Giorgio Gaber
I Borghesi

THE REVIEW

One morning I wake up and feel like rummaging once again through my mother's records, all (so far) strictly classical music. But with immense surprise, I discover, semi-hidden from view, a handful of Italian music vinyl records, on which she must have spent (who knows how much) part of her adolescence; her name written in small letters on the covers of “Io Sono Nato Libero”, “Zombi di tutto il Mondo Unitevi”, “Via Paolo Fabbri”, “Radici”, even Gli Zingari Felici, I confess, moved me quite a bit (but how - I think and rethink among other things - it's been two decades that my father votes for Berlusconi and there is Gli Zingari Felici at home? - something just doesn't add up). But my attention is immediately captured by a completely white and somewhat worn-out record, the writing “I Borghesi” in elegant cursive, by Gaber.

That record tells me something, it reminds me of vague sensations upon which, while I turn the cover between my fingers, reading the tracks, I ponder for a while, then, frustrated, I decide to play it. My mother's voice shuffling in the living room disturbs those Hamlet-like moments: “when you were little I used to listen to this song on repeat, one day you asked me: but who are the 'bogghesi'? and you don’t know how much I laughed”. In the meantime, as I mentally reply to her words with a “boh”, the record started: “when I was little-tarataratarata-I wasn’t well at all- tarataratarata-..”. And there it is, the epiphany is complete, I remember everything in a block, me at 6 or 7 years old spending hours listening to a song, precisely “I Borghesi”, that I couldn't understand but that strangely captivated me. To my childlike mind, Gaber's voice was that of the odd narrator of a whimsical and silly nursery rhyme talking about pigs, a child seeing monsters, a school teacher. It was magical, lighthearted. On the other hand, the melodramatic waltz of “L’Amico”, one of the songs in the album to which I remained most attached, saddened me to no end, even to tears. The “Uomo Sfera” then troubled me, I imagined a rubbery fat man bouncing down the streets, but of course, I felt the tone of the song was not cheerful at all (the declamation in the final part of the ‘uomo-sfera’, today reminds me, in its embryonic state, of that of “Se Fossi Dio”).

The rest of the album's tracks I only discovered today: riding the wave of this retroactive enthusiasm I listened to the whole record again and found it wonderful, a beautiful blend between our man's emerging theatrical experience and the song form he had always attempted. The themes of the exhausting everyday experience, the “routine of the senses”, the inherent need to escape relationships and things (“Evasione” is precisely the title of a song) perhaps even more mediocre than the daily life it wants to flee from, are the pivot of all the tracks except “La Chiesa si rinnova” (where anyway all this is involved in a broader sense). And the discomfort of the everyday, sung with such sincerity and hidden in that usual disillusioned, disarming irony, Gaber condenses in the splendid “Un Gesto Naturale”: here the weight of the struggle for life, which man has slowly learned, transfers into the simplest gestures, of every day and every moment, like talking, breathing, or smiling. It’s the most beautiful song on the album, and also the last. What we need more than anything else I think this album tells us implicitly (and Gaber in his entire career will never stop, more or less implicitly, repeating it): it's love, precisely that censored word, unspoken, at the end of the refrain of “Ora che non son più innamorato”.

And the middle class? I’m probably already one of them... but I still hold on tightly to my “strange hallucinations”.