Giorgio Gaber
I reduci

For me, Gaber is my uncle who moves the pink curtain in the living room and reveals the hard case of a Martin. The case—autographed by who knows who—contains the childish thrill of a boy discovering the profound life, the world's delight, a guitar to tune.

Around me, only adults, they begin to make various requests. He rightly does his own thing and starts a frantic arpeggio, which gradually is spiced up with rhythm and very smoothly turns into orderly strumming. The voice is not of this era, the voice is not my uncle's. The voice in that room full of all the nonsense a forty-year-old can have at home in the 2000s is the distant voice of an entire generation. The relatives sing along with him, but I, the gifted child, capture a dissonance in the air. Believing that these so proper, orderly, well-adjusted people were talking about breaking it all, the school desks I was supposed to adore and the family I was supposed to respect. What was this sense of victory? Wait, what was the victory?

Fast-forward to 2021, copy the frame but change the background and add fifteen years of events, closed wounds, and open wounds, different glances. We are in another house, and now it's me tuning the old Martin, having seen a tiny bit of the world in the meantime. My uncle suggests, and I, good-natured, execute. This time it's different: I'm 20 years old, and I understand. And while the lyrics flow, it's too easy to spot the key passage of the song and sing it a bit louder:

But the fact of having the awareness
that you are in total crap
is the only substantial difference
from a normal bourgeois

Then I raise my head and see them all there, in front of me, now truly ragged and tired like those in the song, survivors of a battle never fought and glorious of a past that perhaps never existed, and that left no trace except one, indelible: me, us, the youth.

Now google, press play and listen to the voice of an entire generation. Look at the screen, because on the other side there's someone who understood that this story, these songs, these people may not have made revolutions (Guccio had warned them!), but they have given us the only substantial difference from a normal bourgeois: awareness, the only possible revolution, the only one we can truly make.