Enzo Jannacci
La mia gente

The time has come to do justice once again to our dear Enzone, after more than six months without him writing a review on one of his albums (excluding the ranking/tribute). The question naturally arises: where to start again? Now I want to tell you, dear debaters: those who know Jannacci know that each of his albums corresponds to a period in Enzo's life, from the moments of bewilderment told in Discogreve to the rediscovered desire for music in Quelli che, from the rebirth in Come gli aereoplani to the artistic resignation... and it's precisely from here that I've decided to start again, from the album that perhaps marked the decisive change, illustrating what Enzo was feeling at that historical moment, namely the desire to abandon music to dedicate himself to medicine. But let's take a closer look at what led him to this.

It is 1969. Enzo participates in Canzonissima with the famous Vengo anch'io no tu no, managing to reach the final stages against Gianni Morandi: Enzo would like to bring the ever-famous Ho visto un re, but the Rai denies it to him for the excessive mockery of the political class (as always Rai doesn't quite get it when it comes to music); Enzo, disheartened by the event, resorted to a song of a completely different caliber: Gli zingari. Unfortunately, with that song, he would reach the lowest positions in the rankings, both in Canzonissima and in sales. This was the event that fundamentally led Jannacci to give up music and dedicate himself to medicine. But unfortunately for him, he still had a record contract and had to release a few more albums to be able to end it. And it is from this series of events that La mia gente was born, an album where bitterness and disillusionment are the core around which most tracks revolve. Obviously, the most significant in the lot is the already mentioned Gli zingari which, despite Enzo having a negative memory of it (in fact, he never performed it live), was included in the album, as if symbolizing the system crash that occurred when he was censored for Ho visto un re.

Continuing to talk about the most important tracks, it is necessary to highlight 70 persone, where the sense of disillusionment is extreme through a crowd of people wandering like nomads through fields, even attempting suicide with poison; it is interesting how the text is recited, as if Enzo wants to remove the artist's mask and speak to us as a man, as if what is written in the text concerns him more as a person than as a singer (the same can be said about Gli zingari, although it seems decidedly less personal). Despite these two moments representing the two poles around which the entire work revolves, there are still another handful of important tracks, where the theme, however, is his hometown Milan: the first to appear is the dazzling Il Duomo di Milano, where the streets of the Lombard metropolis are explored, depicted as a city of sadness and despair; the second is the title track, La mia gente, but this time it doesn't talk about Milan but about its inhabitants who slowly die in the chimney smoke, while Enzo "turns up the volume on the radio" to ignore the decay that surrounds him.

However, there is no shortage of hits to accompany the main course of the album: the most famous is certainly Mexico e nuvole, whose success will annoy Enzo because by then he had distanced himself from the musical world and in fact would rarely perform it live, as well as other songs that appealed to the public (Vengo anch'io, Ci vuole orecchio) and Il dritto, which demonstrates how Jannacci knows how to make the death of a societal outcast amusing in the end. The album features many songs written by other authors, starting with Messico e nuvole itself, written by Paolo Conte and Vito Pallavicini (many think Giorgio Conte, Paolo's brother, wrote it, but quite reliable sources testify that Paolo wrote it), then arriving at Il metrò, a comedic piece written by the much-maligned Bruno Lauzi. And how can we forget the two songs written together with Cochi and Renato, both absolutely funny but among the two, the most successful is undoubtedly El Carrete, an unbalanced flamenco that tells the adventures of Carrete who gets stuck in the concierge; a must-listen, as well as Il piantatore di pellame, which perhaps loses a bit of the madness but remains decidedly surreal.

This album includes one of the last bullets fired with the titanic Dario Fo, albeit in a very skewed way: in fact, E la marcia va dates back to the mid-60s, when Jannacci was bringing the show 22 canzoni to theaters, indeed written with Dario; a little march without too many pretensions, which talks about the freedom of the people. All this to notice how, over time, Jannacci distanced himself from Fo (who since '65 had been omnipresent in Jannacci's songs, just see Sei minuti all'alba and Ho visto un re), returning to write with him only for La poiana (leaving aside the unnecessary duet in Già la luna è in mezzo al mare).

At this point, there are only two songs left in the barrel to analyze: the first is Maria me porten via, a Milanese song that proceeds slowly with the story of a man who is arrested for killing a priest at the inn and asks his wife Maria to pray for him; even though this time Jannacci might make the issue a bit too sad, the piece remains absolutely engaging and significant for Enzo's poetics (so much so that in the last album it will be re-sung by an ailing Enzo over his son Paolo's sparkling arrangement). A completely different weight has Pensare che..., a cheerful little song that talks about solitude, written in a way quite uncommon for Jannacci and which he will keep in the drawer for better times: indeed, in the album O vivere o ridere the music will be taken up for the ironic and sharp Statu quo.

This album might not be the most beautiful of Jannacci and not even the most personal, but it remains an important album for what will come in the future: after the half mess with Jannacci Enzo, he will return in 1974 with a song, Brutta gente (among other things, my favorite of Enzone), which takes up many of the themes dealt within this album with a rage and a strength that Jannacci will hardly be able to demonstrate in the future. In conclusion, La mia gente is an album that looks at the world with bitterness, immersing its hands in the mud to find the little good that remains, concluding that, in the end, there's nothing worth saving. I would say it was very nice to talk about Jannacci again, and I hope to have much more time to dedicate to this man who knows a lot about life during August.