Voto:
He is definitely a jerk, but he has his own strong ideas. We in Italy see everything through our own lens and might say he’s a cheesy fascist, not knowing that he has spoken out extensively against Bush and US imperialistic politics. For the benefit of the cultured pistolpete, I’ll copy from www.kultunderground.org a review about him; I apologize for the length but I hope it helps someone to reflect and be informed before rambling on. “Indispensable premise: in Talk is Cheap you won’t find music. It’s also likely that you won’t find Talk is Cheap itself, at least not in the usual record stores in this country. The double CD in question documents a spoken-word performance by Henry Rollins in Australia in April 2001, and is published directly by his record (and publishing) company 2.13.61.
Now, if usually the music examined on these pages is likely unknown to most, you might think we’ve frankly surpassed the limit now. There’s no point in hiding behind a finger: Talk is Cheap is a two-hour monologue in English… something for really strong stomachs, especially in countries like ours, where English may be officially and statistically the second language, but is actually spoken at acceptable levels by a sadly small percentage of the population. From personal experience, I can confidently say that the horse-dose of grammar taught to local students doesn’t make them capable of holding a conversation at all, let alone following our Hero's verbal evolutions without resorting to simultaneous translation. To do so, they’d better throw away the textbook and venture into the real world, where they will discover that native speakers couldn’t care less about all the rules learned in school and speak a language that is entirely different and much more creative than the one strictly outlined in the pages of the manuals.
Having established this point, it’s time to present a bit about the article. Let’s start with, who is Henry Rollins? Given the stature of the person, any introduction would inevitably be short, so I’ll opt for the most schematic form possible; hence I’ll frame him as a forty-two-year-old singer, spoken-word performer, writer, and actor from Washington, D.C., with a historic involvement in Black Flag and a current one in the Rollins Band. His look (bodybuilder physique, bull-like neck, perpetually angry gaze, a profusion of tattoos) is a kind of programmatic manifesto: it speaks of a man made of one piece, who in twenty years spent traveling the world has seen and heard it all ("illumination comes so hard / makes me see but it leaves its scars," he emblematically sings in Illumination) and has had much to say. However, he doesn’t necessarily reveal another rather significant aspect of his personality: that of a stage animal, a sharp critic capable of seeing and ridiculing our habits, our quirks, our phobias, and the small and large meannesses of everyday life. All this, however, emerges forcefully when, armed only with a microphone, Henry takes the stage and entertains the crowd for hours speaking (almost) freely. From such an occasion, Talk is Cheap was born.
In two CDs, with a total duration of over two hours, the histrionic Rollins leads the audience by the hand touching on a true plethora of topics. Without holding back and without taboos, he skillfully mixes universal considerations with personal anecdotes, travel memories, and lightning-quick jokes: sex, politics, music, culture… everything goes into the pot. Drawing heavily from a still Anglo-Saxon cultural background, here come the jabs at George W. Bush, at the television series "Ally McBeal" ("I'm so sorry for that!", he tries to justify himself to the Australian audience), at the new rock generation ("they sound so alike," and how can we disagree?). Henry talks about young people unable to grow up, about how Americans view Australia, about how he feels labeled based on "who's trying to sell me what," about what happened to him during a trip to Tunisia… if this list
