Hawkwind
Quark Strangeness and Charm

The real problem is that I'm realizing I've lost all my bearings. A few years ago, there was the "ringtone guy" who tirelessly promoted the trashy ringtone "Materazzi has fallen" following the World Cup victory, and in no time, I see him there on a Ligurian beach, a bit bulkier and with an unsuspected black goatee with his family in tow: how many damn years have passed in the meantime? They had massacred that poor guy with threats and lawsuits for playing a role that was just a job like any other, and in the end, almost twenty years later, there he is, calm and content while sunbathing with the appearance of an ordinary man contemplating the serene beauty of his middle age.

I kind of miss those years because the Web was taking off, but it all seemed like a jungle you had to navigate to find anything, and WinMX was my god that, after hours, if not days, of eager waiting, would eventually deliver the most unlikely of Polish B-movies when I was searching for the latest Jenna Jameson masterpiece, and conversely, when trying to pursue my young filmmaker interests looking for some unwatchable original version Tarkovsky film, would gift me with the sweatiest of low-budget American gonzo porn. Now everything is available on all platforms, and you see those dazed Gen Z kids around who, when asked, "What music do you listen to?" systematically reply, "Oh, I don't have a specific genre: I listen to a bit of everything," and then you find out they don't know who Zappa was, and they say, "Yes, Bob Dylan is a poet," but if you ask for a single song, they fall silent only to return to their usual Instagram feeds where the background music is the latest nonsense from Dua Lipa as they try to impress with their cocktails, unable to tell vermouth from triple sec.

Their muse is the god of fooling around, a mythological being with a head shaped like Frank Matano and a body modeled after any YouTuber who goes around trying fast food chains and pretending to be a great culinary critic of complete nonsense: the important thing is to use the tag #foodporn when necessary and make a nice creamy carbonara - holy hell, enough with those fluorescent eggs - necessarily with crispy guanciale on top.

I tell the truth: I don't clearly remember all the gods of my childhood, nor do I want to act like someone saying things were better when they were worse, but I've always wondered what it would have been like to live in the time of Robert Calvert, someone who truly played the role of the seer and was one of the few in the '70s to interpret the cultural revolution as a skillful blend where literature and science would use the medium of music to reach the masses. He was the deus ex machina of Hawkwind's "Space Ritual," the initiator of the more intellectual dimension of British space rock's champions, with a series of albums that, truth be told, weren't always perfectly successful but eccentric and centrifugal like the art of the great geniuses of 20th-century history. Apart from the massive and exhausting "space ritual" mentioned above, limited to his career in Hawkwind, Bob's best work can be certainly heard in "Quark, Strangeness and Charm," one of the maturity albums full of semi-occult references to scientific themes reread in a narrative and prophetically cyberpunk key. Now it’s clear that a lot of the dirty work is done by the usual Dave Brock between guitars and synthesizers, assisted by the recent recruit House on keyboards: the long hand on composition and group leadership, akin to a Fripp capable of keeping the King Crimson legend alive for more than fifty years, is the indispensable element capable of consistently justifying the work of Earth's space travelers. It is clear, therefore, that Calvert does not play the part of the freewheeling artist as in previous solo works, but the change in direction is evident compared to the predominantly instrumental long rides of "In Search of Space" and "Doremi Fasol Latido," in favor of a more verbal—yet not verbose—sung form where space rock becomes a theme not only more musical but also literary. Now that "Spirit of the Age" is already both alpha and omega of the album, since, among stories of improbable hibernations and unsettling clonations, the sense of it all lies precisely there, in becoming aware of the "spirit of the age" that has forgotten or pretends to forget the failed genesis of the human race (the marvelous litany of "Fable of a Failed Race") and winks at the material consumerism that mocks Einstein's and Galileo's scientific speculations ("Quark, Strangeness and Charm"). Now the strength of Calvert and Hawkwind is the fact they've realized that the '70s, once the psych and space intoxication of the early stages is overcome, are loudly demanding to quench the masses' fiery throats with a nice pop-rock stream (contaminated indeed by damp proto-punk streaks) to spread the prophecies of the new millennium to the four winds, so "Quark, Strangeness and Charm" exploits the downhill path of pop songs to break into the diverse audience of the seventies. Now in his unexpected light-hearted talk of particle physics and cloning, Bob Calvert would be today my ideal god, because he only cares so much about elementary particles or pretends to, and in the end, it's all about the lack of "strangeness and charm" if Einstein never really scored in his life, before Sheldon Glashow truly found some "charm" in the way certain Quarks arrange symmetrically and Gell-Mann found something deeply "strange" in the pairs of particles with an exceptionally long life.

Now if in recent years I've completely lost my bearings, part of the blame is also on Bob and Hawkwind, because I'm stuck in the spirit of the age and every time I turn on the TV I'm consistently lagging behind by a few dozen more botox injections on talk-show hosts, still waiting for the "Almanacco del Giorno Dopo" jingle and haven't yet understood what the hell Eurovision is. And above all, today as back then, I'm still waiting for the ringtone guy to pop out of nowhere telling me that if I send an SMS with code 69 to 48248, they’ll send me exclusively the dance version ringtone of "Spirit of the Age."