Fabrizio De André
Storia Di Un Impiegato

Mario Luzi, one of the main figures of 20th-century Italian poetry, said of him: "De André is truly the chansonnier par excellence, an artist who fully realizes himself in the intertextuality between literary text and musical text. He has a story and truly bites".
"He has a story and truly bites," and in this case, the story bites fiercely and sparks intense debates, even political ones, between the left, which accused him of being indifferent, and the right, which branded him as a dangerous subversive.
However, the true form of terrorism that can be attributed to this work, moreover widely intentional, is that against the conscience of the masses, of those who “wait for the rain so as not to cry alone” and with their inertia become accomplices of those pulling the strings of the show.

The thirty-year-old protagonist of the concept album could be, at least at the beginning, the younger brother of Rino Gaetano, who has to navigate between his own frustrations, those of a monotonous and disarming life, and the desire, which progressively grows, to emulate the "youngsters of May 1968", those who are now past their prime. The clerk begins to harbor within himself a desire for revenge, a desire to retaliate against the main cause of his frustrations and not just his own, power. Whether it's paternal, judicial, or bourgeois power. In his frenzy of rebellion, the protagonist ends up becoming an instrument of the very power he criticizes and combats. He takes on a power of his own, after a rather troubled journey. The position he assumes is, indeed, an individualistic one, therefore selfish. His journey unfolds between the dreams of the "masquerade ball", where he imagines himself infiltrating a party that includes all the symbols of these three forms of power, and imagines dismantling them with dynamite and the thought of returning to his quiet and obedient life.

At this point, his dream shifts to a courtroom, where the clerk, from being a rebel, becomes an integral part of bourgeois power, which highlights his desire to join them, thanking him for having renewed the elements of power without undermining its logic. It is at this moment, after waking up from the nightmare, he decides "lucidly" to take action, and decides to place the "bomb in his head" in the most obvious place, the parliament. The rest is the mistake that his unprepared hands lead him to commit, leading to his true condemnation, allowing him for the first time to savor true social equality, that among the prisoners of a jail.

De André provides a stunning psychological reading of the character, capturing the torment that travels between the anxiety of a rebellion devoid of logic and the fascinating sirens of violence. Another noteworthy element is the constant and purposeful use of continuous metaphors by the author, which enrich the work with harsh and modern language. From a musical standpoint, the work represents one of the highest peaks reached by the Genoese singer-songwriter, who succeeds excellently in creating those dreamlike and distressing atmospheres necessary to render such a mental process. It transitions from dark and slow rhythms to outbursts of aggressive progressive that perfectly match the passages filled with anger and murderous intent of the bomber, up to the splendid ballad "verranno a chiederti del nostro amore", intense and very sad.

The exploitation of Faber's thoughts, in a delicate and socially aware album like this, is very easy, but never as in this case, partial and wrong. In fact, "Storia di un impiegato" is not an exhortation to violence, nor a blessing of terrorism, but the exact opposite. It is a cold and very harsh analysis of the social and psychological implications behind such actions, but it is also a condemnation for those who rise to power and do so in a wrong way. De André himself would later make sure to clarify some things. An anarchist, yes, but in the most authentic sense of the term, meaning convinced that every man can govern himself, without the need for oppressive institutions, and can self-govern, trusting in the fact that every other man does so responsibly. He then adds, that if someone has turned the word anarchist into something horrible and synonymous with violence, such a definition no longer belongs to him.

A wonderful album, in which De André gives voice to the despair of those who, in the social logic, are nothing more than a number, which might be useful, now and then, to support power or to be its often unwitting operative arm.