By Claudio Giunta (Università di Torino)

(First published as C. Giunta, “Un’altra magnifica cosa pop. Elio e le Storie Tese”, in id., Una sterminata Domenica, Il Mulino, 2013, pp. 153–176.)

Some time ago, on Radio Deejay, Nicola Savino said something along the lines of: “without Elio e le Storie Tese, life would be a little less beautiful.” Radio Deejay is not neutral ground, given that Elio e le Storie Tese (from now on: EelST), together with Linus, have been hosting a show there every Monday evening for almost twenty years now (the title of the show alone, Cordialmente, would require lines and lines of explanation, because of the semantic slippage that touches many of the words used by EelST—even their own names: Elio is not actually named Elio, Rocco Tanica is not really Rocco Tanica—to which, over the years, infinite irrational, improvised, and obscene appendages have been added, from Cordially Launchpad to Cordially Easy-peasy to Cordially I Like Dick, up to today’s obviously provisional Cardiacally Let’s Ham It Up). Again, Radio Deejay is not neutral ground but, without overthinking too much, the statement immediately struck me as true: life would indeed be a little less beautiful without EelST.

Naturally, the same could be said of a whole bunch of things and a whole bunch of people, and everyone has a right to their own list: “the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong, the recording of ‘Potato Head Blues,’ Swedish films of course, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne…” (Woody Allen, Manhattan). They are all great pleasures—but pleasures for initiates, which in order to be truly appreciated require time, education, effort. Average lives are not illuminated by Flaubert or Cézanne, and even in the lives of intellectuals I suspect that Flaubert and Cézanne count for a bit less than intellectuals like to claim. And then, great art is almost always tied to a certain amount of bitterness: we can enjoy Sentimental Education, we can thank God that Flaubert wrote it, but the ending of the novel does not really prompt us to believe that life is beautiful (at most maybe some distant fragment of it, once upon a time): we close the book fascinated, moved, but not with a smile on our lips. In short, between what makes life worth living and what makes it “more beautiful,” the overlap is not perfect. Kafka, for example, belongs in the first basket, not the second; and the same, I would say, goes for Swedish films.

By contrast, the words “temporeggio bevendo spuma” (“I kill time by drinking soda,” “Tapparella,” 1996) are, for me, a reserve of pure joy. And so is the rhyme “E canto ‘Please don’t let me be misunderstood’ / mentre parcheggio nel parcheggio l’Alfasud” (“And I sing ‘Please don’t let me be misunderstood’ / as I park my Alfasud in the parking lot,” “Discomusic,” 1999). And so is Rocco Tanica’s 1994 song against Forza Italia: “Siamo piccoli ma in fondo al cuor / c’è un istinto come di elettor / che ci guida ad una nuova speranza / di agio / e di imprenditorialità” (“We are small but deep in our hearts / there’s a voter’s instinct / that leads us to a new hope / for comfort / and for entrepreneurship,” “Voglia di Biscione”). And so is Toto Cutugno’s “Gli amori” turning into“Ameri” (1994), from Tutto il calcio minuto per minuto. And so is the public-housing mythology of “Mio cuggino” (1996), especially “Mio cuggino topocane” and “Mio cuggino Benvenuto nell’AIDS,” which Elio pronounces with a distorted voice. And so are all the Christmas songs written for Radio Deejay, especially the one that contains the lines like: “sta scendendo anche l’effetto / delle benzodiazepine / che il dottore mi ha prescritto” (“the effect / of the benzodiazepines / that the doctor prescribed / is kicking in,” “Presepio imminente,” 2006). I could go on for pages. Pure joy, without the shadow of a doubt.

For the distracted, or for those who weren’t there, the first nucleus of EelST formed in 1980 (Elio was nineteen years old), but their first album came out in 1989: for almost a decade they limited themselves to playing concerts in Milan and Lombardy, and their success (which was already interregional: it reached my bedroom in Turin around 1983–84) grew through word of mouth and—readers under thirty should have an older person explain this to them—through cassette tapes copied by a friend of a friend of a friend, live recordings which, with copy after copy, ended up being practically inaudible, a single, endless snowy sound effect. Understanding the lyrics of “Cara ti amo” (2006), which are spoken rather than sung, was already an effort; for the obscene double or triple entendres of “Nella vecchia azienda agricola” (1989) (“c’è la cozza tattu piane di sbarro”; “The duck is all covered in scum”) there was no hope at all: we would have to wait for the records, the knowledge of better-informed friends, and the internet.

The book Vite bruciacchiate (Bompiani, 2006)[1], which tells the story of the group through the voices of those who know them, is full of heroic tales about those early years spent rehearsing in the basement of a restaurant owned by Faso’s father, and playing here and there for very little money. Here is a fairly typical end-of-evening (Elio is speaking): “I’ll add a few memories emerging from the fog. We left the restaurant without eating and retreated to a bar that served us cholesterol-laden brioche and potato chips. The topless dancer was named Fabiana. I went to collect the money myself, risking my own life, and the jerk of a manager gave me fifty thousand lire less than promised.” The book is a splendid choral work much in this vein: Fabiana, the thieving manager, very few groupies (“In those years we seemed to be coated in nopussy, a compound that repels any form of female life”), and such a quantity of musician friends as to make one suspect that every twenty-something Milanese kid at the time knew EelST, or someone who knew EelST—a suspicion that’s immediately confirmed when you question any fifty-year-old Milanese today, because they are all at least friends of friends, and all of them saw the band play in some half-empty club in Milan long before they became famous.

In 1989 they released Elio Samaga Hukapan Kariyana Turu (which means something atrocious, in Sinhalese), and sold more than one hundred thousand copies. Eight more albums followed, plus various live collections. In 1996 they won—by coming in second (the contradiction is apparent)—the Sanremo Festival. In 1997 they shot a porn film with Rocco Siffredi. In the 2000s, whether as solo gigs or with the full group, they performed concerts, theater shows, radio shows, created books, made it onto RaiTre, made it to La7, they became mainstream, they came in second at Sanremo once again. Today, more than thirty years after their debut, they are perhaps the only musicians in Italy, together with Vasco Rossi, to enjoy a truly intergenerational success, from teenagers to young grandparents, let’s say.

Viewed from the outside, this success was worn with admirable understatement. Nominated for an MTV European Music Award in 1999, they paid their own way to get to Dublin, without a press office, because the record label didn’t have any faith that they could win. They managed to get into the VIP area and eat “only thanks to a friend who was a technician from Ligabue’s band and slipped them the meal vouchers under the table” (as Luca Chiabotti testifies). They won. But they had neither CDs to give to the journalists nor a press kit, so they put on a sort of comic sketch: “We came here just to tell you that pasta shouldn’t be cooked for twenty minutes and above all it shouldn’t be dressed with ketchup.”

