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Rating: "Dead ends, bread for the few, violence as much as you want... ".
Released at the end of 1981, "Artide Antartide" is one of Renato Zero's best works, a manifesto of his street and suburban "poetry". The twenty tracks of this double album take us on a journey through the most degraded suburbs of Rome, dominated by alienation and degradation. Almost a Pasolinian chronicle, with outcasts and marginalized people creating a gallery of characters that Zero must have certainly known and even spent time with during the long years spent among the gray streets and tall buildings of Montagnola.
Although one might stumble here and there across small romantic or light oases ("Ed io ti seguiro", "I figli della topa", the latter dedicated to the beloved "sorcini"), the album presents itself as a work of social denunciation, still very relevant (just take a tour around Corviale, Tor Bella Monaca, or Laurentino 38 to understand that nothing has changed since then). In "Artide", a desperate succession of inmates imprisoned in the "Lungara" prison, followed by the "Notte Balorda" of hippies, prostitutes, hustlers, alcoholics, and human leftovers, and then the queers hunting for love and homeless people crowding Termini station, children discovering sex on the street behind a wall, and sidewalks as a school of life. On an arrangement level, the album stands out as unique in Zero's production: after breaking off the historic collaboration with Piero Pintucci, but before starting the collaboration with Renato Serio, the rat king trusts Elio D'Anna, already the saxophonist of the r&b band Showmen in the late 1960s and then of Osanna, a progressive band active throughout the 1970s, in which Corrado Rustici also participated briefly. Rustici himself is the guitarist of the album: benefiting from it is the sound, which especially in Antartide gains that touch of wickedness that fits well with the lyrics and distinguishes it from the emphasis and rhetoric profusely present in other works. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that Renato does not particularly like the arrangements of this double album, to the point of declaring that it is the only one of his records he would redo differently...
The second CD, "Antartide", is even more gray and pessimistic than the first. When Zero speaks of love, it is to sing about incommunicability and distance ("sterile, in vacuum pack, devoid of stimuli"); then begins again the gallery of horrors: drug dealers eyeing children, families living in poverty, teenagers walking around with a gun in their backpack, resignation, and indifference as a way of life. Up until "Stranieri", the song that closes the album and sums up its meaning: "The asphalt is scorching, the boredom ever more invasive, and we are more alone, more strangers than ever... what are we... ".
"Artide Antartide" is therefore a small masterpiece in the realm of mainstream songwriting of the 1980s. The album was recently re-released after being out of stock for a long time due to a lengthy dispute between the artist (who now produces and distributes himself) and Sony.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
12 Marciapiedi (04:32)
Marciapiedi stanchi
La pioggia spazzerà
La polvere e i ricordi
Bagnati di città…
Passi frettolosi
D’un avido via vai…
Chi trascina il tempo,
Clienti attesi…
E’ la vita
Che
Passando sporca un po’ le dita…
Lungo i marciapiedi
Il vento porta via
L’ultima occasione
O la tua prima compagnia…
Lì
Bambino imparerai
A camminare,
Scopri il sesso dietro un muro
O sulle scale…
E’ peccato o lo confondi,
Se sia giusto amare o no
Ti domandi…
E’ li
La vera scuola che
Poi ti segna
Sulla pelle quello che
Non s’insegna…
La palestra della vita
Sta inventando i giorni tuoi!…Una sfida!
Vecchi marciapiedi
Malati di realtà,
Poliziotti e preti
Tra i fiori e oscenità…
Occhi aperti
Su melma e cieli prima mai scoperti…
Non scandalizzarti dei marciapiedi…
Lì sta il mondo, che non sai, che non vedi…
Marciapiedi screditati
Per vergogna o vanità dimenticati!
No, non ridere dei miei marciapiedi!
Lì, ero un uomo, quello a cui tu non credi
Ma se cammini, se vai avanti
È perché i marciapiedi
Sono tanti…
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