Andrea Mingardi
Pus

"Hey, are you the papank?"
I was leaving the house. I only thought: it's really true that children are "so pieces of the heart".

The papank and the mamank are just two of the happy inventions that Andrea Mingardi, born in Bologna in 1940, included in this 45 RPM record with the eloquent title "Pus".
It was nineteen seventy-eight. While outside swarms of young people and workers were unwittingly witnessing the dusk of an era, which they had wrongfully mistaken for the dawn of a new age, Mingardi, who had already abandoned the rock and blues of his early days a few years earlier, dedicated himself to composing songs in the Bolognese dialect, sometimes ironic, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes difficult to classify, like this "Pus".

Those who hastily label this 45 RPM record as absurd are sorely mistaken. No, it is rather the interpretation of a phenomenon (punk) seen through the windowpane of a traditional bar, between the billiards and the Gazzetta dello Sport. In this context, what can catch the eye are the more evident and bizarre aspects, which are obviously exaggerated and mocked in the song's lyrics. However, Mingardi does not have the intention to mock gratuitously, nor indeed to insult something of which, in Bologna, the significance was understood.
We can talk about a good-natured irony, more reminiscent of "Totò, Fabrizi e i giovani d'oggi" than the rigid, myopic, and hysterical approach often mistaken for "education".
In any case, the lyrics contain at least one rather illuminating phrase:
"I am a pimple on your skin, you squeeze me and out comes the pus".
It's a somewhat romantic and youth-centric reading, but what better metaphor to symbolize punk as an anomaly that precisely when marginalized and ridiculed reveals the irreconcilable contradictions of the social and interpersonal fabric in which it is immersed? (remember that we're in ‘seventy-eight', not kidding!)

On the other hand, how did the young hooligans of those years, fortunate to be struck by the word of "new rock", take this evident parody?
Well, I think it bothered very few. No one saw it as an insult to wash away or a mockery to be offended by.
And even when listening, the record sounds pleasant: Let's be clear, don't expect "I'm Stranded".
More than punk, you find a robust and metallic rock, with a very Italian touch, enhanced by Mingardi's hoarse and tortellini-like voice.
The punk purists, the fundamentalist alternatives, capable of unleashing a Jihad over an extra line or riff, were still yet to come. Only in the middle of the unmentionable next decade would form that clique of staunch purists, activists without politics, knights without horses, who would reduce every form of youth (sub)culture to a caricature, useful at most to provoke some well-deserved eviction from buildings that deserved far better use.

Yes, Mingardi was tolerated too, in fact, Mingardi was also a True Punk ^TM.

Let’s not be surprised, it was a world where decontextualization came naturally to adolescents, where situations worthy of "Cabaret Voltaire" could arise without anyone even knowing the meaning of the word Dada.
How then to define four young guys who go to London and instead of drooling over rock heroes, instead of kissing the ground in front of the 100 Club, don’t care about anyone and improvise a fake street concert, with cardboard guitars, destroying everything in a few minutes and ending up arrested by the diligent English Bobbies? How to conceive a punk band that organizes a phantom concert and plasters the metropolis walls with flyers, just to generate tensions and enjoy the spectacle of punks, autonomists, little fascists, and rockers playing havoc on each other?

When I think about it, I don’t even believe it really existed.