And the price that must always be paid for success? There seems to be none—for them, at least. No narcissistic delirium, no guru poses, no rehab clinics, perhaps also because of a banal practical circumstance: success arrived slowly, over time, and money arrived just as slowly, and in any case had to be divided among six or seven people—which helps keep one’s feet on the ground. Some time ago Linus reported a statement Elio had made to him in confidence: “Linus, do you realize it? I’m fifty years old and I’ve never bought a house!” And I’d also bet that Elio and the others have kept the same car for ten years, wash it rarely, don’t think too much about the brand of the clothes they wear, don’t go to the gym or only go the bare minimum. Because they have much more serious things to do, they have a vocation to follow—that vocation whose absence leads human beings to spend their time on activities like buying and selling houses, washing cars, Dolce & Gabbana, hair removal. And the cost has not even been a loss of identity, or of style. As the years have passed, EelST have not limited themselves to repeating the same brainless recipe of their early albums (which is how Skiantos and Squallor did themselves in), but instead have complicated, not simplified, their songs. The post-2000 tracks are more elaborate and complicated than those of the 1980s, both musically and lyrically. For example: the soundtrack to Tutti gli uomini del deficiente (All the Deficient’s Men,1999) didn’t sell well, even though (or perhaps precisely because) it contains notable original tracks and two covers, from Zappa and from Area. EelST’s comment: “In reality, we always choose paths that are theoretically less commercial and should make us sell less, because we’re convinced that this way we sell more. It’s an excellent strategy, with only one weak point: it doesn’t work.”

The lineup of EelST has remained practically intact from the 1980s to today: Elio (lyrics, vocals); Rocco Tanica (lyrics, keyboards, vocals); Faso (lyrics, bass); Cesareo (lyrics, guitar); Christian Meyer (percussion). Jantoman (keyboards) joined in 1999; in 1992 they also welcomed the architect Mangoni, a schoolmate of Elio’s who—as we read on the band’s website—“is called upon to play himself onstage (a pirla, the definitive icon of the idiot that is in each of us), despite having meanwhile become a loving husband and father as well as a respected architect.” The only one missing is Feiez, whose real name is Paolo Panigada and who sang and played just about every instrument; he died suddenly of an aneurysm in December 1998. Feiez was one of about twenty nicknames that Faso had bestowed on Panigada over time: and names, invented names, trigger the “process of earwormification,” or “the creation of an imaginary world in which the subject has a personal history that is more or less detailed and surreal” (which is the same childish mechanism that underlies quite a few EelST songs). The name “Feiez” was bestowed after (or synchronically as an alternative) Mu Fogliasch, Véseghel, Visent, and also Panino (“No, come on,” Feiez had commented, “not Panino…”): the chorus “Go Panino!” toward the end of “Tapparella” is for him. And the final pages of Vite bruciacchiate, written by Rocco Tanica, are also dedicated to him—pages that are like the B-Side and the tragic complement of the splendidly comic ones that Rocco Tanica wrote, in the same book, about other pivotal moments in the band’s life. Twice I found myself with tears in my eyes while reading Vite bruciacchiate: the first time with laughter, the second with emotion—and that is much more than one usually asks from a biography of a pop-rock group.

Outside of Vite bruciacchiate, EelST speak of their friend’s death on the back covers of their CDs. Given the kind of music EelST make, it was difficult to address the loss in their songs because every single line from their lyrics aims to make people laugh and mocks something or someone: the incompatibility is obvious. But the song “Bis,” without ever being explicit, is clearly a song for the dead, and the closing lines are perhaps the only serious, non-parodic words that EelST have ever included in one of their songs: “Ma la vita non ti dà la possibilità di un bis / anche se sarebbe bello” (“But life does not give you the possibility of an encore / even if it would be nice”). This is a mawkish truism, naturally; but what makes it moving is the fact that, as often happens, Elio plays with the meter and pronounces the first sentence at supersonic speed (too many syllables for too few notes), the second with a nursery-rhyme cadence (fewer syllables than would be required), as if he were mocking his own seriousness: “even if it wooooould be nice” (the same irony is present shortly before in “this is life,” pronounced as if it were carved in marble); and also the fact that it arrives unexpectedly at the end of a song full of jokes and foul language, so the listener is not prepared for such emotion.

The two things most often said about EelST are: a) they can actually play; b) they are geniuses. Even in Vite bruciacchiate, “genius”/“brilliant” are the words almost all the friends and witnesses use to express their admiration. “Brilliant” is big, but it is also vague. If we try to break this genius down, what do we find? I will attempt a list.

The most notable quality of EelST is the ability to see things. It is the gift poets have, the reason we read poetry: Seeing Things is the title of a book by Seamus Heaney. Anyone who has read Rilke’s “The Panther”never looks at the caged animal in the zoo the same way again. And anyone who has read the central verses of canto XXIII of Dante’s Paradiso (“Come a raggio di sol, che puro mei…” [“Under a ray of sun that, limpid, streams…”]) remembers them every time they happen to see, in the distance under an overcast sky, a meadow lit by the sun.

Naturally, poets transfigure their own everyday life, not ours, and they more readily bend toward the sublime than toward the small adventures of the average sensual man. Well then, EelST have taken charge of this extremely important slice of reality. The middle-school dance did not really exist, had not yet truly been seen, before EelST saw it and described it in “Tapparella.” The humiliating side of youthful love was still waiting for its chroniclers: “Servi della gleba” is that chronicle. And who has reflected on the unfortunate fate of so many former soccer players? EelST did—tragicomically, as was appropriate—in Sunset Boulevard.

At the zero degree, then, things are simply things, and the same pietas extends even to objects, precisely in the sense of the bric-à-brac produced by small Brianza factories: it generates a song about damp stains on the ceiling (“Plafone”), or one about “a dealer in plastic laminates” who is forced to carry his sample case around without a car (“Abbecedario”). “Ha ampliato in maniera decisiva il vocabolario della poesia” (“He decisively expanded the vocabulary of poetry”) is the formula that literature textbooks apply to practically every poet, from Cielo d’Alcamo to Edoardo Sanguineti (the guiding idea is “Petrarch versus the Rest of the World”). In the brief history of song it is hard not to say the same thing about EelST: it is hard to deny EelST a place in this small fringe of revolutionaries, alongside Gaber, Jannacci, Gaetano, and obviously—earlier and higher—Zappa.

