Doom and anarchism

by Mauro Macario

The poet in music goes beyond breaking up rules and conventions: these artists are born one or two over a century. This is the case of Fabrizio

For several years, including books, papers and conferences, it has been explored much in the figure and work of Fabrizio De André going back to its roots, its referents, its readings. Even today we discover or point out new and more complete facets of this writer-performer whose flow, adding river in the wake of his poetry does not seem to stop, indeed creates side tributaries that gradually grown into other rivers in flood. I believe that the historical and critical to have first brought to light the little known or poorly misunderstood phenomenon of "poet in music", a "distinction" necessary to determine the scans varied in the songwriting, while not demean anyone . People have to say that most of the songwriters of our time renovating the general mood of the song through the poetic and social dimension is not always risked traumatic tearing away of the traditional song straining his ears to the sound of hearing popular shortcuts. A song in their lives not spun off from its constituent elements: voice, text, music. The poet in music is another matter, breaking up goes beyond rules and conventions and these artists are born one or two over a century. The poet in music is instead detectable in the three separate elements, especially in the text. A text, for example, that if only it played live, in isolation, without music or voice, in a sort of test specification, having found, with talent, ingenuity and hard work, their own language, high style, complete, original, together with an 'existential urgency of content policy, ethical and political. In Europe, the poet in music was born in postwar France, in Paris, resulting in what was called "la chanson de Saint Germain des Prés" and the names that come immediately to mind are those of Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens, Boris Vian, Jacques Brel. Authors profoundly different but united by the same dream: to anarchy. The roots of Fabrizio.
The poet is a poet in music "tout court" that annoys academics obscurantist for tiling the floor to the music dequalificante deemed frivolous and while we know that acts as a vehicle penetrative emotional action of the word genetically compatible with the staff and that this absorbs all benefit as a stem cell that saves the poem from the interference of civilization video technology.

Strong anarchist matrix

Fernanda Pivano knows and taught us, how important it was for the Beat poets the relationship to music, from bebop of Charlie Parker, jazz, folk, pop, and not just in the writing of "spontaneous" but even during their public "reading". I think in this sense, the music and singing have greatly expanded the use of poetry by bringing it to the streets elite salons of the world as a primary language, but perhaps hidden among the nations.
And that movement was inspired by planetary-style more or less consciously in the culture beat, I remember the light pre-insemination fertilized libertarian take our minds of that time feeding values such as anti-militarism, pacifism, the sense of community universal respect for others. A position in those days, much disliked and reverse to the institutional establishment split between profit and the atomic bomb.
Here is the words and music that come back together because of this it is: restore poetry to its original source when it was separated from the music. Fabrizio has been said so: Fabrizio as one of the greatest poets of the century, Fabrizio refined music researcher, author Fabrizio strong anarchist matrix who hates and rejects all forms of authority. A libertarian nature of the final destination, after the criticism of power, is the "piety" toward the latter, the wretched of the earth who know their own hell on earth. A "pietas" which sometimes has been exploited by certain clerical areas that have tried to digest and metabolize talking about "Christian anarchism" while Fabrizio pietas is secular, earthly and also reduces reactive against whom the last to be such. How, on the other hand, his Jesus of "La buona novella", already well designed and designated by them Apocrypha. It is spoken more often of Fabrizio in the central and final stage now when the stations of onset, the intermediate and the training, were chronologically distant but to continue to draw a map of his personality as a dynamic interconnected with high potential ethical conflict -existential, I would like to draw attention to something that perhaps has been bypassed by the passage of time and reached his libertarianism, an element which is not separated from its utopian goal and maybe it is the antechamber gestation. It is "cursed" in that early period of his career characterized some of his works and the image itself that he came to us mere admirers with its share rising anarchist positions that were gradually more and more defined to break away from that cursed devote himself fully to local, ethnic children, and his odyssey geo-musical circumnavigate the Mediterranean basin, where the siren song of the soul is nothing more than history of the land to us confluent and interchangeable in a single pitch in a common feeling and find yourself.
A coexistence between anarchism and the accursed, that already existed in its own references French cited. Authors who lived this "flatness", now in introflex misanthropy "maudit", now opening up to the claim in key social libertarian. Léo Ferré even music and singing poets "cursed" as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Rutebeuf, Angiolieri and Villon. The latter two - parellel magical fraternity - were also addressed by Fabrizio when he worked in "S'i fosse foco" Cecco Angiolieri and La ballata degli impiccati requested by the climate of the Ballade des pendus of François Villon. That of the "cursed" is primarily a genetic existential revolt against the injustice inherent in life, a sharp contraction in cecum, which reacts to every form of sublimation of doctrine with a retaliation solipsistic despair and omnivorous, and retaliation that careens off the rails as it deprives specifically identified targets and that in fact the poet introflex darkness "against" without another stop him from railing against those patterns of social life and morals institutionalized that he is always opposed and which belong to power. It is as if there was the extreme side tended to utopia and that prolapses into the awareness of human nature, a kind of desperation criticism, an unequal struggle between the inevitable and the Liberator.

