Fabrizio De André
La buona novella

I cannot think of you as the son of God
but as the son of man, a brother of mine too

La buona novella is one of the most challenging works by Fabrizio De André; difficult not so much for its content but for its own radical choice of form: those were years of protest, and opening a work with a Christian choir - announcing the evangelical theme that will cloak all the songs - denotes the will to go against common sense, being mocked by the more prosperous layers of society. The youth would criticize the songwriter, although De André, using an apparent detachment, intended to speak precisely about the impulses that animated the struggles of that era. I am reminded of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who, in those same years, wrote about not siding with the "sons of daddy" - those who called for revolution - but with the forces of order, as the latter were the true members of the proletarian class; was Pasolini perhaps a reactionary, maybe a fascist? Absolutely not, just as De André did not hesitate to call himself an anarchist: a genetic conformity that pushed him to rise above society, commenting on it through allegories, metaphors, and jibes. In the years to come, the mass of revolutionaries would not find an outlet for their elucubrations, whereas De André would always remain faithful to his ideas - few but fixed, as he declared in a famous concert - because he, like few others, was capable of understanding the sign of his times: a noble commentator of an era stuck in a superficial conception of man and the system.

This fourth studio album by the songwriter is, by definition, a classical work: he does not speak of the life of Christ and those around him by adopting contemporary sounds, nor does he let himself be caught by exotic influences which reigned in the early seventies: La buona novella is an archaic and blatant record. An album that is sparse and in some ways unsettling, just like the sounds of Volume I and Tutti morimmo a stento, not yet made palatable by collaborations with PFM or Massimo Bubola; De André, as he will always do in the face of the tragedies of the downtrodden, sides with his Christ, analyzing his delicate human adventure, contrasting it with the crimes of the oppressive system that grips him and will lead him to death.

The redundant use of choruses, the choice of a skeletal musical output, make La buona novella a work that appears timeless and as little accustomed to superficial ears, ready to cry out at the (reversed) blasphemy as soon as references to the Gospel appear. Yet, having overcome the chants of Laudate Dominum, it only takes a few seconds of L'infanzia di Maria to grasp an evident reference to the reality of those years, to the French May that Faber will evoke in Storia di un impiegato:

And when the priests refused you lodging
you were twelve years old and without guilt
but for the priests, it was guilt your May
your virginity that tinged red

With the feverish strings sustained by choruses gone in the final part of the song - which seems excerpted from a theatrical piece, as is Laudate Hominem at the close of the album - a hypnotic litany permeates both Il ritorno di Giuseppe and L'infanzia di Maria. A line begins to be traced that evokes a growing lysergic experience, making the soul fly above the houses, beyond the gates, the gardens, the streets of antiquity, as well as on the roads and neighborhoods that animate the reality we live every day. The combination of archaic religion, detached from any clerical conception, and the analysis of man's eternal inclinations, reappears in the most famous piece of the entire work: Il testamento di Tito. The Genoese songwriter speaks of the thief as he did in Il cantico dei drogati for a distant figure, yet similar in its invective, in spitting the last drops of poison before death comes to sweep away the body and the mind.

After this controversial work, Fabrizio De André will return the following year with the marvelous Non al denaro, non all'amore né al cielo, moving away from that primordial search that renders his early works so visceral: raw works that will not return, intricate labyrinths that can be unraveled only by listening carefully, turning your eyes to the sky until you catch the colors of other worlds (that I do not know).