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There are certain moments when you feel like listening to a story, a story that lets you daydream and dream with your eyes closed in a past context, but that ultimately is always current. Stories can be read, written, watched, and listened to. Well... the story I wanted to imagine, I listened to thanks to a wonderful album by Fabrizio De André from 1973, an album to listen to from start to finish to have a complete vision.
Story of an Employee is perhaps the most beautiful album by De André... a De André who speaks anarchistically, talks politically, who talks about the life of contradictions between bourgeois life, power, and those who suffer it. The employee compares his too normal life to that of those who had the courage to rebel against the system, against the power of abuses. The employee would like to change, to be like them... the kids from the student protests, but he can't because his life is now "marked." The only way he can rebel is by dreaming.... and thanks to the dream, he manages to throw a bomb at a masquerade ball where all the people he respected for years are... all the bourgeois power that oppressed him for years. During the explosion, he sees them all die... just all those he sold out to, and his dignity.... and he feels a sense of liberation. After the explosion, the dream continues with the voice of a judge telling him that the system knew his moves... knew his intentions; the sentence turns into a thank you for having eliminated all those who for years only pulled the strings sitting behind a desk... people who annoyed the power itself. His actions were driven by the search for personal power; now the employee is one who decides for himself and for others... the employee finds himself on the same steps as those who hold power.
The dream continues as a nightmare.... the nightmare of taking the place of the father killed by him at the masquerade ball, a nightmare in which the employee finds himself facing situations in which, in a world of disappointments and illusions, he desperately searches for the defense of his integrity and his money. At this point, the employee wakes up and starts to realize that his actions will always and only be directed toward his own needs and that being in power does him no good, because the anguish is always there. And then he decides in reality to throw a bomb in parliament, but the bomb ends up on a newsstand... where in the newspapers is the picture of his girlfriend. The employee is now in prison where he writes a farewell letter to his girlfriend.
Thanks to prison, the employee manages to understand a lot of things, finding himself in the midst of the community.... a community in which being oppressed joins being all equal. While his bourgeois life made him oppressed but different from those who wield power. To be in power, you just have to play the game, and the employee, before moving from oppressed to oppressor, must necessarily "come out of himself," abandon his class and start to confront people like him: no more individualism and selfishness, only collectivity. Thanks to the collective reality, the employee learns to act and manage his own person, taking into account the lives of others, always placing himself in the same position of struggle but this time in a context to which the employee belongs together with all the others: a class of exploited people.
The album ends here, and the narrated story stops being projected in the mind.... an album to listen to and re-listen to... a brilliant album that reflects a life made of obedience in a context surely far from 2005 but always current; this life of obedience is confronted with the desire to change completely and stop being oppressed by a system too dirty to be managed. One must always defend one's rights and avoid being trampled on... in all areas, highlighting one's dignity... something that is often lacking in those who from behind a desk pull the strings of all of us puppets in this world.
Today I listened to this album and felt like writing something.... if you haven't already, listen to it... it's really worth it.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Introduzione (01:42)
Lottavano così come si gioca
i cuccioli del maggio era normale
loro avevano il tempo anche per la galera
ad aspettarli fuori rimaneva
la stessa rabbia la stessa primavera...
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Other reviews
By mangoni
The music ranges from folk ballads to the almost progressive 'Ora di libertà,' a supreme celebration of De Andrè’s anarchism.
An indispensable album: times have changed, but some reflections, properly updated and contextualized, cannot leave one indifferent.
By enbar77
De André attacks with quick thrusts and with skilled mono-tone basses that which the law would like to conceal or highlight the exceptional difference between judge and condemned.
An album to be listened to with extreme attention, in even religious silence, if possible, both to musically gather the testimony of those years, and to understand the power of the lyrics.
By majortom79
"He has a story and truly bites," and in this case, the story bites fiercely and sparks intense debates.
It is not an exhortation to violence, nor a blessing of terrorism, but the exact opposite—a cold and very harsh analysis of the social and psychological implications behind such actions.
By Knopfler76
Yesterday's newspaper reports him dead, rusted. The gravediggers often collect them, among the people who let themselves be rained on.
It’s a mirror of a country that believed it was something it never became, of music that was culture even before it was made.
By POLO
De André doesn't sing but humbly and self-effacingly serves the word.
Fabrizzzioneeeee, on the other hand, sings with his gum raised to the left because who knows, maybe it's chic, but who cares really.
