Stoney

" It is the worker who makes a company great." But it is the company that, once great, makes the worker small.

Of course, faced with the completed fact, no one would rationally ever admit to being happy about getting screwed. And yet every morning they get up, go to work, come home exhausted, fully aware that their job is just a cog in the machine that, thanks to the now well-known mechanisms, does nothing but worsen the quality of life for everyone—rich, poor, workers, unemployed—without distinction, through debt, pollution, and social tensions. And still they carry on, because they have no other choice, and every so often they end up convincing themselves that as long as it lasts, it's not so bad after all. This is called complicity, whether they're aware of it or not, and it’s the only lifestyle allowed. This is the true getting screwed: being forced to become complicit in something harmful, even starting to enjoy it: a bit of money in your pocket, a few indulgences or satisfying moments taken, and the game is done. Then one day they cut down the trees in the park by your house to build a skyscraper, or they open a toxic paint factory two meters from where you live, and then you understand: they gave you a little something, and now they're taking it back with interest. The machine must function and move forward; you can only accept it, your voice in the matter is zero, even if millions or billions of people are screaming along with you. Once tyrants and dictators were killed or overthrown; any system, no matter how despotic, always allowed for a revolt. Today, however, there’s no accountable dictator, just an abstract system that sacrifices the lives of individuals and entire populations to its rationalizing and regulatory will, rendering any rebellion in fact useless.

Of course, it takes courage to stand alongside Meshuggah, Opeth, and Nile...

The thought process is very simple: democracy is an oligarchy, citizens are subjects, and mass culture is nothing more than a bunch of bullshit aimed at convincing everyone that poverty, debt, pollution, and precarity are necessary and unavoidable sacrifices to "make things work" in the best possible way. Thus, it never crosses anyone's mind that a change might even be remotely desirable. It's as if everyone is getting fucked over, but that's how it has to be, for a worthy cause; otherwise, things would get worse. The only thing that perhaps Fini hasn't understood well is that people are quite happy to get fucked over; they really care about it, indeed, they wouldn't know how to live any other way.

"Now I will probably ask for something impossible. That is to try to eliminate biases and judge the album only if it has truly been listened to, and not dismiss it just because the singer in question is Giuseppe Povia." Exactly, you heard right: impossible. A firm no based on trust.

I don't know what you see as "sunny" in this album; to me, it feels soaked in that gloom typical of certain mediocre rock that, since it doesn't know what to talk about, prefers to lean on melancholy so it plays it safe. Additionally, I would really like to know what "light and sensitive guitar arpeggios" are.

oops, about the shopping, pardon

Comment 5: The fact remains that these extreme groups never sing "the phone books," why is that?

I would like to know what harm the Italian language has caused you to deserve such treatment.

Do you know what bothers me about your writings? Your absolute lack of respect for even the slightest intelligence of the reader. "I can say, in a ruling, that Tizio stole 10, 100, 1000 bottles of wine, but from this fact, I certainly cannot infer that Tizio is always and anyway a thief by vocation, nor that he is a murderer, or a person devoted to evil, let alone that he is a 'man in black' unfit to govern a country." This means mocking those who read you, dear De Lorenzo; it isn’t even rhetoric to support an unprovable thesis (which would be an art in its own right), it’s shamelessness and taking the mickey, not even having the dignity to realize how trivial and ephemeral such an argument is in trying to support a thesis that has no grounding whatsoever.