Claudio Lolli
Disoccupate le strade dai sogni

Resulting from a great poetic, political, and imaginative effort, a culmination for Claudio Lolli before surrendering to a few years of break, the problem of a great album like Disoccupate... is its being a jewel of '77, with everything that entails; and the poor historical memory related to that particular period can make it appear as an abstruse work, difficult to comprehend. The album is steeped in the events of that period: it is at the same time a historical document and a poetization of events, protagonists, and dreams (now falling apart) of a small and tragic era; a piece of reality within a historical context already inherently crossed by a myriad of experiences, points of view, and lived experiences, often in conflict with one another. Hence, the problem lies between Lolli-the-singer who opens a glimpse into the dilemmas he was living firsthand, both as an artist and an individual with a troubled conscience, between existentialism and politics, - which leads him to reject any easy compromise with the public (there's little explicitness of a Borghesia, Disoccupate... is an intimate work, almost a swan song) - and it's shared with the listener, the guilty forgetfulness (or direct ignorance) of the contemporary Italian who, faced with this album, would probably get a big headache even before reaching the middle of it. Disoccupate... is a work that fits with difficulty into the panorama of Italian music and in all of Italy. It can be trivially called a "Pearl among swine." And of the pearl, this album has everything starting from its eclectic arrangements, like another veil spread over Lolli's anger and disillusionment, making these forty-six-minute-long waters even less clear.

In Disoccupate... there's all of '77. Or, better yet, in this album emerges the other side of that medal explored the previous year by the Bologna professor: after getting to know the Zingari felici, now one encounters dangers (the explicit Attenzione!, one of the most direct texts of the album) and the first boundless regrets, the goodbyes to those who leave, (Da zero e dintorni) because within a few months it's as if something broke. As if the monster (La socialdemocrazia) had become capable of surrounding and suffocating the movements born from '68, ready to crush, transfigure, and swallow the hopes of freedom and emancipation of an entire generation of dreamers, giving rise to what would be the lineage of non-dreamers (some would say the non-thinkers of the "Milano da bere") and of those who, defeated, would take refuge in heroin or mysticism. The emblem of all this is perhaps Incubo numero zero, where there's everything, really everything: there's the RAF ('Turn off the lights thought Ulrike...' the reference is to Ulrike Meinhof) with the versification of the suicide/murder of the figure risen to symbolize the armed struggle in Germany, there's 'the ink of our newspaper' which is most probably the ink of Lotta continua, and there's, precisely, the vacating the streets of dreams and 'the carabinieri will be kinder': Disoccupate... is recorded in May '77, just two months after the Bologna events of the previous March, triggered by the killing by a carabiniere of Francesco Lorusso, student and militant of Lotta Continua. The bitterness is overbearing and highlights what was probably the most sensational event of the whole affair: the split between the historical left and the extraparliamentary one, the fact that the carabinieri were shooting and that Kossiga's tanks were intervening not in just any city, but in the very red Bologna administered by the PCI. (Vacate the streets of dreams/There will be no place for fantasy/In the clean, industrious paradise/Of our new social democracy). That infamous day is the protagonist of the concluding I giornali di Marzo, a piece where the album's journalistic and eclectic side emerges: Lolli's customary poetic rhymes are replaced by a collage of different phrases extracted from articles from Il Corriere and Il resto del carlino, small details that return the narrative of the time to us, the events of that month, today virtually non-existent, - days outside of history, minor league conflict, - for the majority of people.

The curious thing about Disoccupate... is - beyond the bittersweet blend between disillusioned lyrics and jazz accompaniments, which on the contrary, can become light and fable-like, - its ability to be read as a novel poised between utopia, apocalypse, and, overturning, the darkest dystopia. There's still hope, yet a threat hovers in the air, and tremendously frightened by this eventuality, Lolli imagines and traces shadows that emerge here and there from the edges of almost every song; in the manner of a contemporary Cassandra who then, ironically, would prove to be right (the nihilism of Aspettando Godot triumphs once again...) while still all around was a sense of fervor and the Years of Lead would have experienced one last tragic tail marked by the most dismal implosion; getting lost over the years and among rusted dreams, like this album. Which is a jewel, a small lesson, the dream and nightmare of revolution and man without chains; it's looking those chains in the face. Looking at and denouncing them in all their harshness, in their interpenetration of society and individual, servant and master, flock and shepherd. Who writes the newspaper, who reads it, who puts it into song. A jewel for those who love history, for those who love music, for those seeking inspiration, for those who love songwriters with a capital C.