Giorgio Gaber
Anni Affollati

After striking, with skillful strokes, the heated atmosphere from the revolutions, or attempts at organizing them, of the '70s, Giorgio Gaberscik, better known as the much more famous Gaber, decides to showcase the harvest gained after ten years of intense work, repeatedly disturbed by subversive attacks from all political factions. "Crowded Years," indeed, is the result of a careful analysis of those decidedly confused times.

In some tracks, Gaber chooses introspection as a demonstrative method. But a violent introspection, self-accusatory, perhaps with a subtle vein of hope and a slightly more pulsating one of provocation. Gaber displays his thought process also through fiery executions against every target, targets belonging to every breed, without the sometimes necessary will to spare the innocent or the martyrs. Gaber exposes his personal soul-searching examination to the eyes of every class, radiographic as it may seem violent or precise, desecrating or upright, reckless or just, delirious or superb.

Gaber, using every available means, claims the existence of divine power, even attempting to replace it, to act in its stead, with a hint of gratuitous omnipotence bordering on blasphemy.

Gaber decides to destroy with irony and dedication the political and social structures raised with the blood of the innocent, the partisan, the students, and the police officers, without omitting the blood shed, always ignobly gratuitously, by the holders of the somber power of politics.

Gaber confirms his will to issue invectives solely to annihilate hypocrisy, the dirt encrusted in the mechanisms of every point, created or already existing from the council of statesmen of that era, casting a prophetic eye on the current ones.

Gaber spares no one, sweeping away with neurotic violence every form of falsehood, every attempt to conceal the truth, every possibility of hiding what is just. Who would punish with bloody flagellations those who possess the freedom to decide everything, those who have no qualms of conscience, those who judge without any remission of sin, those convinced they can close every deal.

Gaber reaches the peak of his (just or unjust?) venom, loudly announcing the decision to replace for only fifteen minutes the main symbol of the Catholic religion, putting the ideology belonging to every faction to fire and sword. Claiming to be more precise, perhaps juster, more intolerant, and uncompromising than any other, eliminating with only the strength of the diaphragm the conjectures and falsehoods squandered over the years, even admitting his own mistakes, at the cost of risking a media crucifixion with "Io se fossi Dio".

Provocation, more than a song, predominantly courageous, published clandestinely shortly after Aldo Moro's death. Courageous, in relation to the statements present in the lyrics, where Gaber attacks everything and everyone, without any reservation or remorse of conscience.

Gaber denounces the overflowing falsehood of the people, of the politicians of the time, who disparage the police forces (in some cases rightly) during their work and mourn them with pity at someone's death. Overflowing falsehood of politicians who badly define their colleagues and presidents, who, if they could, would eliminate them because judged as dangerous, harmful in the chance of creating "historic" compromises. Politicians ready to cry with fake tears brought on by orange peels squeezed into their eyes upon finding such presidents in the trunks of cars "furtively" parked in the right place. Politicians who preach democracy and justice, recalling with fake emotion the colleague martyred by parliamentary terrorism with "the cloth on the hands and the hands on the balls" (Thanks Fabrizio!).

Gaber, who despite everything, denounces with superb courage (and the risk of ending up in jail) while standing firm on his claims, where a man alive and ill-regarded remains so even after a violent death.

An album that, even if terribly censored at the time for its obvious accusatory content, remains a pearl of rare brilliance both in Gaber's discography and in the Italian musical landscape.