The De Gregori “case”: an intervention by Niccolò Agliardi

Francesco De Gregori’s response to a journalist’s question regarding artists who explicitly take political positions and proclaim them from the stage has caused a lot of discussion in recent days and (as unfortunately happens too often) was reported by the press in a simplified and incomplete manner. Numerous interventions followed, many by authoritative journalists and newspapers. Even some people from the world of Italian song wanted to comment (or were asked to do so) on the Roman singer-songwriter’s statements, and I would like to be sure that before doing so they listened carefully to the words spoken by De Gregori (which I doubt, in these times of often poorly thought-out reactions, perhaps via social media).

I received one of his reflections from Niccolò Agliardi – which I personally feel I share – on what Francesco De Gregori said a few days ago. I gladly propose it to you, preceded by the video which unequivocally certifies the words spoken by De Gregori (from minute 33).

It seems to me that the discussion can thus be considered closed. But I kindly ask anyone who wishes to comment on this article to do so only after having seen the video, at least to distinguish themselves from the many – journalists, people of some repute, artists or self-styled artists – who have commented on the story without having proper knowledge. (fz)

CHILDREN DON’T NEED SPRINGSTEEN

De Gregori, silence as a position, and that song from 1989 that explains everything

Francesco De Gregori decided not to tell us what to think. In return, for fifty years, he has offered us songs. If that’s not enough, it’s not your problem.

At the press conference in Milan he used a word that few seem to have listened to carefully. He said he feels “embarrassed.” Not disagreement, or even annoyance; embarrassment when an entertainer takes a clear and apodictic position on international issues. What you feel when someone does something that they’re not doing to you, but that affects you anyway. Then he quoted Whitman: “I contain multitudes” to explain that his is not totalitarian thinking. He asked, with his oblique irony that cuts under his breath, what qualifications a showman has to give lessons.

And the web responded as it knows how: badly.

Betrayal. Complicity by omission. Someone even used the word “ignorant” complete with the hashtag #Dante.

Enzo Iacchetti, Eros Ramazzotti, and some other resentful people, orphans of a group leader obliged to instil certainties, are disappointed and then say that his own songs prove the opposite; that De Gregori “preaches well and scratches badly”. And there are those who, in an even more subtle and dishonest way, use their position to latch onto the moment, to do, “instant marketing on the merits of other people’s fame.” alluding to Springsteen and his beloved Dylan.

I would like to try doing something different. I, partisan and devoted to my Prince since that time when I lost my virginity at 16 with “Rimmel” playing in the background, try to blame him without insulting him.

It’s just that as I do so, I discover that he wasn’t wrong at all.

“Mira Mare 19.4.89” was released in April thirty-six years ago. It is De Gregori’s eleventh album, and the track that opens it is entitled “Bambini venite parvulos”. The title is a macaronic pastiche of the Gospel verse “sinite parvulos come to me”, let the children come to me, emptied of grace and filled with poison.

He explained it himself, with that surgical precision that he sometimes allows: “It’s a song about the progressive lowering of the average age of killers and victims in today’s world, and about the fact that they both often wear the same brand of shoes.”

It is, in every possible sense, a political song. Indeed: it is a song of fierce denunciation, without extenuating circumstances. There is transformism (“the professors of the day before yesterday are hurrying to change the altar”), connivance (“any type of failure needs its claque”), predatory populism “the knife grinder approaches smiling with his know-how, come to sell beads and give away crack”. And then the children used, consumed, sacrificed: “your heart is worth an eye, your eyes are worth a thousand dollars, your eyes without pain”.

It is one of the most politically precise songs that Italian music has produced in the last fifty years. And it is signed by a man who, thirty-six years later, says he does not want to make any proclamations.

So: does he contradict himself? Does it scratch badly?

No. It does exactly what it always said it would do.

There is a world of difference between taking a stand in an opera and going on stage to tell your audience what to think. The first is literature, or music, or art: it builds a question, stirs the conscience, leaves an empty space that the reader or listener must fill alone. The second is propaganda even when it serves a just cause, even when it comes from a sincere place.

De Gregori, in that splendid mosaic of injustices and ugliness that is “Children come parvulos”, he places you in front of the children in the black of the sea, he throws you in front of a smiling knife grinder who brings crack, he dirty you with the blood that flows under the sun and leaves you there, alone with that image that stinks of iron and pain. But it doesn’t tell you who to vote for, who to applaud and who to hate. You are the one who has to deal with what you feel. You are the one who has to decide what to do with it.

Yes, this is exactly the opposite of what those who get on stage and shout that Trump is an imbecile do. or “Free Palestine” before the last encore.

That is the emotional shortcut of those who want applause without the risk, it has nothing to do with civil commitment. It’s speaking to those who are already convinced, on a stage where everyone down there would applaud you anyway.

I was present at the press conference the other day in Milan and I can guarantee you that De Gregori did not say that the children of Gaza do not exist. He didn’t say their deaths didn’t matter. He lowered his gaze, rested his hands on his bony knees and confessed confusion in a world of presumed, flaunted certainties. It seemed to me one of the rarest acts of intellectual honesty in recent years. He said that he has already put the thousand dollars of children’s eyes to music. For thirty-six years those “painless” eyes have been touring Italy played live, in people’s headphones, in dormitories and in cars and kitchens.

Anyone who has a song like that in their repertoire, and chooses not to add anything else, is anything but idle. If anything, he is someone who has already done his part, and who has enough respect for his work and his audience not to reduce it to leaflet.

Then there is a question of form, which in (certain) songs is also a question of substance.

Some songs last. Not the proclamations. “Children come parvulos” in 1989 described the Italy of Tangentopoli which was about to explode, the populisms which were about to be born, the generation which was about to be sacrificed on the altar of disenchantment. Today, listened to with Gaza in mind and with Trump mixing dementia with geopolitical idiocies, it says the same things. Indeed, it says more, because time has stratified them.

Our indignant tweets will be passing bits, negligible digital minutiae, archive notes at best.

Footer pixels in an essay on 1920s conformism.

Or maybe not even that.

The difference between art and militancy is not of moral value. It is long lasting. It’s depth. It lies in the fact that a well-written song can change the way a person sees the world for thirty years, while a slogan, even the most correct, exhausts its function the moment it is pronounced.

I confess: for me De Gregori is something more than a topic of cultural debate. It is the voice that my father, many years ago, unknowingly, during a car trip, put inside me forever.

That voice never told me what to think. He taught me how to look. It kept me company, it made me become the adult I hoped to be. And this is the highest form of commitment that an artist can afford: not telling the world where to stand, but giving it the eyes to see it.

Niccolo Agliardi