Awesome effect

Following the brief journey of these "flowers of evil" Fabrizio has sown in his enchanted garden tear the first petal to the text of '63. Here the code of the expression "damn" is fully respected and emerge once scraped the irreverent humor that covers it. Another black petal is the "Delitto di paese" from Brassens "L'assassinat", dated '65. We arrived the following year, to meet a small masterpiece of bloody" La Ballata dell'amore cieco", fearful martyrdom that ends in blood, slaughter of feelings. The crown continues to strip naked in '67 with the song, "La Morte" where the physical disintegration of expressionistic tones almost terrifying efficiency.
Finally, we open the aperture on the dark green house "Tutti morimmo a stento" ('68) work, unfortunately - I say - but maybe by Fabrizio abjured in its being sung a symphony of darkness is better this zenith just as dark as the darkness is fraternal in Baudelaire.
We remember the cupe Gothic "Inverno", cruel and deceptive sweetness of "La leggenda di Natale", the bare desolation of the "Cantico dei drogati" written with Richard Mannerini, anarchist poet cursed with a fate which led to the suicide in 1980. The song by Fabrizio said Recitative expresses precisely this blend of existential torment and external demand because the text supports the darts anathema against judges, bankers Executioner, images, dark and dreary, the last gasp leveling scythe of death.

Elected judges, lawyers
Let us dance in your dreams that we still
We are sorry the human flock
of those who died with a lump in their throat.
How many innocent horrendous agony
you voted deciding the fate
and what do you think is right
a ruling that decreed death?

(……………………………)
Men, since last minute
do not assail the late remorse now
not to have pity never had
and does not become the death rattle breathing:
We know that death will monitor,
rejoice in the meadows or between the walls of lime,
how to grow the great looks at the clown
until it is ripe for the sickle.

(from Tutti morimmo a stento)

Fabrizio impression not only reveals this poetic kinship but also in his short work of an essayist, of "maître à penser."
Take his dazzling introduction to the work of François Villon in verse - striking emblem of the poet maudit "- where to shorten the distance, beyond the time, said his fraternity and spontaneous to this author writes him a letter full of gratitude and devotion, but with that close colloquial use among old friends, or between a master in the disciple who recognizes a fellow traveler. A letter in the mail or through the interstices of Timelessness catapult elective affinities, the true priority mail, which finds its shortcut in mysterious ways that lead into inaccessible places where poets gather in conclave anathema in a libertarian Sabbath. It is as if the two - Villon and Fabrizio - meet in a perfect tavern after a brawl between a glass of wine and merry laughter of shameless whores, to resume the thread of an "outstanding speech". Here are some excerpts of this letter: "Dear François, in 1963 I happened to read a daily newspaper in South Africa celebrated the authorities without knowing the five hundredth anniversary of your death: the court in Johannesburg was hanged for eight suspected criminals, of course, blacks . The author described the desperate child as part of their terror exorcism: 'They danced and sang under the strings before being hanged'. Then it just lingers in grisly detail afterwards. "Kicking for a bit ', some have lasted a minute, others a few minutes'. He took my anger just to write a ballad. As they say in today Gallura 'Chistu tocca ponillo in canzone', this must be put into song, giving the music a meter a rhyme, why not disappear from the collective memory. If I had not found you as such an important predecessor to my song I probably would not have brought the title you suggested me: finally I found the occasion to thank you. "
A little further on is inspired by the painful life of Villon: 'So what' of Aussigny Thibault 'in whose hands so much pain you have suffered and whose immense power comes to' shed blood in the streets of Paris 'and, therefore, that you' deny as your bishop 'reappears with a choice array of powerful enemies of humanity in a page of Grotius:' If the human race is one of a hundred men, it is doubtful that these hundreds of men belonging to the human race '. "

utopian fireflies

At another point in the text Fabrizio, introflex, the Thin from their trenches era: "I write to you from another enlightened age of reason and technique, where the use of the rope 'that lets you know your weight in your neck ass' has become more rare and far without disappearing altogether. The war itself, renewed itself a hundred years in one hundred years, is not over yet and then as men love beating down their arms and hands and if there are no boilers for boiling counterfeiters, the tools to give the death were improved to the point that only one of those hundred all-powerful, one of Thibault Aussigny may determine the end of humanity in such a short time because the pressure of a finger on a button. A modern form of inquiry that studies people as masses of cases divided by the number without distinguishing between the various individual fates, informs us that we are all much richer than they were your contemporaries, but the requests for ' help from the poor become more desperate every day and getting compelling results of your worst 'case to lord of Bourbon' because you did 'a loan of six shields pretty'. Even today we are capable of strong feelings, but more willingly turn them into tears sitting in the theater before the tragedy of Hamlet and Orestes or returning home to dry eyes do not even deserve a closer look at our intent to have the spaghetti to feed children.
Of course, from "Tutti morimmo a stento" are barely past the years and even more from the first Fabrizio "blind love or vanity." Songs from the Mediterranean sun to shade the axis of rotation has made his poetic circle by bringing the hands up to the age and matures, and when, due to wear of existence, had lost the glow of the stars, Fabrizio returned him to form utopian fireflies in the short or long summer of hope. And between anarchism and damned if I do not know one another but it has generated are endless because the infinite ways of anarchy is anarchy.

Mauro Macario

Fabrizio De André visto da Massimo Caroldi

rivista anarchica
       anno 33 n. 289
       aprile 2003