Francesco Guccini
Quello Che Non...

An open title for an open work, which opens a decade (the '90s) and leaves inquiries and questions unanswered. It seems that this feeling of suspension and incompleteness of judgment about the world and man is what condenses the meanings of the entire work of the most "Dylanian" of Italian Songwriters (alongside Edoardo Bennato and the "other" Francesco, De Gregori).

An album centered on questions, questions that cannot be answered, or should not be, as in the "Canzone delle Domande Consuete" (Awarded by the Club Tenco as Song of the Year 1990), giving the impression of a circular dimension of one's existence perception and the thoughts formed about it ("If you exist, what are you? What do you think and why? / I don't know, you don't know; are we here or far away? / To be everything, a moment, but inside you, / to have everything, but not tomorrow..."). The same wavy circularity of internal time, where everything is flowing and ebbing, all composed of courses and recourses where everything eventually returns to its starting point, where the narrating voice seems to wonder between the lines if there is a meaning in these journeys, against a background of existential bitterness and disillusionment, somewhat softened by the hope, somewhat by the self-irony. Not a decadent and imposing "pain of living" (Baudelaire, Wilde), nor a "reaction and protest" typical of the Rock poetic foundation (Bob Dylan, but also the Rolling Stones, Them, The Who...). The perspective is decidedly more shifted towards a "glimpse" view. This emerging "melancholy" (of memory) mitigated by a more "resigned" and disenchanted view of things constitutes the backdrop of "Ballando con una Sconosciuta" whose words, sharp and ironic/subtle, at times surreal, perfectly clarify the concept: "happiness that we only know how to look at, wait for, seek already made, as if it were the perfect anagram of ease, cheating on a single letter...".

It is debated (perhaps somewhat "inertia-driven") that the Songwriters have abandoned the socio-political stream in these years to focus on the universe of individual existence. Which, however, becomes an allegory of the world in general. The fifteenth record of the Modenese Songwriter (considering them all without distinction between live and compilations) inscribes itself within the coordinates of a minimalism of memory and imagination: "Tango Per Due", "Canzone Per Anna", "Cencio", a story of ordinary human squalor, literarily "verghian-realist" (as Guccini also previously referred to Flaubert's Naturalism) in which once again it is Poetry that restores dignity to the protagonist ("who knows if you found within your true height?" reminiscent of that story of De André's "Giudice," but much more subdued, autobiographical and reflective); "Le Ragazze Della Notte", a glimpse into a piece of nightlife, in which, as in all other episodes, the narrator self-includes (the point of view can be that of the table of a bar) and gives the listener a sequence of enchanting verses, perhaps the most beautiful of the album

"How I love the girls of the night
so similar to me, so different,
we passengers of parallel trains,
small heroes of missed opportunities,
even if I know that we will not meet
but we only watch each other pass,
even if I know that we will never love each other
with the regret of not being able to love.".

No denunciation, no protest, but certainly an intense involvement in the scenarios portrayed "from within." These are bounded by two ideal "confines": the concluding "æmilia" where the singer's gaze expands beyond the horizon of the everyday, and restores a sense of belonging ("Emilia dreaming between today and tomorrow, of food, engines, of luxury and dance halls, Emilia of faces, of cries, of hands, it will be a great pleasure, to see in the future from a far-away world down here on earth a patch of green and feel my heart beating slower and there inside it gets lost...") through a tribute that however also defines the outlines of the space where the various stories told until now have been paraded, with a beautiful, powerful rock arrangement and remarkably interpreted vocally, and "What That Does Not...", another country-rock gem with harmonica in the style of Bob Dylan, enigmatic in the title, but very clear in meaning: the subtraction of the time to live from those who already have in today's world a subtracted and compressed time, ("We are not the dust in a dark corner, nor a stone thrown at a window, the crack of the sun in a wheat field, we are not, we are not, we are not...") where the disappearance from the interior horizon of the basic referents of life makes us lose the consistency of life itself ("Do you know what color the low clouds have and the seats of a former third class? The anguish given by an endless plain? Do you feel like me and life, of any day, of a bare shore? Do you know that we are nothing more?") even if, for a single moment, the only one, the elevation of the gaze to the sky seems to scan the possibility of answers, obviously metaphorical ("The sky is striped and that high pressure is a second-view film, it's the usual scream that says slowly:"). On this song, the Author will say "The narrating self addresses a female interlocutor, as often happens in my songs. The dissolution of the relationship emerges from a series of sharp images that, apparently, have little to do with the couple's relationship and overlap. It was a moment of great uncertainty for me. Although it was a private matter, underneath, by indirect means, there was also all the discomfort of the left-wing, in clear identity crisis. I believe that both disaffections influenced each other".

A record that says a lot, perhaps everything, but from a glimpse, a window in the wall that surrounds us in our unawareness. The "cri(p)tical" quote on the back cover of "Fear and Desire" is, at this point, perfect:

"it's not time that needs us, it's we who need time".