages, almost always English with another language as an album's base, such as Italian with this record. In this way, he hedged his bets, hoping that the music would catch on in one of the dozens of languages he wrote for. Sadly, it did not work. His legacy would end up being the genre that grew out of his recordings: “Hedge Pop.”
From what I could understand, Kanooch made most of his work with a very limited budget. This must have been the reason he worked with artists who neither spoke English nor the other hedge languages he wrote for. You can hear many mispronounced words in both English and Italian on this record (Sciopero, Gelato Alla Panna, and Lemon Spritz’s bad Italian, just to name a few). I haven’t been able to find much on his musicians, The Super Hedge Pop Kansainväliset Suomalaiset Superlaulajat (Super Hedge Pop International Finnish Super Singers). From what I can gather, they were from Tampere, the third biggest city in Finland. I would guess that he got the best bang for the buck using these talented, yet unknown, musicians.
Whether it was disputes with distributors, the uncommitted feel of the music, or just bad showbiz luck, Kanooch’s records were largely forgotten.
In the late 1980s, Kanooch desperately tried to get his music into the growing 8-bit video game soundtrack scene with his recordings of sci-fi-inspired themes like “THX-1138bit,” his Italian video game themes “8 1/2 bit,” and his most promising album for the Electronika 60 system, which nearly gave him his breakthrough as it contained the original score to Alexey Pajitnov’s Тетрис (Tetris). Unfortunately, it was stripped out by Nintendo’s Game Boy as Koji Kondo complained that “Tetris should have a Russian-sounding theme and not the Mariachi-inspired Hedge Pop scored by Kanooch.” It seems that Kanooch finally gave up on music around this time, though I hope one day to find the music he must have continued to produce from the 1990s to his death in 2020.
From “Cappuccino No” to “Lemon Spritz” and “Romanaccia,” Kanooch’s ‘Roma, City Story” is a classic, no matter how famous or not. Enjoy!