In the EelST mix, it is hard to distinguish the contribution of one member of the group from another; and perhaps the distinction is pointless, because before being musicians who play together, EelST are friends, and they therefore share many opinions and many similar likes and dislikes. One can therefore say that the fixation on everyday, serial objects and on brand names is a fragment of EelST’s poetics as a group—or rather, it is a piece of their generation’s imagination that has almost naturally become one of the main ingredients of their songs. A shared obsession, then, which manifests itself as tenderness toward the ephemeral, as devotion to all the infinite useless things—urban legends, television commercials, Japanese cartoons, poor people’s liqueurs (Vov, Zabov)—that, from the years of the economic miracle onward, have flooded our existence. But even if this obsession is common to everyone, it should be noted that this hypersensitivity to postmodern squalor, which surfaces at times in the songs, is a constant of Rocco Tanica’s prose:

The touching part that brings feelings into play around page 70 is dedicated to elderly Falun Gong practitioners, to the klinker baseboard shoe molding, and to a tall man who impersonates Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a joke […]. Dedicated to a Spanish couple’s fat dog, glimpsed in line at the bar of the Barcelona–Genoa ferry in 1985, with the same torment as back then.

This was the dedication that opens Scritti scelti male, so I will take the opportunity to say that Rocco Tanica is, in my opinion, by far the most gifted Italian comic writer. I say this on the basis not only of the song lyrics he has written for EelST and for others, such as Bisio and Cortellesi, but also the chapters of Vite bruciacchiate entitled “L’ultimo dei romantici” and “Rompere le balle ai cantante” and—indeed—of the anthology Scritti scelti male. “L’ultimo dei romantici” recounts EelST’s collaboration with Rocco Siffredi on the porn film Rocco e le Storie Tese. No one writes like David Foster Wallace—not even Rocco Tanica, of course. But the intelligence present in “L’ultimo dei romantici” is no less penetrating than that which, in Wallace’s “The Big Red Son,” illuminates the Las Vegas porn film festival—and without the bitterness that intelligence usually (and in Wallace almost intolerably) brings with it. As for Scritti scelti male, it is a book full of delights, and delights that are very different from one another. But among the various registers, two in particular strike me as those in which Rocco Tanica performs as a virtuoso.

The first register is that of a defamiliarized, impassive prose, Buster Keaton-like. For example, that of the music journalist who believes he is interviewing Janis Joplin and instead interviews a woman who pretends to be Janis Joplin, speaks Italian without an accent, and has learned everything about Janis Joplin from the internet.

He: “May I ask which team you support?”
She: “Udinese […]. The fact remains that on October 4, 1970, a few days the other ‘hero and martyr’ of rock, Jimi Hendrix, I was found dea… I mean, well… Uh… How about we go get something to eat? […]”
He: “What did you say? What the fuck did you say?”
She: “Listen. Udine’s Friuli Stadium is illegal: the exemption for implementing the changes required by the Pisanu decree expires on December 31. This was reiterated by Police Chief Padulano, who specified that if the infrastruct…”
He: “I throw myself on her, screaming” (Gli articoli rifiutati da Rolling Stone [Articles Rejected by Rolling Stone]).

Or the diary of a man who, purely out of distraction, kills John Kennedy:

Inside a book depository I was curiously handling a weapon legally purchased and owned by a friend, named Mannlicher Carcano. Taking advantage of the momentary absence of my friend, an employee in the same depository whom I knew as the husband of an acquaintance of his, Marina Prusakova, I used the weapon—which I believed to be unloaded—in a clumsy and wholly inappropriate manner, to the point of accidentally firing several shots out the window, toward a wooded area without buildings […]. Years later I learned that my foolishness had produced extremely serious consequences: two people lost their lives, another sustained severe injuries… (“Conseguenze della mia dabbenaggine” [“Consequences of my Unworldliness”]).

The second register is the comic mimesis of professional jargon. Another music journalist who writes with all the tics, gestures, and rhetoric of music journalists: “A young man aged by time with a calm air, far from the furious and rosy excesses of Walking the Bargain, this is how he seems to me as I embrace him without speaking. He keeps his arms at his sides […]. He seems to fly with stone wings above streets of lime.” Or the artificial language of tourist guides and municipal heraldry:

Genoa, in Liguria, finalist city in the contest for ‘Capital with the Longest Name,’ a category with up to seven letters; secret Genoa of the carruggi, of nocino, of women’s youth table tennis; Genoa facing the mountains with its back to the sea. Genoa of the great longshoreman utopia; Genoa, a city known throughout the world for its characteristics […]. And thus there appears, emerging from the draperies of its natural modesty, the Genoa that surprises you and makes you fall in love with the so-called ‘pesto,’ one of the best-kept secrets of local cuisine […].

Or the pseudo-scientific jargon of technical data sheets for pedigree dogs:

The muzzle, of medium length and rounded at the top, fell sharply beneath the eyes. The lips, tight and joined, showed no loose parts; cheeks and corresponding muscles were very pronounced, the jaws well shaped (the lower one strong and powerful in grip) with scissor articulation; the nose black. The head was of medium length and height, skull broad and stop clearly defined. The neck, slightly convex and also of medium length, tapered from the shoulders toward the head. The dewlaps? The dewlaps were absent…

This is, though dried out and concentrated, the same mimetic skill that makes songs like “La bella canzone di una volta” (music and lyrics taken from the 1920s), or “Indiani” (music and lyrics taken from Western films), so perfect.

There is therefore, as this mimetic talent proves, a grace complementary to the aptitude for seeing things, and that is the aptitude for hearing them. Just as EelST have a radar for the grotesque aspects of reality, so they also have an ear sensitive to the stock phrases and clichés that overflow from public discourse. Bulgaria is “una nazione leader nel Settore” “a leading nation in the sector” (“Pipppero”: commodity jargon); “Tra le maschere che un uomo può portare ricordiamo l’argilla” (“Among the masks a man may wear we recall clay,” “Shpalman”): where the recall at the beginning of the list comes from middle-school essay topics). And their favorite idiolect, the most parodiable, is obviously that of pop: the phrase “scampoli d’assenza” (“remnants of absence”), in the song “Rapput” (Tanica-Bisio), “non significava veramente niente ma […] sarebbe stato perfetto in un sacco di canzoni di quegli anni” (“didn’t really mean anything but […] would have been perfect in a whole lot of songs from those years”). And this crepuscular opening—“Gli ombrelloni ripiegati e le sdraie / un’altra estate che se ne va / e io qui che mi ritrovo da solo” (“The folded beach umbrellas and the deck chairs / another summer that’s going away / and here I am finding myself alone”)—would be perfect for a Festivalbar song, except that there is the Milanese sdraie instead of sdraio (“deck chair”), and except that after “finding myself alone” the text continues “a pensare all’aborto… / Aborto aborto smaliziato dove vai…” (“thinking about abortion… / Abortion abortion world-weary where are you going…”).


