Giorgio Gaber - The Poetics of Signor G

“Living, I can't manage to live, but my mind allows me to believe that a story, whether mine is positive or not, is something that exists within reality”

The short circuit that a Giorgio Gaber show would set off was made of gestures and song, civic urgency and entertainment. It's not easy to explain. To the natural precariousness of our difficult attempt to write about music, other layers are added when talking about Gaber. Anyone who wasn't lucky enough to attend a recital by Signor Gaberscik will struggle to grasp the physical involvement that his theatre-song could generate. The recitals Giorgio took around Italy's theatres in the 1970s were an overdose of intelligence, lashing like a circular saw at customs in unstoppable mutation. But he did so using word and body together (as well as music). Those shows, both the ones entirely Gaber's own and those staged together with his 30-year collaborator Sandro Luporini, are milestones — one might even say sociological milestones — for their ability to lay bare, with modesty and subtlety, the ordinary tragedy of existence and of living together. How important the bodily, physiological dimension is in Gaber's art is beyond question. There he was, on stage, a black-clad clown, with those tentacles of his — arms, nose, legs; grimaces, tics, smirks, shy smiles. A speaking body.

Giorgio Gaber's songbook spans forty crucial years of Italian history. An unmatched interweaving of public and private life, between the anxiety of someone who spent his whole life grappling with the measure of his own uselessness, and the anger of a Milanese maverick who never let anyone pin him down. He always said what he felt to be true; lucid, sharp.

As early as 1970 (in “Il Signor G dalla parte di chi”, from the concept album Il Signor G), Gaber had the courage to sing, about the youth movements, that yes, they're right because they're young, but in the end the man G asks himself: “Do I really care about these things?”. He meant “inside, for my own life, as a physical fact”. Here is an early example of a poetics of physiology. Gaber's entire repertoire is studded with it. “The Bourgeois” (from the album of the same name, 1971) starts from the premise of a physical unease that produces strange hallucinations (“When I was little I wasn't exactly well”). These are the hallucinations healthy people have, as long as they stay healthy. And it's above all in Far finta di essere sani that Gaber expresses all this in a perfectly organic way. Cerco un gesto, un gesto naturale is an attempt to reach reassuring ground, which is first of all a matter of the body and only then of the mind, because the body is wiser (“Cerco un gesto, un gesto naturale/ Per essere sicuro che questo corpo è mio”). L'impotenza expresses the difficulty of relating to another person in a way that truly means something, starting from what is Gaber's first postulate: one's own inadequacy, one's own insufficiency. Meanwhile “La marcia dei colitici” lays out a catalogue of humanity made up of “gastritici, stitici, psicosomatici”, a colitic vanguard of the colitically afflicted.

In the same work, in “L'uomo che perde i pezzi”, Gaber told, through the allegory of the body, the story of lost certainties, falling away one by one: the armpit, the thigh, the ankle, the heart. The loss of self is first and foremost a loss of contact with reality, with that bodily core which for Gaber is wholly paramount, in an age that has turned everything into superstructure and hyper-intellectualized every perception. A loss of self that will go as far as the loss of one's own name, in the surreal monologue Angelieri Giuseppe (from Anche per oggi non si vola).

A decade later, in Io se fossi Gaber, the reflection on identity would be tied to so-called looks (“Da un po' di tempo non so più come vestirmi”, from “La vestizione”), dwelling on the contagion of the masses and the difficulty of remaining an individual without being dulled into sameness by fashions (“La massa”).

Let's go back to the golden period of the 1970s. In the song “Far finta di essere sani” (a genuine manifesto), unmasking the counterfeits and hypocrisy of ideologies, he dreams of “una donna normale che riesce anche a esser fedele, comprando sottane, collane e creme per mani”. The “security of objects”, the rituals of normality, the elegy of mediocrity, ten years before Nanni Moretti: more than one point in common with the director from Monteverde. The irreducible integrity, the dry, disenchanted and bitter outlook, that moralism of a minority condemned by its own ethical syntax to remain a minority.

Giorgio Gaber's codified sanity is the anchor to real, concrete things, while engagement in “public” categories represents an escape route — Gramscian texts, study groups, class struggle — makeshift lifeboats, merely consoling rescues; and ideas are nothing but abstractions. Gaber sings, in one of his finest moments: “Se potessi mangiare un'idea avrei fatto la mia rivoluzione” (“Un'idea”, from Dialogo tra un impegnato e un non so). Ideas can't be touched, can't be seen. Everyone handles them as they see fit: the racist preaches anti-racism, the traditionalist dresses himself up in psycho-pedagogical avant-garde. Everything is free as long as it remains just an idea — the open couple, feminism, psychoanalysis. As long as they're concepts you carry only in your head, not in your skin. The body, on the other hand, can be seen. The body speaks, it cannot lie (remember the tics of the old “Goganga”?).

