Vasco: “Jenny? I’m having my 19th nervous breakdown”
“Jenny… a young woman who has problems and can’t communicate them to the worldfeels excluded. It is not useful for society, and if you are not useful, they put you aside, they marginalize you…”. With these words, Vasco Rossi recounted on social media the genesis of “Jenny è pazza”, a 1977 song, later included in the album “…But what do you want it to be a song…”, which marks one of the first, and most authentic, confessions artistic by the rocker from Zocca. A song that, right from the start, reveals Vasco’s ability to transform fragility into strength. “I wrote it when my adventure hadn’t yet begun. In reality in the song I talk about myself… Jenny is me in the throes of my ‘nineteenth nervous breakdown’, the one that my aunt would have cured with a beating. Back then it was called exhaustion, today it would be called depression. I have always emerged from it, and I emerge from it, thanks to music, thanks to concerts, for me the reason to exist and resist”.
In these lines, Rossi reveals with disarming sincerity the link between one’s interiority and writing. Jenny is not just a character, but an alter ego who embodies the vulnerability, the rebellion of those who feel on the margins, all while tackling a very delicate topic: depression. “I have always cultivated my side of dreamy madness. For the love of art, I find myself frequenting the ‘limits of the mind’, a walk on the wire that brings you close to that hell ‘that really exists…’. Dizzying heights and deep valleys of solitude that I frequent and from which I always emerge standing.”
“Jenny is crazy” It thus becomes a journey inside the artist’s mind, between dizziness and falls, between the search for a purpose and the desire to remain in balance. “When I wrote that life ‘is all about balance above madness’, I was talking about myself and I thought it only described me… Then, instead, seeing how everyone recognized each other, I understood that it was a universal song. Everyone lives on the edge, in a precarious balance above their own, of madness”. Those words, destined to become a manifesto, explain the timeless strength of the song: “Jenny is crazy” is not just the story of a lost girl, but the portrait of all of us, suspended on that thin thread that separates normality from madness, desperation from hope.