Now, irony about plastic language is a common pastime among intellectuals, and the ear of EelST is no more refined than that of Fruttero & Lucentini, or of Arbasino. Rather, that of EelST is almost never true irony, let alone sarcasm. On the contrary, it is as if the most worn-out words were summoned, in stories and songs, out of affection; as if repeating them, isolating them, digging around them corresponded not to an intention to censor them but to a desire to appropriate them, to polish them and make them shine. In Elio’s fairytales there is the reindeer that sweats “col rischio di prendersi un accidente” (“at the risk of having an accident”), which is a mom-like expression, smiled at without sarcasm, because it is endearing. In the final spoken section of “Fossi figo” there is the lament of someone who spends all day  “in giro a far ballare i piedi” (“running around making feet dance”), which is Lombard workaholic jargon (and in fact it crops up frequently in northern Italian blogs, against southern indolence). And then there is the fascination with the strange or obsolete dissonant word. Elio’s story “Il motociclista che sapeva destreggiarsi nel traffico” (“The motorcyclist who knew how to weave through traffic”) revolves around one of these ghost-words, destreggiarsi: “Si arrivò al punto di creare del traffico artificiale anche nelle ore notturne per invogliarlo a destreggiarsi” (“It got to the point that artificial traffic was created even at night in order to encourage him to weave (destreggiarsi) through it”). In Rocco Tanica’s story “Conseguenze della mia dabbenaggine”(the short memoir written by JFK’s unwitting killer), the word dabbenaggine (“naivety”) is repeated so often that the focus of the story ends up being the word itself, not the murder.

The song “Catalogna” repeats to exhaustion, to the point of nonsense, the word catalogna (“chicory”). It is a childish fascination, the kind of catchphrase that is born in the classroom, where anything makes you laugh; and part of the fun and pleasure of listening to EelST clearly lies in the fact that we recognize the mechanism, the halo of surrealism that surrounds certain words and makes us laugh or smile. Once school was over, while everyone else had to put on a tie, EelST found Cordialmente, the Radio Deejay show where they test catchphrases that will end up in stories and songs. For twenty years Cordialmente has been EelST’s laboratory; and the pleasure one finds in listening to it derives, on the one hand, from their own enjoyment, an enjoyment that for once is not simulated, not televisual; on the other, from the sensation of being part, for a few minutes, of a very close-knit group of friends, the most likeable ones in high school.

The extreme variant of this taste for the sound rather than the meaning of words is the collector’s catalogue. This is the beginning of “Supergiovane”—all attributes or words or things that concern the Giovane (that is, the young person of the 1970s: figu stands for “figurine,” or footballer stickers; the Garelli was a small motorbike; Oklahoma was the name of an air gun):

Argento vivo, sbiancate, figu, Oklahoma, sigarette, puttano, paciugo, garelli, smarmittare, figa, figa pelosa, figlio di puttana, porco diesel…

(Quicksilver, humiliation, figu, Oklahoma, cigarettes, male-whore, mush, Garelli, to straight-piping, pussy, hairy pussy, son of a bitch, for crying out loud …)

And this is the ending:

Siamo forse secchioni? No. Siamo forse matusa? No. Siamo forse governi? No. Siamo forse checchineris? No. Siamo forse bulicci? No. Iarrusi? Buhi? Puppi? Posapiano? Orecchioni? Mangiatori di fave? Orrendi? Rammendati? Giuisci? Meiusi? Magutti? Fenderi? Finestrati? Oietti? Samanettati? Rautiti? Semeiuti? Aperitaviti? Aperitivi? “Sì”.

(Are we perhaps nerds? No. Are we perhaps geezers? No. Are we perhaps the government? No. Are we perhaps queer? No. Are we perhaps gay? No.Bottoms? Holes?SGL? Metrosexuals? Queens? Fags? Sausage munchers? Horrid? Patched up? Giuisci? Meiusi? Magutti? Fenderi? Finestrati? Oietti? Samanettati? Rautiti? Semeiuti? Aperitaviti? Aperitivi? “Yes.”

I’ll come back to matusa and governi later. From “queer” (checchineris) to “fags” (orecchioni), the words are slang for “homosexuals” (with the exception of posapiano). What about mangiatori di fava (literally “bean eaters”)? Is it also an innuendo to homosexuality or an allusion to favism? Perhaps the only ones who get “patched up” (rammendati) are those who go in for a facelift. After that, the text slides into nonsense—that is, into a parody of youth slang, the kind that in the 1980s produced thepaninari and the sfitinzie. By comparison, Arbasino’s catalogues are easier, because they are less incoherent (L’ingegnere in blu, Milan, Adelphi, 2008, p. 119):

E dopo la fase degli ‘oidi’ in auge ai tempi degli intellettualoidi e mattoidi e cretinoidi “before our time”, le ‘stupidere’ in voga negli anni Trenta e Quaranta fra i programmi di varietà dell’Eiar e i giornali umoristici tipo “Bertoldo” e “Marc’Aurelio” […]: gagà e gagarelle e gagaroni, pisquani, fresconi, maschioni, simpaticoni, tontoloni, brutaloni, tardone, vedovone e vedovelle, pivelli, picchiatelli, cretinetti, cretinoschi, zuppatori e zappatrici, scemi di guerra e poi tipi da spiaggia, navi-scuola, racchie, stellasse, fessacchiotti, mascotte, limonare, pomiciare, appariscente, effervescente, cercopitechi […]

(And after the phase of the “-oids,” in vogue in the days of the “intellettualoids,” “fooloids” and “cretinoids” before our time, came the “goofballs” (stupidere) fashionable in the 1930s and 1940s among EIAR variety shows and humorous magazines such as Bertoldo and Marc’Aurelio […]: the dandy and the dandy-lion and the jack-a-dandy, pipsqueaks, wimps, machos, funny guys, numbskull, meatheads, cougars, widow cougars and little widows, rookies, crackpots, idiots, idiotsky, peasants andpheasants, madmen at war, and then beach bums, Mrs. Robinsons, ugly girls, little starlets, silly fellows, mascots, French kissing, making out, flashy, effervescent, cercopithecoid […])

The EelST radar goes especially haywire when it picks up fine words and fine ideas that, through being repeated carelessly over and over, have become cloying and can now be cited only with laughter. In particular:

1) Friendship: “Are you twirling your fingers? Are you joining your phalanges? Are you striking up friendships with people whose skin color is different from yours? Well done” (“Pipppero”).