In Anche per oggi non si vola the singer-actor returns to the theme even more explicitly. Il corpo stupido is the story of a night spent with a woman with whom he shared “la linea”, good books. “Era perfetta ma non ho avuto voglia di toccarla”, sings Gaber. “Com’è corretta l’ideologia/ Com’è ignorante la simpatia/ Io purtroppo non riesco a istruire il mio tatto/ Non riesco a politicizzare l’olfatto/ Ci ho il corpo stupido”. Gaber sets free the triumph of the senses and of sincerity, going so far as to howl like Marcello Mastroianni with Sofia Loren. In “L'odore”, the protagonist is besieged by a persistent smell that won't go away. Washing isn't enough (inevitably recalling “Shampoo” and its candid triumph of lather, rinses and re-rinses); the stench persists. As if coarse physicality kept reminding the presumed intellectual superiority of superstructures and formulas of its own laws: “Sciacquoni, sciacquoni, forza, cessi!” (“È sabato”, from Dialogo tra un impegnato e un non so).

After a long, successful career spanning Sanremo festivals, Saturday-night RAI variety shows, high-profile duets and major hits, Signor Gaberscik was convinced that his role was that of the jester: “Devo fare per forza il pagliaccio/ Devo solo fare divertire/ Suona chitarra, falli divertire/ Non farli mai pensare” (“Suona chitarra”, from Il Signor G). But this thoughtful jester illustrated Italy of the late twentieth century better than many specialist articles or essays ever could.

With the biting sarcasm of a Brel, Gaber spat out his debunking, anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical poetics onto the stage, a portrait of bigotry, opportunism, hypocrisy. But Gaber never married any ideology: his gaze is merciless even towards the mandatory fashions of the left. He was among the first to distance himself from certain post-'68 ideologies, even while mourning that lost momentum. His is the voice of a restless individualist, incapable of staying silent about anything. Gaber nursed a fierce dislike for homogenized, parroting masses. In "L’uomo non è fatto per star solo," from "Polli di allevamento," he says: “Le cose buone non fanno epidemia/ è un fatto biologico/ L’intelligenza non si attacca/ La scarlattina sì/ Le persone che si aggregano hanno incorporato un distillatore che elimina via tutto il buono e lascia passare la merda pura”. A pained trust in individual experience, an enormous distrust of aggregation and collectivity: this is another cornerstone of Gaber's ethics. We find it constantly, in the works already mentioned, but also in "I cani sciolti" (from Io come persona) right through to "Verso il terzo millennio" (from My Generation Has Lost). As long as one doesn't mistake the false sense of euphoria given by battery-farmed consumerism – mandatory freedom – for true freedom, which doesn't consist merely "in a free space," but in participation ("La libertà"). "What, with all the freedom you have, you also want the freedom to think?" ("Si può," from My Generation Has Lost).

Alternating music and monologues with extraordinary intensity, Gaber taught us a great deal: torn between life and neurosis, between well-being and despondency (he also dedicated several songs to suicide: "Il signor G sul ponte," "Il suicidio," "Il dilemma"), singing of illogical joy and the "right to live in the present." Laying bare the obstacles of consistency and the harshness of intellectual honesty and independence. Singing about sexuality and relationships with Balzacian mastery, combining the gifts of a character actor with the algebraic precision of a moralist. He was an intellectual without a chair.

Wonder, allegiance, anger, pain, desire. Giorgio knew that "everything is crumbling" ("L’illogica allegria," from Pressione bassa); that things become "well-known and tiresome." But his wasn't nihilism: it was rather a hyper-awareness. His bitterness had become ever more incurable. His last album released in his lifetime, My Generation Has Lost, is a testament to failed programs and ideals. The posthumous Io non mi sento italiano announces the same tones. Gaber, who was among the first to break away from ideological sectarianism, could hardly resign himself to the squandering of the ideals and civic commitment of times past. He gets angrier than ever, because he no longer sees "anyone getting angry anymore." Everything has been watered down. “Ma questa è un’astrazione/ È un’idea di chi appartiene/ A una razza in estinzione”. That was his.

Neither right nor left, for Gaber ("Destra-Sinistra"). He was genetically incapable of embracing an ideology, of belonging to any preset camp (except in the past, in "Qualcuno era comunista"). He couldn't share in a mass sentiment. From various quarters he was accused of political indifference. Perhaps Gaber was indeed indifferent to politics, if that means refusing anesthesia, if it means the obligation to keep one's mind working, one's critical spirit alive, fighting stupidity and conformism wherever they come from. "Or maybe it's me who doesn't understand a damn thing anymore" ("Timide variazioni," from Polli di allevamento).

Giorgio Gaberscik: a windmill fighting against idiocy.

We have lost an irreplaceable voice. One fewer thinker able to tell us what kind of world (shameless and absurd) we live in.

"E tu mi vieni a dire io amo, come se l’amore.

E tu mi vieni a dire io muoio, come se la morte.

E tu mi vieni a dire io soffro, come se il dolore."

(from "Il Mucchio Selvaggio," issue 518)

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