Popping up

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This article was published 20/04/2023 (1223 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Carlo Capobianco has a little secret he’s only recently begun to say out loud: he wants to be a pop star.

The singer has no time to be quiet, and no desire to hide his ambitions either. Nobody would bat an eye at a chemistry major publicly declaring their aims for a career in medicine. But a 24-year-old singer from Winnipeg saying he wants to be just like Prince and Madonna? The skeptics abound.

But Capobianco doesn’t care, and he is all the better for it. To him, pop star is not a dirty word meant to be whispered — it’s a holy title meant to be revered.

He’s only been performing on Winnipeg stages for about two years, but Capobianco, a six-foot-tall willow tree often dressed in all black, has always been ready for centre stage.

“I used to perform in middle school, but not in shows,” he says, sipping a latte after finishing a shift at his day job, where he conducts phone surveys for a market research company.

It was in phys-ed class. While his classmates were playing basketball or touch football, Capobianco was off to the side, fiddling with the sound system, dancing in his gym shorts. “Dodgeball is happening, and I was like, jumping away from dodgeballs while doing this weird Pussycat Dolls choreography.”

Kids can be cruel, and he often was teased with homophobic slurs, but he insists it never fazed him. “I always knew that was going to happen,” he says. “People are going to be people, and I can’t control what they think. If they want to call me a faggot or a pansy, that’s their opinion. I’m just going to keep doing what I do.”

What he did as a preteen was listen to the Disney Channel’s output of pop stardom. Think Hilary Duff, Ashley Tisdale, or Aly and AJ, three acts that got their start not on the radio but on TV shows such as Lizzie McGuire, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and Phil of the Future. It wasn’t exactly the most inventive pop music, but Capobianco took the message of Duff’s breakout 2003 hit Why Not to heart. “Why not take a crazy chance, why not do a crazy dance.”

The Disney Channel addiction led to more adult ideas of pop music: in high school, Capobianco began exploring Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson, artists who embody and illustrate the best and worst parts of being an icon. One thing those stars have in common is the era in which they exploded as international solo artists: the 1980s.

It’s a time period Capobianco, born in 1998 into a strict Roman Catholic family, quickly fell for. “I feel like it was a really interesting time to be alive. There was a lot of creativity and energy in the music industry, and I feel that’s when record labels really started to commodify their artists,” he says, mentioning the Cher doll, launched in 1976 by the Mego Corporation.

Capobianco dipped into Madonna’s and Jackson’s discography, and with YouTube at his disposal, studied his idols’ movement onstage. “It was all very glamorous and loud,” he says. “I liked that, and I think there needs to be more of that in the industry, and in Winnipeg.”

So Capobianco took matters into his own hands. After several years of consideration, in 2021, Capobianco began to write and produce his own songs, quickly earning a reputation as a funky outlier in Winnipeg’s indie scene, standing out, just as he had in gym class, by refusing to fit in.

Onstage, Capobianco plays with audience expectations by colouring himself — just as Prince, Madonna and MJ did — as a somewhat androgynous object of desire: he wears sequined shirts, leather jackets, cross necklaces. and ruby-red lipstick. With his long, black hair waving, his collar bones popping, and his hands often hidden by elbow-length gloves, Capobianco certainly looks the part of an ’80s star.

This past February, Capobianco earned a slot at the Chip’s Vintage anniversary show, an annual event at the West Broadway shop held as part of the Winterruption festival. In a review for Stylus Magazine, Rish Hanco wrote that Capobianco teased the audience with playful banter and heartfelt ballads. “In one electrifying set, heartache and joy are intertwined.”

But for all his live success, very little of Capobianco’s catalogue was available to be heard by the casual listener.

That changes today with the release of Pray To You, an album about sinful desire, jealousy, lust and the acceptance of flaws. Produced at House of Wonders, the album oozes 1980s excess: in art, as this album shows, greed can be good, and it can be generous. Laden with, but not burdened by, synths, it’s a scintillating collection, unconcerned with disguising its self-indulgence beneath a veneer of modesty.

It might not be for everyone — no music is — but Capobianco’s music will find an audience: it insists on it.

Opening track Big City is about Capobianco’s teenage trips to nightclubs, which began in the dark corners and ended up, after some tequila, on the sweaty dance floor; it feels right out of Working Girl. Dance With the Devil is about loving something that’s obviously bad for you, says Capobianco, who likes to smoke Matinee cigarettes. “Sometimes salty can be sweet, just like when I saw you leave,” Capobianco sings during Mermaid, one of the more modern-sounding songs on the album.

Lyrically, the title track is Capobianco’s best. “Jesus wants me pure, but I can’t be for sure, I look into my mirror and see myself a whore,” he sings. Sounding a bit like New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle, it’s also the song where Capobianco shows the most restraint.

Thursday night at 9 p.m., Capobianco takes the stage with his band at the Good Will Social Club alongside Cerulean Drift and Dayloft, giving Winnipeg audiences the chance to see whether Capobianco’s skill as a performer matches his ambitions.

He’s confident that it does.

“By day, I’m just a dude who works at a call centre,” he says. “By night, I’m a pop star.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com