Giorgio Gaber
Dialogo tra un impegnato e un non so

Talking about Gaber means talking about Italy and Italians and, as far as I'm concerned, talking about oneself is always more difficult than making judgments about others. Indeed, it's not always easy to explain the wide range of collective psychoses that periodically affect this nation. From the fearsome Pulcino Pio to the systematic spying through various social networks, it seems that the average Italian has always felt the need to nourish himself with something different every decade, strictly degrading and fulfilling at the same time. It's a sort of spiral in which one gets caught due to the malicious daily routine, sworn enemy of that commitment, the effort that should characterize life and distinguish it from survival.

Between the late '60s and early '70s Giorgio Gaber, an anarchic patriot, described this oxymoronic situation with dark irony, producing one of his most refined works both musically and theatrically. What has always fascinated me about Mr. G since I was a child is precisely this ability to merge two complementary arts like theater and music in such a peculiar and captivating way, creating an ensemble far from trivial, without ever bordering on pomposity or self-celebration, instead resorting to the weapon of sobriety, which, although often equated with a poverty of content, in an at times embarrassing spiral of simplism, plays a key role in the success or failure of a work.

The “Dialogo tra un impegnato e un non so” (Dialogue between an engaged one and a don't know) has its roots in the need to criticize any type of political conformism, regardless of whether it leans one way or the other (a theme very dear to Gaber, which he reprises in pieces like "Destra-Sinistra" or "Qualcuno era comunista"), ridiculing the figure of the committed communist engaged in a class struggle that aims more at filling one’s own belly than that of others. The album thus alternates phases. It develops in the form of chiaroscuro, with the figure of the “don't know” acting as a counterpoint, at times peevish, at times hilarious, to the rigor of what is defined as “a left-wing extra-parliamentary.”

On one side, the social issues, which are gloomily ridiculed, although their presence is not denied more in people's minds than in their real daily lives, and on the other side, an attentive introspection of the little things: with great simplicity and clever lightness, it moves from the weakening of a couple’s relationship to the issue of the “hair,” until reaching an indifferent Nixon (Watergate was on the horizon, I like to think of him as an ante-litteram character described by a syncretic Cassandra) through the greed of the bourgeois. A well-rounded work, which does not turn out to be manichean and biased.

It’s the manifesto of the life of a character like Gaber, one for whom "freedom is not being on top of a tree, it’s not even having an opinion, freedom is not an open space. Freedom is participation.”

Hoping that it doesn't all become a big frog to swallow.