Ah, everything beautiful and everything true, especially in the passages where you make a clear and sacred distinction between their work and comedy as such, as comic force, which generates (and unexpectedly, incestuously, simultaneously derives from) satire and other noble progenies but also, precisely, ascendants. I, on the other hand, was there at the times you mentioned, very young, even though I didn’t have the venerable age of
@[sergio60], I was there; it’s known that, back then, at fourteen/fifteen, you participated in everything in the broadest sense, forming politically and socially (incredible to say nowadays, right? Fifteen years old, holy cow, fifteen years...), taking stones from the autonomists while a cop beat you or reading Kafka without understanding much, only to retreat to the legendary Thor or the eternal Lando... and I remember well the aura of mystery surrounding the Squallor (only later, after "Vacca," the third issue after "Troia" and "Palle," timid assertions about the group managing the nickname started to appear in the genre press, as one would say now. It was thus revealed that a certain number of hugely successful songwriters and the like, incredibly rich, utterly bored, and deeply addicted to cocaine, (in times when the said substance was the prerogative of only certain high-profile and lavishly spending figures...) had, so to speak, out of boredom and as a hobby, created a group of singers/reciters that took care to season meaningless little tunes mostly à la page, para-disco or para-Italian melody, with lyrics, mostly irreverent or simply of a vulgarity that would soon give way to the total and absolute boredom, as always happens with repetita that, after briefly being enjoyable, ultimately bore us to death. I will skip the most common comment that wanted our guys to be able to produce such absurd and gratuitously heavy discography simply because they belonged to the elite of popular and commercially important Italian music. Never, and even less so, would others, less acclaimed figures, have managed to achieve such a "project" with the same sales results... Personally, I remember well using, during nighttime or evening hours, broadcasting from a tiny free radio from Genoa, certain passages from their records, curse words and expressions picked here and there, for the few hundred people who listened to that radio. So, with the simple aid of a headphone for pre-listening, two turntables, and a little mixer, I added during the reproduction of, say, "A canzuncella" or, worse, "Ti amo," some sweet little words that better than other expressions painted my discomfort in being forced to mix "little song" programs for hours to gain the right to have a show entirely my own on the new wave or psychedelic rock... That’s it, personally, nothing has remained of them that isn’t attributable to two good laughs among friends or phrases extracted here and there and repeated at school in front of those who were not initiated into their pagan rite ("Pronto, papà, ammucchete a uallera di Alibbabbà...") As for the members of the historic group, everything, or too much, you’ve already said, recalling their merits (?) as composers of lyrics and music, as well as arrangers, of that megliobarrapeggio that so permeated the auditory pathways of half the Italian population, sweetening evenings and days of the remaining half, for over thirty years... Really, do you really remember anything from their, moreover, bulky discography? Would you really describe their production as part of a varied and composite puzzle that depicted Italian society of those years? Because if that were the case, well, I fear that it could indeed be part of that puzzle, but to tell the truth, a rejected, forsaken, tedious part, like, I don’t know, a corner in the lower right of the puzzle, the one where, generally, patches of grass or sidewalk reside, insignificant and terribly well-known.