2) Youths. Now locked in combat with the matusa and with the government: “Com’è noto, il nemico numero uno dei giovani è il governo, alleato coi matusa per impedire ai giovani di essere tali” (“As is well known, the number-one enemy of the young is the government, allied with the matusa to prevent young people from being young”; “Supergiovane”). Now proud of their non-violent weapons, to be set against the violence of Power: “la simpatia, l’umorismo, la gioia di vivere e l’argento vivo addosso” (“likeability, humor, zest for life, and quicksilver energy”; “Supergiovane”). Now cocky, macho-style like Rocky Roberts’ “Sono tremendo”: “Noi siamo i giovani (con i blue jeans).” And above all

3) Love, which provides inspiration for a whole series of ruthless anti-elegies, the most famous of which is “Cara ti amo” (which ends, indeed, with “Long live lo-o-o-ove!”). But the most famous is not the harshest, because that title belongs rather to “L’indianata” (“Di fronte all’amore / c’è poco da dire / c’è poco da fare / non resta che bere” [“When faced with love / there’s little to say / there’s little to do / all that’s left is to drink”]: spoken by an alcoholic housewife), or to the masterpiece that is “Servi della gleba.”

The flip side of this linguistic hyperrealism—the words of the tribe transferred wholesale into song lyrics—is fantasy: the creative talent that allows EelST to distort reality and fabricate alternative worlds (see above the “earworm-making process”). Gaber managed to write a song about shampoo, but EelST managed to write songs about figures from urban mythology such as the “Fantasma Formaggino,” “Supergiovane,” or ‘Shpalman,” or the indecipherable “Vitello dai piedi di balsa,” or the“Man from Japan,” who seems to have stepped out of a David Lynch film, yet actually came into being like this: “Quel pomeriggio in cantina, appoggiato sul lettone, c’era L’uomo del Giappone, un fumetto di Robert Gigi. Eravamo arrivati al punto della canzone in cui il testo dice: “Siamo una banda di bastardi / al soldo di… Ehm… Boh? Di chi?”. Ed Elio, leggendo il titolo del libro: ‘… dell’Uomo del Giappone!’… risata con tuffo sul letto” (“That afternoon in the basement, leaning against the big bed, there was The Man from Japan, a comic by Robert Gigi. We had reached the point in the song where the lyrics go: ‘We’re a gang of bastards / on the payroll of… / Um… beats me? Of whom?’ And Elio, reading the title of the book: ‘…of the Man from Japan!’—laughter, followed by a dive onto the bed,” Vite bruciacchiate).

One variant of this fantastical impulse is the fictionalization of a real given: embroidering with the imagination around a thing or a person who truly exists. “Sometimes he takes off, he doesn’t even wait for me / he leaves me with Bitossi, I feel like I’m going crazy.” This is the cyclist Felice Gimondi speaking about Eddie Merckx—or rather, singing about his love-hate relationship with Merckx—in an absurd crescendo à la Massimo Ranieri (“Sono Felice,” set to the music of Ron–Milva’s “Sono felice”).

“Sono Felice” falls into the category of songs written “in the first person narration of”—that is, spoken through a character—which belong to a traditional comic repertoire (and not only comic: this is Rollenlyrik, already medieval, already classical). With EelST, however, beyond their comic effectiveness, these songs have a peculiar representational force because they do not stage mere stock types but rather individualized, updated types, synchronized with current events. In “Sunset Boulevard,” the speaker is a player on Sunset Boulevard: “Io rinascerò. / Mi han lasciato in ritiro, / dove tiro e ritiro…” (“I will be reborn. / they put me out to pasture, / where I shoot and reshoot…”). In “John Holmes”, John Holmes himself speaks, and he speaks in Milanese dialect: “tutti mi scherzavano…” (“everyone used to make fun of me…”). In “Tapparella,” the speaker is the class loser who never gets invited to parties. And the theatrical effect is further enhanced by the fact that these imaginary little figures also have voices of their own, distinct from that of Elio: the man with the shoulder bag in “Uomini col borsello” is Riccardo Fogli, and the calf with cobalt feet in “Vitello dai piedi di balsa” is Enrico Ruggeri.

Within the family of imaginary characters, the most numerous sub-family is that of animals. It is likely that this obsession belongs primarily to Elio, and that Elio then infected the other members of the group. For the most part, his book Fiabe centimetropolitane tells tales of strange animals contaminated by human habits and tics: a swan who dreams of ending up on the cover of Fortune, a water-soluble crocodile, an antelope who gets engaged to a rhinoceros, the guinea fowl who embarks on a career as a fashion model but does not forget “her humble origins,” the rabbit who is the CEO of a company “that produces and markets rabbit meat.” These are Aesop’s animals seen through a distorting mirror, or on LSD, and the result is something like a juiced-up version of Edward Lear’s limericks. Which is, after all, the same thing that can be said about the fantastic animals that crop up from time to time in the songs: the calf with balsa-wood feet, the queer little bear, the catoblepas, the absurd hybrids that inhabit “Old MacDonald’s Agricultural Business.”

Quante bestie ha lo zio Bruno, uno uno uno,
lui che è un orso,
poi c’è il ragno, ragno, ragno,
c’è la cozza tattu piane di sbarro,
c’è il pesce pilota sul pesce volante,
c’è il pesce frizione sul pesce capelli…

(Old MacDonald had an agricultural business, E-I-E-I-O!
and he is such a grouchy bear
with a spider here and a spider there,
here a spi-, there spi-,
everywhere a spi- spi-,
the duck is all covered in scum
the pilot fish is on the flying fish
the lotion fish on the hair fish…)

(There is therefore a certain consistency in the fact that Elio later went on to play and perform, on his own, in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and in Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals.)

