Negrita: “Our new album is a self -defense”
The discography of Negrita It had been stopped for some time, since 2018 no new box had been added. Today comes “Song for ruthless years“An important album that brings the Tuscan band back to good levels and sees them explore new musical areas. But it is also an album” word “in the sense that the texts have their weight and must be listened to. To understand more we have talked about it with Pausinger, frontman and author of the band’s texts. With him he traveled in the maze of the disc, in the report words and music as well as in -depth the themes. The project will be presented with an ad hoc tour.
Why seven years between one disc and another?
However, some time always passes, 3-4 years, more or less those are the distances between one job and another. So already half of these 7 years. Then Covid brought us our head completely elsewhere. The concerns of Pandemia as an end in itself and then the one who produced on a group of people who for a long period did not have a direct relationship was devastating. At the same time we are always very skilled to spoil the blood between us. We had a fairly heavy period of crisis, not that it is a novelty, so it is for what you don’t feel alarmed, but let’s say it was a rather heavy period.
You have been together for a long time.
It is almost 40 years together, which is so much for a group of people who are not psychologically calm like us, who does a job that submits to you to an important emotional stress, a group in which there are strong characters that meet, many roosters in the same farmyard. It goes without saying that these things happen and then there are no conditions for writing music, because writing music is a creative process that tends to happiness beyond the topics addressed. But this is not alone. The latest Negrita album, perhaps even the last two, is not that it was one of our best works and this is obvious that it leaves a heavy psychological train to which add a Sanremo of 2019 that has not brought us anything, as indeed in 2003. All this set of things was not a habitat favorable to creativity.
But then what happened?
I do not know. We looked at each other and said: “We should start shaking all the problems we are experiencing, that we have just lived, spent and start again slowly”. Also to regain a little trust. The first thing we thought is to become more contemporary, get out of the romantic album form and throw us on publications more related to the single piece. We wanted to make two songs, to make them come out in streaming, then we said to make three because at least we give a more complete idea than what we are right now. Then songs began to arrive who set themselves on the disc, then in our opinion of the good songs. The trusted sign has started to emerge again. At that point we could take a tour and then publish other songs when they would arrive. In reality in a short time, about ten days, others have arrived. And therefore away all the plans and hypotheses made: let’s do an ep. As we arrived at 6 pieces and we started believing it, the seventh has arrived. And then I had the idea of putting “Viva d’Italia” and finally the piece of Drigo. Basically a disc came out.
A record that has also grown in a “folk” perspective.
It was a right music that welcomed the words we proposed, creating a perfect balance, in a new naturalness in the intersection of words and music. It was the right one to create a narrative fil rouge that did not interrupt, between up and down and down. And it is obvious that in this context the first that comes to mind is Bob Dylan.
Then from Dylan to De Gregori the step is short. How come the rereading of “Viva l’Italia”?
That song is perfectly fitting for the historical moment we are experiencing. It is a caress and a slap in our country. De Gregori, also for us Rockettari, is a great source of admiration and inspiration.
This is a very centered album on current affairs, but what world tells?
What we can see us, and I said not surprisingly, we can see, because we live in a world made of strata, in which I have the impression that the truths are increasingly hidden, depending on the use, consumption, what you want to do and favor who provides them. So how to contrast, we have a great production of alternative realities, fake news, the last new stunt that with the methods we have today, social and digital in general, have become propaganda tools. So we live this type of reality, a reality that leads us to always be on the defensive and I don’t speak of weapons, I speak of an intellect.
What feeling brings this record with it? Anger, impotence, disillusionment, disappointment or hope?
I believe that it contains them a little all these feelings. Whenever we write, or if I want to be more precise, when I write, that I know the topic better, I always try to tell so many facets of life. And very often, not always, but very often, records are life experiences put in music. Music transfers sensations and you say, this piece is so relaxed, peaceful, that I am talking about certain things rather than others. If I want to break the schemes and bother the listener a little, in this quiet, relaxed environment, I put on strong, contrasting themes and here I get another result. So, automatically, music is also a little the queen, the mistress of what will then be the final result. When you have many various pieces, such as those of “Song for ruthless years”, it is obvious that music somehow suggests the way to take. It is at that point that Pandora’s vase of your experience, of your culture, your intelligence opens, if you have, of what you would like to vomit outside because maybe it is anger, and that point you invest these emotions on the sound material you face.
Anger?
The anger is immediate, it goes from zero to one hundred very quickly, it is a formula one, and therefore it must explode in some way, you have to represent it flaming. The verse “but God curses you and puts you in a coffin”; That is anger, we are somehow recommending God to kill the death manufacturers, practically give them pan to focaccia. But now that I spit bile, who am I? In the sense, how do I place in this new, contemporary dimension? And then you are writing who you are and comes “We are the others”. Months earlier I had pinned this sentence: “Where’s the wrong?” When the piece arrived I think I took 40 minutes to write the text, while on other occasions I worked months on a song. Sometimes you are more inspired, sometimes less. All the traces, more or less, came out with the naturalness of that event that must be released, because the time has come, is mature. Today we could only do this record because it is how I read the world I now, as it comes to me. So it’s like a reference to arms in some way. We reservists were summoned to this battle which is a cultural battle. I must say, to dispel all doubts, this is not an armed resistance, it is a peaceful, cultural resistance, therefore poetic in some way.
But this record asks more questions or more answers? For example: where were we wrong?
That is a question that has the answer within the text, in the final when he says if this is the result then we were wrong. The answer is this, we have the result in front of her eyes. We did nothing, I mean how my generation, we generated this political class, but the problem is not politics. Behind there are the markets or those few large companies that administer world capital, in essence finance. This is therefore a self -defense disc, community self -defense and poetic resistance.
Do you feel rareness, extinction beasts in telling certain themes?
We feel some balls (laughs). Because instead of putting ourselves in a calm corner to make cool with the tools, we are exposing ourselves with the risk of taking barrels on one side and on the other, by barrel I mean criticism, without minimally changing the fate of the world, this is a security. Perhaps we enforce so many people that our work will not have great economic returns. Since we are not the Coldplay and we do not even have the Oasis reunion available, with the relative cachet, We are practically cutting the salary alone.
