Francesco Guccini
Guccini

It was 1983, I would be born 4 years after this album and would listen and appreciate it about 18 years after its release. This should help you understand the sense of immortality that lies behind the works of certain authors, and certainly Guccini is part of this noble category.

The LP in question marks a clear expressive and dialectical continuity with the previous one (Metropolis - 1981). The main theme will continue to be the journey seen within a perspective of negativity resulting from the impossibility of knowing. Guccini indeed confronts himself, which is very rare in his works, with songs of pure fantasy (Autogrill, Shomèr ma mi-llailah?...) and with others that are semi-autobiographical, but still revolve around the idea of the journey (both in a metaphysical or vaguely surreal sense, and in a physical sense).

The tracks are 6, few as the master has often accustomed us to. "Guccini" is therefore a compact album, but accompanied by an expressive richness that is rarely found.

The opening is majestic: "Autogrill" is one of the most beautiful songs in the already rich Guccini repertoire. Defined by Jachia as "a brief appearance of magic in the elsewhere," the piece tells of a love merely touched upon, which will be lost in the pure vacuity of imagination. Not coincidentally, the meeting place is precisely a highway rest stop, symbol of transience and fleetingness. The song has several expressive topos where the narrative planes overlap frenetically, confusing the listener. The arrangement (acoustic guitar and sax) is sober and suitable for the surreal and dreamy atmospheres of this masterpiece in which the hypothetical protagonist travels, moves, exposes himself to his fantasy, but ultimately discovers that life grants us the same solutions for different conditions.

The album continues with "Argentina", a lyrical, engaging ballad, this song reminds us how it is impossible to grasp the true essence of the places we visit, which remain unusually familiar even in the face of oddities like "the inverted ambiguity of Orion" that presents us a "perverse horizon", initially shocking but fundamentally the same as the one that awaits us at home when in the morning we are surprised by the rising sun in what is ultimately an "identical dawn". Once again, the futility of the journey, then. Just as Gulliver's travels were futile, as he recounts his adventures to his grandchildren, he realizes that from his journeys only the faint semblance is left encapsulated in the form of empty words. This is exactly the content of the third track, with vaguely rock echoes, and literary inspiration. In fact, the message is the same: the composition eloquently concludes with; "from time and sea you learn nothing!"

If it is true that time teaches us nothing, it is equally true that inherent in man's nature is his boundless curiosity, his openness to asking new questions, to pushing beyond the known and the knowable. And it is from this point that Guccini gives birth to the splendid "Shomèr Ma Mi-llailah". A "biblical" ballad with an obsessive rhythm, in which Francesco cites an extraordinarily human and intense passage from the book of Isaiah where the story of the "sentinel of always" is narrated. A hypothetical lookout placed on the edge between the human and the non-human, the earthly and the transcendent, (this condition is allegorically represented in a topos of an eternal dawn) to whom travelers pose a continuous question: "at what time does the night end?". The answer will eternally be the same: "The night is not yet over but the day has not yet arrived... but you who can, continue to ask."

Therefore, the allegorical function of the piece is clear, which paints the eternal condition of uncertainty in which Man faces his life, his eternal questioning whose solution he will never know. However, it is necessary that he continues to ask because it is his questioning that makes him Man. In this way, Guccini understands that "the answer about the Future is a voice that will ask...".
Sublime are also the syntactic solutions found by Guccini, who to convey the sense of ambiguity and doubt inherent in human living, composes a text rich in antithetical and oxymoronic solutions ("I've been standing for ages or a moment in a void where everything is silent" "I no longer know from when I feel anguish or peace" ... "now I understand my not understanding"...", "memory or myth"....etc).

Totally different is the profile of "Inutile", which is nothing but one of Guccini’s classic strokes, depicting with his usual mastery a day of ordinary routine, in which he narrates the probable end of his love, definitively buried in a rainy March, among the wet beaches of Rimini. What to say about this song, if not that it’s one of those that makes you say "dang, but this is my story!", in short, when you discover that you dress yourself in Guccini's words, you look in the mirror, and you find they fit you perfectly.

But in the end, if we poor humans are denied any access to knowledge, any sign of the "truth of things", what could we do, other than retreat into perpetual questioning? The man from the mountains gives a solution; irony. Yeah, irony as the only approach to wisdom, the mystery of life. Because Guccini, after all, as the "spiritualist agnostic" he is, empathizes with the transience of the vital breath, the perpetual and incomprehensible flow of time, the unstoppable and overwhelming alternation of generations. In the end, as he himself states: "life is a wheel, there’s nothing to do but laugh at it". From these concepts comes the carnivalesque closure, a product of that goliardic and cabaret-like verve to which Guccini has often accustomed us. "Gli amici", the last song, is a classic Blues in which the narrator presents his vision of the afterlife. Imagining it as "the usual place, where drinks are free and harmless". A quiet, humble, and familiar place, where in the end one has fun with old friends... after all, what could be better?

In conclusion, "Guccini" is a compact but rich album, without faltering, which presents an extraordinarily creative singer-songwriter tackling fascinating themes. Besides, one can notice not only an improvement in his voice, now more mature and profound, but also a slight abandonment of the folk sound in favor of a more elaborate musical approach, contaminated by jazz, rock, and blues. However, to appreciate a total growth on a musical level, one must wait for the next album "Signora Bovary", but that is another story....