Giorgio Gaber
Polli d'allevamento

When you come across such an enormously unconventional intellectual like Giorgio Gaber, you always do so with a kind of reverential fear, with a sense of inadequacy and cultural imbalance that leads you, willingly or not, to introspective work and an unprecedented paroxysmal indignation. "Polli d'allevamento" is an album dated 1978, recorded at the Duse Theater in Bologna, with the extraordinary participation of Franco Battiato (arrangements) and the usual presence of Sandro Luporini in the writing of monologues. This work, by the Gaber-Luporini duo, is by far one of the most provocative and debated, as it targets the youth movement of those years, accused, without mincing words, of wishful thinking and conformism. In Gaber, this element was predominant; he did not seek easy applause, immediate consensus, populism sprinkled in small doses (although one of the main criticisms directed at him is precisely this), but rather inner torment, the most wearing and profound reflection as a remedy to preserve morality. He was a scourger of consciences, a Pasolini-esque voice of an unresolved private matter that was taking over. Far from that invasive rhetoric, from that bucolic tenderness in the Battisti manner, Gaber in every show, and album, tested his audience. Even in this one. It is a concentration of smiles and tears, of indignation and hope, of anger and strong sense of belonging. Yes, belonging, that concept he so much detested because "belonging means having others inside of you," he didn't know, or perhaps he did, that for many it was precisely that thing. When you listened to "Quando è moda è moda," a deep sense of hatred towards him was born within you. Because he shattered any certainty, even yours, because he placed doubt above any dogmatic interpretation of life, politics, society. Yet, at the same time, you loved him immensely because he had given you another point of view, another direction from which to glimpse new horizons. And then "Il suicidio," a contamination of emotions and sensations that left you bewildered and helpless. There was hilarity and a poignant poetic and literary narrative, there was the ridiculous and the precarious human condition within an increasingly fluid society, there was an already written end and one all to be discovered "there is an end to everything, and it is not always death." Gaber is all this, and "Polli d'allevamento" is the main megaphone of what he was: a disorganized intellectual, a forerunner of modernity, a "gull with the intention of flight." He did nothing but enter the pantheon of individual consciences, understand their discomfort, and transform it into art. I will close as he would have, with sarcastic melancholy: "I am not afraid of the Italian in itself, I am afraid of the Italian that is in me."