Claudio Lolli
Disoccupate le strade dai sogni

Well, yes, for a few days now, without reason and just waking up, I started humming "l'alba si inventa una ruota a Torino...", an old and semi-unknown song by Claudio Lolli titled "Alba Meccanica" and this was a clear sign that I needed to take back the reins of a period that started a long time ago (suspended but never interrupted... let's say "asleep") on Claudio Lolli, today more or less neglected and considered "a harbinger of bad luck" by many (a bit like Mia Martini).

So I start with an attempt to partially reevaluate the work of this "minor" singer-songwriter from the Italian scene, an author from Bologna born in the early '50s, politicized, desolate, nihilistic, and pessimistic like few others, and I begin with this album dated 1977 with a title both splendidly long and "damn utopian". A truly historic album in every sense, where the literary part, poetic and visionary like few others, is joined by a varied and complex musical composition that starts from classical singer-songwriter music ("Autobiografia industriale") and reaches jazz fusion ("Incubo numero zero"), with intermissions of country marches ("La Socialdemocrazia") and free jazz inserts (just a few years shy of the '80s with synths and various glitters). An "rich" album and musically much more varied than colleagues Guccini, Vecchioni, Bennato who adopted a fairly classic and stereotypical song formula, where the musical part was almost marginal to the actual message. With Lolli, the canons are overturned and reformulated (thanks also to the commitment of the best musicians of the era who participated in the sessions, contributing their part "with maximum expressive freedom" as required by the cultural movements of the time).

Beyond the purely musical aspect, I would like to highlight the beauty and poetry of pieces like "Analfabetizzazione" with the verses that say "La mia madre l'ho chiamata sasso, perché fosse duratura si, ma non viva..." a unique literary invention of its kind, not to mention the music, a true jazz score of weatherreportiana memory. Or the beautiful "Canzone scritta su un muro" or "Da zero e dintorni"... unique and never like in this case "legendary" songs that give us still clear and vivid watercolors of an important and groundbreaking period like '77 that, whether we like it or not, continued the discussions never addressed in '68 and created, with armed struggle and social clashes of the time, an unbridgeable fracture with the civil society that had to suffer and, slowly accept, the cultural revolution of the then student movement ("La Socialdemocrazia"): it's incredible instead the relevance of a song like "Autobiografia Industriale" that contests the squalor and commercial strategies of a Major's record label (EMI of the time) in contrast to an unknown singer-songwriter (Lolli himself) refractory to compromises but still to be launched in the music market. Sigh, more than 30 years have passed but the song could have been written now. Conversely, now, songs so "complex" and musically unclassifiable could hardly ever be composed by an Italian singer-songwriter (and I emphasize Italian, even though, for example, the various Marco Parente & C. are proving to be up to par, but it's a small exception that confirms the rule...): they would be said today to be "not commercially viable, few choruses, not radio-friendly".

In short, the question is: were we "too demanding" THEN or has our "demand" TODAY dramatically shrunk? To posterity the arduous sentence.