Corollary: in these imaginary worlds all languages can coexist, and indeed the real pleasure lies precisely in making heterogeneous languages react with one another, sometimes with the alienating underscoring of the music. It is this strange mixture that makes one smile at the “fottio di animaletti” (“shitload of little animals”) in “Vitello dai piedi di Balsa” (vulgar plus childish, set to a little music-box tune). Or, in “Essere donna oggi,” it is the sequence and interweaving of advertising clichés (“protagonista del tuo tempo” [“protagonist of your time”], “corri incontro alla vita” [“run headlong into life”]), bookish formulas that would be found in no book (“ostentando sicumera” [“flaunting self-confidence”]), obscenities (“verso il mare del duemila al grido di ‘Cazzo, subito!’” [“toward the sea of the year two thousand to the cry of ‘Right now, damn it!’”]), all the way to the virtuosity of segments such as  “Piccole donne grandi labbra, / piccolo uomo grandi labbra apprezzerà” (“Little women, big lips, / little man will appreciate big lips”); an Alcott novel plus a risqué detail plus a Marcella Bella song plus another risqué detail. Or again, in “Shpalman,” within an atmosphere reminiscent of a children’s choir (the refrain comes from Achille et Polyxène by Pascal Collasse, 1649–1709), there is the union of a formal register (“ricordiamo l’argilla, come non citare il bronzo” [“let us recall clay—how can one fail to mention bronze”]), children’s language (“cattivissimi, Pupù” [“very, very bad, Poop”]), and the usual profanities (“tamarro, incularmi la Vespa, focaccia di merda” [“douchebag, to jack off with my Vespa, shit focaccia”]).

In Vite bruciacchiate, Elio recounts how his first song came about: “At his place I wrote ‘Giorgio légnami’ (‘Giorgio, bash me’), a song about the problem of incommunicability, after reading an advertisement from the company San Giorgio Legnami (‘San Giorgio Lumber’).” Here, in nuce, there is already quite a lot of what will later be found in the subsequent songs: the irony aimed at intellectual angst (incommunicability is a remnant from Antonioni), the not exactly politically correct characterization of the relationship between men and women (one hits and the other takes it, and she doesn’t mind), and above all, as has already been said, the use of words more for their sound than for their meaning, a surrealist talent that will lead to delights such as “Catoblepa catoblepa, io ti dono le mie Tepa” (“Catoblepa catoblepa,[2] I gift you my Tepa shoes”). And the manipulation does not stop with Italian.

On the one hand there is the macaronic English of Italians who never studied the language: “In Italia, terra del vater clos e del sanguis, grazie all’arch. Mangoni bungee jumping diventa Budy Giampi” (“In Italy, land of the vater clos and the sanguis, thanks to architect Mangoni bungee jumping becomes Budy Giampi”). But the exercise does not consist merely in mangling words, which would be a banal device. In the mid-1990s, EelST patented what we would today call a machine-translation technique: in a song like “Christmas with the Yours,” the English words are articulated correctly, but the syntax does not work, because it is Italian syntax: “Christmas with the yours, / Easter what you want…”. And some very amusing pages of Vite bruciacchiate recount how EelST managed to persuade James Taylor (of “Mexico” fame) to sing a song in fake English that includes, among other things, “How you call you? / How many years you have? / From where come? / How stay?”.

On the other hand, there are the dialects: “La cunesiùn del pulpacc” is a song in pseudo-Milanese dedicated to Milan’s historical cabaret club Zelig, a song that—with a taste for incongruous contamination to which I will return—mixes together a protest against the venue’s exorbitant prices (“Cosa riden lo sa la madona / cun quei pressi che g’han de paga’” [“God only knows what they’re laughing about, with prices like that”]) and a protest against Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip (“e alla tele se vedi Israele che spacca le braccia” [“And on TV, you see Israel smashing people’s arms”]). And it is not dialect proper but a Milanese inflection that is used as a mimetic effect in pieces such as “Fossi figo” (“If I were cool,” the rant of a citizen outraged by dog shit on the sidewalk) or “Storia di un bellimbusto” (“Tale of a Braggart,” the final dialogue between a long-haul truck driver and a cocaine-snorting yuppie). “Li immortacci,” instead, is a Romanesco pastiche set to the tune of “Siamo i Watussi,” overflowing with coded allusions to the hard life of Rome’s housing projects (“ma a notte inortrata ce invita er canaro a facce du’ spaghi” [“but late at night, the dogkeeper invites us to have some spaghetti”][3]) and to major and minor pop idols, from Elvis Presley to John Lennon, to Il Guardiano del Faro.

In “Giorgio Légnami,” the inspiration comes from the outside: it is the verbal equivalent of the objet trouvé. Especially in the early years, EelST’s inventiveness follows this path of spontaneity and chance. “We randomly opened the daily newspaper Bresciaoggi, having decided in advance that the headline of the first article selected at random would become the title of the song we were writing” (Vite bruciacchiate): and the title turned out to be “Settore giovanile targato Travagliato” (“Youth Academy Branded ‘Travagliato’”). But even chance needs a helping hand, corrected by a, shall we say, targeted selection of sources. Hence the collage of words:

Ritagliavamo e componevamo utilizzando riviste bellissime, come Astra o La Settimana Enigmistica. Capitava così che l’illustrazione di un manifesto fossero un rebus, e il titolo dello show o la descrizione dei musicisti fossero il titolo di una rubrica di astrologia. In particolare, c’era su Astra la pagina dell’interpretazione dei sogni, e ogni sogno veniva riassunto in un titolo breve del tipo: “Mi resta un unico dente e cerco di riavvitarlo”, “Ho visto uno stambecco caricare tori”, o anche la stessa “Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura”, che poi ha dato il titolo all’album.

(We cut things out and assembled them using wonderful magazines such as Astra or La Settimana Enigmistica. It could happen that the illustration for a poster was a rebus puzzle, and the title of the show or the description of the musicians came from the title of an astrology column. In particular, Astra had a page devoted to dream interpretation, and each dream was summed up with a short title such as: “I have only one tooth left and I’m trying to screw it back in,” “I saw an ibex charging bulls,” or even “I’ve left my body and I’m very afraid,” which later became the title of the album.)

And here is another surrealist technique: the collage of images:

Vado anche orgoglioso di un manifestino per il quale fornii io i nostri ritratti: avevo ritagliato da alcune riviste porno solo le teste di uomini che eiaculavano. Le espressioni dei volti, fuori dal contesto originale (in genere Caballero, Le Ore, Men), erano meravigliose. Ricordo che il mio era di un biondo semicalvo con la lingua fuori e il naso schiacciato da una chiappa, solo che non si vedeva la chiappa.

