Italy still needs a jester like Rino Gaetano
Every moment is a good time to remember Rino Gaetano. Especially in this 2025, 50 years from “But the sky is always bluer” and 75 from the birth of the extraordinary voice of Crotone. Last night, moreover, Giorgio Verdelli presented his “Rino Gaetano: increasingly blue” at the Rome Film Festival, to retrace and relive the human and artistic parable of a singer-songwriter constantly balanced between satire and poetry.
When he debuted in the Seventies, the Italian songwriting tradition was at its peak. Defending ideology and values is the order of the day, political commitment is an essential must for anyone who wants to define themselves as a singer-songwriter. The public trial of Francesco De Gregori by the young people of the extra-parliamentary Left gives a good idea of the climate that hovers around the stages. The singer-songwriter, as a “companion” and spokesperson for the latter, must necessarily be aligned and politically active. Rino Gaetano’s debut with “Ingresso libero” is almost a sacrilege: romantic relationships, nonsense lyrics, friendships, soft drugs, puns. No proletariat, except for a hint of the hot autumn in the last track, very narrative, “The worker of FIAT «the 1100»”. A short circuit in the system.
In July 1974, when the first album was released, Gaetano was only 23 years old, but he had already understood what the stylistic feature of his songbook would be: irony. Like Calvin’s lightness, irony means neither superficiality nor play, on the contrary: it is a form of resistance who, when necessary, knows how to be sharp. Behind the nasal voice, inside apparently absurd rhymes, lies a ruthless look at the country, its compromises, its hypocrisies, its collective inability to look at itself in the mirror. In Rino’s songs Italy laughs so as not to crydances on the rubble and has fun, despite his thousand contrasts. He loves and hates, gets married and breaks up. As if he knew no other way to live than chaos.
Like the jesters in the courts, intellectuals disguised as buffoons, free to say what they wanted because they were excluded from the class struggle and legitimized to unmask the king with parodyRino Gaetano chooses the path of comedy as a political act, at a time when songwriting takes itself too seriously. In his theater of the absurd, everyone is on the same level, social masks fall. And like any self-respecting jester, he transforms bitterness into a smile; tells the truth when no one wants to hear it.
His music mixes the everyday and the surreal, satire and lyricism; a courageous and unique contamination, between lightness and desperation. He doesn’t belong to the seventies because he is not an author of his time: he is the interpreter of a present that is eternal. His pen cannot age, because reality will always have that aspect: a joke that came out badly, which hurts us, but which in the end, all things considered, also makes us smile a little.
