The American magazine Spin dedicates an article to Richard Benson

There is some curious – and in some ways surprising – news coming from the United States: Spinone of the most historic and influential music magazines of American rock culture, dedicated a long article to Richard Benson. Founded in 1985, Spin for decades it has been one of the reference magazines for reporting on rock, alternatives and musical culture outside the mainstream more predictable. From the covers with Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Prince until the rediscovery of cult figures and outsiders, Spin he has always had a keen eye for stories that defy traditional categories.

And it is precisely in this line that the piece on Benson fits. The article, signed by the American journalist Jonathan Rowe, reconstructs the guitarist’s entire parable, defining it bluntly “the saddest guitarist in the world”. A portrait that starts from the nineties, when Benson was a prog-metal virtuoso known for his incredible guitar instructional videos, and reaches the recent years, marked by physical degradation, by concerts transformed into rituals of “public humiliation” and from a never clarified gray area between abuse, performance and self-sabotage.

The heart of the article lies precisely in the question that Spin leave open: Was Richard Benson a victim or a conscious artist who turned ridicule into language? A tragic character exploited to the end or a Tommy Wiseau-like figure, capable of inhabiting failure as an extreme form of entertainment? What a magazine like Spin choose to tell Benson today is significant: it means recognizing him not as a simple meme or Italian curiosity, but as a cult figureemblem of a certain dark side of rock music and of the relationship between audience, performer and show. A difficult, disturbing story, but for this reason perfectly in line with the vision of a magazine that has always loved to tell who is on the margins.