The album that Fabrizio De André dedicated to anarchism
The sixth album by Fabrizio de André, “The Story of an Employee”released on 2 October 1973 and is the most explicitly political album by the Genoese singer-songwriter. An album that opens and closes with a warning: “As much as you think you are absolved, you are forever involved”. We therefore propose that you read the review of the album written by us Claudio Cabona last year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its release.
Everything and more has been written about “Storia di un clerk”, Fabrizio De André’s sixth album released on 2 October 1973. We also analyzed it in depth. For this reason, the most honest question we can ask ourselves today is: why does it still deserve to be listened to beyond its value in the history of Italian music? Why should a young man or woman make it resonate? First of all it must be contextualised. After the concept inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” “Non al moneta non all’amore nei al cielo” of 1971, De André took up the old project of dedicating a record to anarchism, which he considered the most honest among the “negative” political ideologies.
The result was a record, not understood for many years and even judged negatively by critics, in which the songs are connected to each other by a narrative thread.
And not only that: there is also an initial instrumental motif which is taken up on various occasions in the other songs and acts as a common thread to the plot. Yes, there is a plot. In this case the topic has a strong political connotation, as written, as it is the story of a young employee who, after listening to a song from the French May, goes into crisis and decides to rebel, without however giving up his individualism . The songs that follow tell of his solitary stance, with a rapid and even dreamlike succession of events, then comes the failed experience of violence and finally, in prison, the realization of the need for a common struggle. Music that is repeated in almost every narrative turn and a plot that develops verbosely (this is De André’s style) step by step: doesn’t it remind you of anything? It seems like the structure of a modern podcast through which, episode after episode, new details of an intertwined story are discovered.
To write this review, I tried to listen to “Story of an employee” exactly as I would have listened to a podcast today: I started it and traveled freely, without breaks, in the car on the Milan-Genoa route, instead of “Indagini” by Stefano Nazzi. And I found it, once again, to be a beautiful journey, full of questions and capable of arousing the desire to delve deeper. From “La bomba in testa”, when the employee confronts the sixty-eighters and ideally joins the rebellious young people, passing through the dream of “At the masked ball”, up to the final triptych, with the three most significant songs that have remained in time, “The bomber”, “They will come to ask you about our love” and “In my hour of freedom” the existence of a man flows. The employee, in prison, completes the definitive maturation between individualism and collective struggles. The final song starts with the renunciation of free time, describes the uselessness of prison and the maturation that leads the prisoner to “understand that there are no good powers”.
Obviously the comparison with the podcast is at times deliberately forced, I am aware of this: De André’s language is much denser and more sophisticated than the one used to create an audio resource accessible to the masses. And then there’s the music to keep it all together. But it is also true that in a society in which these formats are now consumed in huge quantities (there is a hunger for stories, there is a desire to know the vicissitudes of different people, from the simplest to the most famous), why not crush play and dive back for just over half an hour into the tormented meanders of an employee’s journey told by one of our country’s greatest storytellers?
