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Rating: This heartfelt appeal is directed at you! Yes, you, who stumbled upon the Debaser site while searching for ferrous materials online for your aluminum sectional company, and found yourself facing a Metallica review. And your life, after some years of slippery uncertainty, seems to have settled on what a debatable writer might describe as the "tracks of tranquility." You have always been a "devoted son, faithful husband, and exemplary father," as written on certain provincial cenotaphs. Sure, a few dalliances here and there... but life is like that, right? Weeks filled with duties and pleasures: playing Burraco with friends on Saturdays, art house cinema on Fridays, five-a-side football with pals on Thursdays, Sunday lunches at the in-laws with Mara Venier and the good china in the background, Tuesdays and Wednesdays seated in an armchair watching "Pressing Champions League" with reports by Daguanno, Fabiani's thighs hidden by a scant mini-skirt, and yours covered with the first plaid to prevent initial signs of arthritis. It must have been that free Monday that set you off, darn it...
You have always liked music. Carefully selected authors from years of meticulous listening. I don’t know... Phil Collins, Simply Red, Ligabue, Sting, Zucchero, Giorgia, something from Venditti, "who at first," as you say, "did some good stuff" ("like Mussolini?" I would ask...). So... what could be described with a single word, not without a hint of snobbery, as "Volkswagen Golf music." At home, in an English '700s cupboard, you showcase a music collection worthy of Red Ronnie, although to find an original CD there, one needs unbelievable luck since the last one you bought was in 1994 - you remember it well because it was the year Anna Falchi got her breasts done. Since then, you’ve stopped entering record stores "to boycott the Big record companies" - at least that's what you say - and if you do, it's only to buy a recharge or a "cover" for your phone.
Nowadays, you download everything from the Internet with your new ADSL contract and a PC worthy of the CNR. Once, you boasted to friends at the bar about your "from toll booth to toll booth" times or about certain horizontal performances over which it would have been more gentlemanly to gloss over... Now you strut like a child over the download times of albums by Ofra Haza or Khaled. Yep... because in recent years, to the great concern of people around you, you’ve begun to show an unpredictable interest in what, filling your mouth voluptuously, you call "ethnic music." And it was precisely this seemingly innocuous hobby that opened the doors to the abyss for you...
A few nights ago, at the Festa dell’Unità - while strolling with your Maghreb sandals and Indian linen shirt in search of the stand hosting "Belly Dance as a form of protest in the inland Tunisian populations" - you noticed a stall whose sign read: "Latin-American Dance School." You could have pretended nothing happened... slip silently into your stand, which was waiting for you in its maternal embrace with the harmonious scent of incense. But no, you approached and picked up a copy of the information leaflet (otherwise known as "brochure"), ending up entangled in a spider's web from which you will never escape. The girl - with a seductive tone, Argentine accent, and thong in view - began painting you a golden world made of "Vamos a bailar," "...hay muchas chicas...," Compay Segundo, and other postcard images of Cuba. And you entered a catatonic state and, immediately, thought of everything your friends told you about their trips to Havana... Renato, your childhood friend, said: "what paradise... there is everything a man could desire: Rum, cigars, and women!" Indeed, good old Renato - in accordance with the saying attributing devastating powers to "Bacchus, tobacco, and Venus" - returned to Milan-Malpensa fitting entirely in an ashtray, remember? And to think that, just a few months earlier, together with his accountant, he had won the "Couple of the Night" award at the annual Bachata lovers' convention in Sassuolo....
But you did not think about all this, no. You took the flyer home, along with a monstrous 1:1 scale rhinoceros bought from the fair trade stall. Now - you say - in September, you will enroll in a "Latin-American and Caribbean dance" course.
Don’t do it... you’re still in time. I’ve been to a dance hall, or whatever they’re called, those places.
Generally, they are located in a place whose humidity makes Bangkok look like a thermal spa... on a riverbank, next to a pond for pike sport fishing, inside the establishment "Peppino by the sea" on the Torvaianica coast. Inside, everything is written in strict 16th-century Spanish - and therefore dating back to Hernan Cortés' raids or some appearance on Telecinco by Raffaella Carrà - while the crew - physically far more appealing than you and me - take away your women and speak to you in Cuban dialect, incomprehensible to most but very expressive, especially if used by a pitch-black dandy exposing arms the diameter of your thigh.
The music is all unbearably cheerful and merry. Notice: there is a precise inverse proportional function between a country's GDP and the cheerfulness of song lyrics (can you imagine a cheerful Swiss song, for example?...). The fact is that, after ten minutes of listening to such tunes, one feels like exterminating a family or listening to Luigi Tenco or a Gino Paoli from the early days. The other night I couldn’t resist... I plucked up the courage, approached a girl, and asked her point-blank: "Why do you like this stuff?" She, once over the shock - poor thing, since '86, no one had approached her without intentions of picking her up - replied: "Because it is music that doesn’t make you think." Instinctively, I turned around, looked at the wild people on the dance floor, and said: "...but it seems to me that most of them already have an advantage..." Don't be fooled by appearances, blessed one: almost all the girls on the dance floor are repulsed by the idea of a forty-year-old with a prominent belly moving like Sandy Marton. And if one day a Peruvian follows you around the venue and insists on taking you to the bathroom, don't let it go to your head.: She’s probably mistaken you for the octogenarian she cares for and wants to perform your daily ablutions.
I already know what you're thinking: "Come on... after all, it’s just a harmless, passing fad!...". I hope so for your sake. But I continue to doubt it. The truth is that the decision to enroll in a Latin-American dance course lays the foundation for a Weltanschauung from which, within a couple of months, you will be permeated to the marrow: already by December, for example, you’ll force friends and family to spend weekend evenings slumped on the chairs of some dancing venue to see you and your partner give the first demonstration of your treacherous lack of coordination. Next summer, you and your partner will also do that horrendous thing of inviting your friends to dinner by surprise, only to torment them with 6 hours of slides about Maracaibo and surroundings.
Find a healthier passion, my friend, trust me... Swinging or bondage are already more deserving, just to say.
Think about it... now even the ARCI clubs and DS sections are organizing Latin-American dance courses, selling it as "solidarity with the oppressed populations of Chiapas and subcomandante Marcos" (who, by the way, in my opinion, when his face is revealed and everyone realizes he doesn’t look like Che Guevara but like Carlo delle Piane, you’ll see what happens to solidarity for Chiapas, you’ll see...).
The other day I was passing by the "ARCI Club - DS Section" in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, hoping to find a debate on the future of the Left or a nice bunch of swearing old men playing cards or some other pleasant scene... And instead, I found the entire association terrace filled with couples devoted to Salsa and Merengue. And I couldn’t help but think: "what would dear old Marx have said...". Then I figured out what he would have said: "Proletarians of the world, unite! But, for heaven's sake, don’t rub against each other!...".
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