(I am also proud of a little poster for which I myself supplied our portraits: I had cut out, from some porn magazines, only the heads of men who were ejaculating. The facial expressions, taken out of their original context (usually magazines like Caballero, Le Ore, Men), were wonderful. I remember that mine was of a blond, slightly balding man with his tongue sticking out and his nose pressed against a buttock—except that the buttock itself wasn’t visible.)

There is nothing revolutionary in either the collage of words or the collage of images: both are common currency in the “smart” pop of the 1970s, and Zappa had already done everything before everyone else had back in the 1960s. But what matters—beyond the awareness and the systematic nature of the procedure—is the adolescent euphoria that congeals in the adjectives; what matters is the gratitude toward fate for having given us Astra, Cronaca Vera, and La Settimana Enigmistica: magazines that—EelST say—were beautiful, with wonderful expressions.

For this reason they are not just words: words make possible the—again euphoric— recovery of objects from the past. EelST take the things that forty- or fifty-somethings today remembers from their adolescence and put them back into circulation. This, of course, is not original either. Everyone does it, including Walter Veltroni (“Trent’anni dopo, da un telefono di bachelite, mi giungevano le note di ‘Furia, cavallo del West’. – È Mal, vero? E quest’altra cos’è? – È ‘Oba ba lu ba’ di Daniela Goggi […]. Cercai negli scaffali del cervello l’anno 1977 e non trovai nulla” [“Thirty years later, from a Bakelite telephone, the notes of ‘Furia, cavallo del West’ reached me.—It’s Mal, right? And what’s this other one?—It’s ‘Oba ba lu ba’ by Daniela Goggi […]. I searched the shelves of my brain for the year 1977 and found nothing”]). But usually these reminiscences have a bitter aftertaste: either because the memory concerns a past that is subjectively judged to be better than the present, the years when life was an expanse of possibilities (as with the young Veltroni, as with “Gli anni” by 883); or because one longs for an era in which ideologies were more clearly defined (Offlaga Disco Pax); or because the person remembering places himself on a higher plane than that of the objects he catalogs—especially when it comes to the endless series of objects and brand names that became familiar to us in the 1970s and ’80s, the school years for EelST and the introduction of private television into all Italian households; or because the memory of adolescent objects is tinged with the memory of an unhappy adolescence (as is the case with almost all of Aldo Nove’s commodity memories in Superwoobinda). With EelST there is neither bitterness nor condescension, nor true nostalgia. It is as if the passage of time absolved all the foolish things seen and heard in those years, as if that whole repertoire of idiocies are now today simply amusing: Fantasma Formaggino, the sticker album, the middle-school party, the phrase “Pass the ball, because the game is more fun with lots of people,” Cronaca Vera graphics refashioned in the credits of the album Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura: Gli inediti 1979–1986 (1993), the ads for X-ray glasses, the “repeated nighttime viewing of televised jewelry sales by SM of Valenza Po.”[4] The dark reverse of these pleasant memories is always to be found in scattered recollections in the stories/essays of their contemporaries Aldo Nove and Tommaso Labranca: the middle-school party in “Tapparella” should be compared with Nove’s harrowing true story “Meteor Man”; and the love for ephemeral objects seen on television or at the department store is also a leitmotif—though turned into elegy—of Labranca (in “Chaltron Hescon,” for example, the chapter “People, places and objects that provoke the exaltation of modernity”).

For these and other qualities, EelST have earned their two pages in the fine book Modernità letteraria, edited by Andrea Afribo and Emanuele Zinato (Carocci, 2011), in the excellent chapter “Canzone” written by Paolo Giovannetti. The book takes stock of Italian culture over the last forty years and teems with poets who are suicidal, or aspiring to be so, or propped up by anxiolytics, and with philosophy professors waiting for the end of time or the end of Capitalism while glossing Heidegger. Then you reach page 275 and there is “Pipppero,” and the sense of relief is such that one regrets that such detachment, such self-irony, and such humor were not more present in the “serious” literature and criticism during the years 1970–2010—not only for readers but for the authors too, poor things.

But then: what about criticism? Fine, dismantling and reassembling the Western pop imaginary of the last half-century—but what about criticism? Everything that exists deserves to be mocked. But does laughing at everything not also mean being complicit with everything—with trash TV, bad music, B- or C- or D-movies, the liquidation of any serious discourse, serious commitment, serious stance? Isn’t it all just juvenile? Everything, starting with the idea that at fifty it still makes sense to talk about the things we were obsessed with at eighteen? We have grown old but we have not grown up—there is no attitude, no pose more in tune with the times than this.

This continuity between adolescence and adulthood is precisely what Rocco Tanica finds—and finds “enviable”—in Mangoni:

Ma io noto una continuità invidiabile tra il Mangoni di oggi e il Mangoni del liceo, quando scatarrò sul muro dell’aula lasciando un reperto che rimase appiccicato per anni e che era diventato meta di pellegrinaggio per gli studenti più piccoli. E quando Mangoni, dopo averlo emesso, rivolgendosi al suo uditorio, disse: “Guardate: la Natura”, secondo me già in quel momento germogliava in lui l’artista completo che oggi tutti conosciamo.

(But I notice an enviable continuity between today’s Mangoni and high school Mangoni, who hawked a loogie onto the classroom wall, leaving behind a specimen that stayed stuck there for years and became a pilgrimage site for younger students. And when Mangoni, after producing it, turned to his audience and said, “Look: Nature,” in my opinion at that very moment the complete artist we all know today was already germinating in him. Vite bruciacchiate)

But speaking more seriously, it is this same continuity that explains the traits, the ways of speaking, thinking, and writing of the other members of EelST; it is this continuity that explains the statement, “I’m fifty years old and I’ve never bought a house.”

Just another case—one of the many—of ordinary infantilism? The point, however, is that continuity between youth and adulthood does not mean there has been no evolution or refinement, nor that EelST’s songs should be confined to the realm of the puerile. In fact, precisely because they look at the past without nostalgia, without bitterness, and without regret, EelST always operate on a higher level than that of the things and people they inventory. Collecting fragments of reality does not mean endorsing them wholesale, and perhaps the most effective exorcism against stupidity is putting it on display (against gym and SUV narcissists, “Fossi figo” is worth more than any sermon). Only, instead of abstaining from reality or excommunicating it, as intellectuals tend to do, EelST dive right into it. Does porn exist? EelST make a porn film. Does Sanremo exist? EelST go to Sanremo. Do musical genres exist? EelST choose them all. What is pop? Warhol’s answer: pop “is about liking things.” That is their answer too, and it applies to music as well. EelST are not Zappa; they do not destroy musical genres—quite the opposite, they lay wreaths on their altars. The swing of “La bella canzone di una volta,” the disco music of “Born to Be Abramo,” the pseudo-house of “Pipppero,” the melodrama of “Farmacista,” the melodic style of “Pork e Cindy,” the ballroom liscio of “La terra dei cachi,” the 1970s funk-soul of “TVUMDB,” the Afro-Cuban of “El Pube,” the Roman stornello of “Li immortacci,” the heavy metal of “Omosessualità,” the rock of “Il rock and roll,” the electropop of “La visione.” Since these are mostly defunct genres, one is tempted to say of them what has been said of Stravinsky: that all this quotation and contamination play is a symptom of a secret propensity for necrophilia.

