Reflections between literature and music

Luke Rhinehart – The Dice Man (1971, published by Marcos Y Marcos in 2004)

Lucius Rhinehart is a successful psychologist in the New York of summer 1968 who, over time, has lost his passion for the profession and has grown tired of the usual methods. His marriage is also heading toward crisis, his friends are always the same, stimulation is lacking and life drags on, weary and toothless. One evening, after yet another poker game, driven by an irrepressible desire for his neighbour, the wife of his best friend and colleague, Lucius decides to leave it to a die whether or not he should make a move on the woman. The roll gives him a positive answer. So Lucius goes for it, and it works out. From that moment on, the psychologist decides to entrust his entire life to the die. At first he assigns it minor choices, then gradually imposes whole changes of personality according to what the game dictates. In turn he becomes a madman, a tramp, a fervent believer, an unrepentant atheist, a homosexual, a scientist, an aggressive character or a rather meek one, a Black man, a model husband, an unfaithful husband, a murderer, Jesus Christ. This and much more, in a delirious crescendo that's always ironic but remarkably lucid in showing what any of us could be, if only we constantly changed our own psychological makeup.

“The Dice Man” by the American George Powers Cockcroft, aka Luke Rhinehart, is a cult book released in the United States in 1971 and published in Italy in 1973 (since 2004 an edition edited by Marcos Y Marcos has been in circulation, and one reprint even came with a free die included). The book slides from satire into the grotesque, yet it also manages to be a kind of genuinely illuminating psychoanalytic treatise, if you look past the irreverent, ironic veneer it's made of. Doctor Rhinehart's pseudo-autobiography reveals just how enslaved we are to our own personalities. Sometimes all it would really take is trusting to chance (and mustering some courage) to turn into someone else. That would open us up to new realities: we could experience first-hand what all those we feel distant from actually feel. Am I shy? The die gives me the courage to be a non-shy person. Am I afraid of what's different? I turn into that difference, I put myself in its shoes, I understand what it feels and I break down my own barriers. Do I not get along with someone? I become that person and try to grasp their point of view from the inside. Am I bored with myself? I become someone else.

Put like that it sounds simple, and putting pressure on the mechanisms (and chains) of one's own personality is certainly not the game that Luke Rhinehart actually plays out across the pages of his novel. But the book should really just be a pretext for reflecting on it a little. Are we truly “just made that way”, or is that only a lie we tell ourselves, a screen we hide behind when we don't want to take responsibility for putting ourselves on the line or empathising with other situations and people? “The Dice Man” searches for an answer to this age-old question, and while reading it there are more than a few moments in which, die or no die, you feel the urge to step outside your usual self, try on other characters, and finally break free of self-imposed chains.

Want to try it? Think it over, and in the meantime don't miss “The Dice Man”: it will entertain you and unsettle you, the way only truly great works can.

Soundtrack: Dargen D'Amico – Nostalgia istantanea (2012)

Like Lucius Rhinehart, Dargen D'Amico is a man of a thousand faces. To the general public he's a rapper. But not only that — he's also a judge on X-Factor. But first and foremost, a rapper. Many saw him at Sanremo, actually rapping less than usual, doling out pearls of social wisdom while at the same time getting Italy's piazzas dancing. But once again, there's more to him than that. And that “more” really amounts to a lot. Dargen D'Amico is Italy's smartest rapper, the most innovative, the most experimental, the most creative. Ever since the release of his stripped-down debut album (“Musica senza musicisti”, 2006), he's shown he can use rap in ways that are at once conventional and utterly unconventional. Dargen spits rhymes — everyone does that. Dargen also busts out an Anglo-Milanese patter that, if you didn't know the irony behind it, might even come across as grating. But there is irony, plenty of it. It's as if he were staging a parody of rap that ultimately comes across as positive and original. Original and brilliant. First of all, because the musical fabric is about as innovative as it gets. At its core there's plenty of electronics, as is customary, but it never falls into the flimsiness and monotony of similar efforts elsewhere — quite the opposite, it's a genuine kaleidoscope of invention. Anyone willing to dive into the flow of the aforementioned “Musica senza musicisti”, and its follow-ups “Making a virtue of formal flaws” (2008) and “Cd'” (2011), will find themselves in the presence of a sort of rap Frank Zappa.

For those who already know the genius from Baltimore, no further words are needed; for everyone else, I'll just say there's a real risk of coming out of the listening experience genuinely dazed by a sonic richness that very often couldn't care less about commercial appeal and instead builds Amazonian jungles of sound. Then, in 2012, comes “Nostalgia istantanea”, which is yet another thing entirely. The album contains two suites (eighteen and twenty minutes long) that upend any idea you might have of rap. Even on his earlier records the lyrical fabric was already estranging. When Dargen writes lyrics, he manages to burrow into the labyrinthine recesses of the psyche with the skill of a true miner of the soul. No image is predictable, every word is a concentrate of existential poetry. And forget the Sanremo hits too. “Nostalgia istantanea” goes even further: you witness a wild whirl of concepts, emotions, experiences and memories smeared freely and originally across the flow. Forget everything you know (or think you know) about rap — here it's an entirely different story. “Nostalgia istantanea” has the effect of a psychoanalytic session on acid; it feels like stepping into Lucius Rhinehart's shapeshifting mind and getting lost among his many impersonations.

Dargen wrote the lyrics through free association, letting the pen glide across the page with no restrictions, giving free rein to a boundless imagination. He says he conceived it in the moments right before and right after sleep. And the dreamlike fabric underlying it is distinctly palpable — just as in dreams, the words fly through the listener's head, narrating scattered fragments of the artist's life that mirror the lived experience of everyone. A crazed stream of consciousness, full of wordplay and glimpses of deep intimacy that leave Dargen completely laid bare. I could quote particularly illuminating excerpts (and there are dozens), but the flow is so compact that it has to be taken as a whole — you have to surrender entirely to the unspoken laws of consciousness. Underneath, meanwhile, runs a backing track where the few notes of an apparently simple melody seem to clash with the deep introspection of the words. They hang suspended, then a rhythm kicks in that stops and lingers, and the flow never ceases. And you realise those simple notes align perfectly with the excavation, a hypnagogic loop that seems to turn into a sonic nursery rhyme to soothe the depth of the dig. Then you flip the side, and across those twenty minutes the delirium grows even more intense — the backing track is a perfect example of frippertonics. The words have turned obscure; now there's truly no handhold, no familiar footing, nothing to grasp onto to decipher the voice of a consciousness in full eruption. And so that voice too becomes music, everything frays, everything becomes lost, even one's own identity.

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