Giovanni De Liso
Genesis - Once Upon A Time

"Genesis. Once Upon A Time" commented texts (1969-1974), by Giovanni De Liso. Arcana, Rome 2009.

Once upon a time, books about pop were written by going to concerts, listening to records, reading the lyrics, poring over interviews and reviews published by magazines in the field, listening to friends' opinions (the more daring ones even contacting the artists themselves). There wasn't much interest in doing real research because the world of pop music was considered, even into the late Eighties, as "youth music." The advent of popular music studies (particularly IASPM) has made it clear to half the world for the past thirty years that pop could be written about with more seriousness and expertise. Yet, fundamentally, books about pop continue to be written in the same way as before. Except for one detail. Today, one also pores over (or mostly?) the internet. Essentially, all of this happens because the publishing world wants it this way. And it wants it this way because it believes, thus, that it can sell more with less expenditure of effort (from publishers and authors).

Arcana is a historic and illustrious name (read about its origins on wiki); in the 70s/80s, it had a series "MUSICQA" (number 6, 1982, dedicated to Genesis) where complete lyrics appeared with side-by-side translations. The translations were more or less good/decent, rarely terrible; while the ideological slant of some introductions reflected those times. Today, this series has been replaced by booklets, like the one we should discuss, following a style already experimented by another publishing house, Riuniti, which has a substantial series of pop texts translated in snippets with commentary. The "snippet" of the original text is a copyright issue we cannot tackle here. The doubt remains whether it's truly impossible to return to the complete text with side-by-side translation (and commentary). Maybe in another thirty years.

The novelty of today's Arcana, specifically "Genesis" by De Liso, thus gains the commentary on the text but suffers from the lack of complete translation and consequently the presence of the text itself (commenting on something not offered to readers in its entirety: ideological mommy does its damage even if in another form; I mean, do I comment/translate the part I like the most?). Moreover, there's the little problem of poring over the internet. But let's be clear, the problem isn't that unreliable info can be found on the internet, but that the book's author (whether De Liso or others) ends up doing a job of assembling collective or specifically other people's ideas. What is missing, and what makes the book, these books, the same old reheated soup, is the lack of a strong idea, a personal vision, an authoritative and authorial direction. In the end, we read opinions collected from the internet and the historical sources we referenced at the beginning, while personal elaboration is missing. The very possible authorial contributions get lost in the already-read, already-discussed (these publications indeed lack the ability to indicate sources).

In essence, it is a surface-level work. To put it in Boulez's terms: it lacks the courage of research. This, paradoxically, instead lies on the internet. Paradox of paradoxes: the book loses authority. Who is to blame then? And if the internet goes down, what do we do? Do we go back to the mimeograph?

ET