Whoever listens to them a hundred years from now will find themselves facing a strange collection of objects: a mash-up of Italy straddling the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but without the tragedies. “La vita di ogni individuo, considerata nel suo complesso e vista soprattutto nei suoi aspetti più significativi, è in verità sempre una tragedia; se però ci si sofferma sui particolari, assume il carattere della commedia” (“The life of every individual, considered as a whole and especially in its most significant aspects, is in truth always a tragedy; but if one dwells on the details, it takes on the character of a comedy”).[5] The EelST are interested in comic details, not in the tragic whole. Yet in reality it is not always comedy: there are also real problems, real miseries of people who lived between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, made only slightly more tolerable because they are wrapped in irony. In fact, all EelST songs are funny, but many are not merely funny.

The songs about former youths who stubbornly refuse to grow up, such as “La chanson,” which tells of a forty-year-old trying to pick up teenage girls at a disco, or “Storia di un bellimbusto,” are funny and melancholy at the same time:

Tendenzialmente intrattengo rapporti superficiali
e vado a zonzo con la mia faccetta rassicurante.
Così nessuno si accorge
che invece sono pieno di menate, menate,
e tanti altri problemi che non ho mai risolto
e forse non risolverò mai.

(I generally maintain superficial relationships
and wander around with my reassuring little face.
That way no one notices
that instead I’m full of hang-ups, hang-ups,
and many other problems I’ve never solved
and maybe never will.)

This monologue of a dandy makes you smile, but at the same time it creates a certain anxiety, because it is a human type we have all encountered, and the EelST’s skill lies precisely in formulating in words and music the types we know but have never elevated to ideal heights. “There’s too much involvement” is a narcissistic slogan that would have made Christopher Lasch smile—if he ever smiled. The ending of “Fossi figo” makes you laugh even more, but causes even greater anxiety, because it describes a psychological profile, and a kind of desperation, that one encounters constantly but that is rarely described:

Forse non sono figo, forse no,
ma sono bello dentro, dentro…
Fuori stranamente mi vedete come un solitario
ma a me piace stare con la gente.
Io, per piacervi,
mi epilerei per tutto il santo giorno
come le balle di un attore porno.

(Maybe I’m not cool, maybe not,
but I’m beautiful inside, inside…
Outside you strangely see me as a loner,
but I like being with people.
To please you,
I’d wax myself all the blessed day long
like the balls of a porn actor.)

Even one of the EelST’s most overtly comic songs, “Tapparella,” if listened to with a bit of attention, is sad: all it takes is to put yourself not in the shoes of the schoolmates playing spin the bottle, but of the desperate kid whom those schoolmates treat like a pariah.

The point is that lightness and humor can coexist perfectly well with seriousness. And taking inventory of trash does not mean endorsing it—neither blessing it nor condemning it, but laughing at it. This might, after all, be the best strategy, or at least the healthiest one: since those who bless trash are usually stupid, and those who curse it are usually depressed. In a world of singers, comedians, and low-talent imitators who presume that peddling their banalities has genuine political effectiveness, the EelST are a fine example of discretion, because they do not take themselves seriously even when they are being very serious. Before becoming, in its finale, an anthem against the Moratti administration and the most resolutely political pop song of recent years (just look at the audience’s reaction at the rally for mayor Pisapia, May 2011), “Parco Sempione” is a song that bad-mouths incompetent bongo players. And “Balla coi barlafüs” (“Dance with the Oafs”) is an anti-Lega song from the early 1990s that quite rightly counters the ridiculousness of the Lega with the ridiculousness of the lyrics and the ridiculousness of the music (which is the tune to “Time Warp,” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show). As for the rest, there is—fortunately—nothing sacred, nothing at all, and even the best causes are drowned in farce: “Budy Giampi,” about the death penalty, and “Gimmi I.,” about fear of pedophiles, are—however contradictory it may sound—ridiculous serious songs. EelST are all between forty and fifty years old; it will be interesting to watch them age. It is always interesting to see how people grow old, but even more so in the case of pop stars, because white hair clashes somewhat with the role they assigned themselves—or were assigned by the world—at twenty: and not everyone is Mick Jagger. As for EelST, one must also take into account the fact that these tireless saboteurs of youth-worship rhetoric have, for thirty years, spoken constantly about young people: thirteen-year-olds in “Tapparella,” twenty-somethings in “Cara ti amo” and “Servi della gleba,” former youths who refuse to resign themselves in “Storia di un bellimbusto.” Going much further down this road will be difficult. For this reason, the pure fun of their youthful songs (those in which EelST recount the stupidity of which they themselves are part—“Cara ti amo” is a perfect example) has already made room, and will increasingly do so in the future, for satire, for a very detached, derisive form of commitment (the kind that leads them to describe the stupidity of others: the cocaine-snorting yuppie, the homophobic singer, Berlusconi). It is a shame, because caustic spirits are already plentiful, whereas truly funny people are rare. But as long as their detachment remains, it might after all be a tolerable way of—finally—growing up.

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[1] The title hints at the Italian version of Dick Lowry’s 1997 film In the Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory.

[2] Catoblepa is a fantastic creature whose deadly gaze is similar to that of a basilisk. It appears in medieval bestiaries (often spelled “cathapleba” such as Vincent de Beauvais’s Biblioteca mundi, Book XVIII or Thomas of Cantimpré’s De naturis rerum (29) and probably originating in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Book 8) and in Francis Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 135. Tepa shoes are just a nonsense rhyme Elio used for comical effect.

[3] Pietro De Negri, “The Dog Keeper” was a criminal who gruesomely killed his former abuser. The story was in the news for a long period in Italy.

[4] See Angelo Di Mambro, L’importanza di chiamarsi Elio, Roma, Castelvecchi, 2004, p. 137.

[5] Arthur Schopenhauer, Il mondo come volontà e rappresentazione, Milano, Mursia, 1991, I, 58.