Italy is a land where, without any supporting structure, talented persons sometimes emerge by running against the wind, and gain a worldwide leadership, alas, often with a short-term permanence. Trying to find some of the causes of that, I’ve seen that no official mass media has ever informed Italians about the objective data bound to the access of the country into the euro zone. I let interested readers to personally find and reconstruct those data by utilizing the internet, while keeping in mind that official sources always trick and mask the most significant elements. I simply summarize the only possible evaluation: a catastrophe, and a severe, totally unjustified condemnation of the entire country to an inevitable decadence, made of unstoppable declines in demography and in economy. The decadence is quickened by a public administration hostile to citizens, whose cost is out of control and economic sustainability, and is responsible of the worst public services among Occidental countries, at the highest bills. Moreover, the norms coming from the European Union are constantly opposite to the interests of Italian economy, and Italy is among the countries asked to more hugely fund the bureaucracies of the cited organization. So, on a general level, you can conclude that Italy has internal enemies, the ones described above.
The page is dedicated to the sector that I know best, the record industry, although without historical purposes. I simply want to remember some facts, and a person, recently dead from suicide, who can validly represent Italian talent. Well, as I already wrote on past pages, Italian house music deserved a global leadership, lasting approximately from the year 1994 to the year 2003. Similarly to the features of the productive tissue of Italy, chiefly made of small enterprises, I can’t cite truly big names, and the global leadership was the fruit of a myriad of contributions, normally rather small. A sure contributor to the success of Italian house music was Mr. Alex Benedetti, who, on February 10, 2025, decided to voluntarily jump down from a window at the seventh floor at Turati Street, in Milan, where there was his office as an executive of Virgin Radio Italy. He was 53.
In the 90’s, Mr. Alex Benedetti was a successful nightclub DJ. In the year 1994, he was hired by Radio Italia Network, an ambitious project focalized on dance music, that had just changed the seat, from Udine to Bologna, and was making big investments for transmitting all over the entire Italy. In the year 1995, Mr. Alex Benedetti was chosen as the new presenter of a well-known show, named “Suburbia”. While the diffusion of Italian house music was chiefly bound to the so-called “commercial house music” (some examples: Corona, La Bouche, Robert Miles, Cappella, 49ers, and many more), Radio Italia Network, and particularly Mr. Alex Benedetti, was promoting a different sub-genre, named “deep house”, that was especially big in the USA, and extraneous to the best of the Italian house music industry. With other words, as usual, an Italian mass media, Radio Italia Network, was working against the commercial interests of Italy. Nevertheless, Mr. Alex Benedetti had the ability of finding something interesting in obscure records, such as an old-style funky guitar, or echoes of dub music. In effect, he was soon chosen as the director of the programs at Radio Italia Network. I don’t know Mr. Benedetti’s intentions, but he resulted as the most followed and influential promoter of deep house, and indirectly enhanced new tendencies of the national record industry. Without Mr. Benedetti, you can’t fully understand the explosion of an Italian record label, called “Underground Music Movement” (the acronym is UMM), that conquered even the deep house scene of the Big Apple. Of course, the music of Suburbia radio show didn’t include the productions of the UMM label, and Mr. Benedetti never demonstrated to care about Italian commercial leadership. The first conclusion, the contribution of Mr. Alex Benedetti to the Italian record industry was indirect, and, perhaps, unwanted.
The second, and most important conclusion is equal to the title of the page. Now you might understand the reason why Italian, leftist parties are popularly associated to the comical character of Tafazzi, a masochist anti-hero that uses to hit his own balls with a plastic bottle. Back to Mr. Alex Benedetti, I honestly didn’t suspect that he had suicidal tendencies, despite of his popularity, and his important position in the sector of Italian private radios. However, I think that he deserved a musical tribute, under the form of a mini-mix. The cited short mix is entirely made of some of the (obscure) horses of battle of Mr. Alex Benedetti, transmitted by Radio Italia Network during the Suburbia show. I have attempted to obtain a funk house mood.
File name “Max Look’s mini-mix, funk house from Suburbia, by Max Look DJ (March 2025)”, about 23’and 30” of Alex Benedetti’s deep house, from Suburbia radio show.
Mr. Alex Benedetti (RIP), some of the horses of battle:
Pure Tone – addicted to bass (John Creamer & Stephane K)
Shauna Solomon – weekend (star tonight)
Gaudino feat Ultra Naté – bittersweet melody (Pat Legato dub)
Una Mas – I will follow
Basement Jaxx feat Lisa Kekaula – good luck (Tim Deluxe)
Claude Monnet pres Monica Nogueira – infancia magica (Martin Solveig)
Claude Monnet – Mafé disco
Stefano Sorrentino – sans egal
Fantastic Plastic Machine – love is psychedelic
Danny Howells & Dick Trevor feat Erire – dusk till dawn
Scuba feat Dr. Kucho! – that is funk
Gladjo – so many times
