Alberto Camerini - Confessions of a Cyberpunk

“There's this strange guy/ you'll see, you'll like him

He plays guitar/ in a rock'n'roll band.

He's like a Harlequin/ but he never breaks down

If you plug him in/ he'll light up and off he'll go”

Alberto Camerini enjoyed his peak popularity between the late Seventies and early Eighties, largely thanks to his sharp instinct for recognizing the importance of image, turning cross-dressing into his greatest strength.

But let's take things in order: the Beatles experimented with and/or popularized the concept album. No longer just a scattering of songs, but a “whole” that could be read as a single unified theme, tracks linked to one another by one or more shared elements - musical, lyrical, atmospheric, or all of the above.

David Bowie turned his entire career into a single concept album: tracks that grow out of what came before and hint at what's still to come, perhaps on another LP, with each record tied to the ones before it and the ones yet to arrive, while the stories carry on, intersect, and echo one another. In this sense, Camerini is our own little David Bowie; Harlequin, like Ziggy Stardust for the English singer, would prove to be a mask that was sometimes even hard to shake off.

His body of work, from its beginnings right up to today, thus takes shape as a continuum, built around a few recurring themes: musical ones (experimentation and tradition), iconographic ones (Carnival and masks), and lyrical ones (the failure to communicate).

The Music

Alberto Camerini was born in Brazil to Italian parents, returned to Italy as a child, and began his music career early, working as a session guitarist in recording studios. He went on to contribute to numerous albums, including those of established artists such as Patty Pravo, Ornella Vanoni, Area, Stormy Six, Equipe 84, and Eugenio Finardi (with whom he also formed a band: “Il Pacco”)…

In '76, backed by distinguished collaborators such as Patrizio Fariselli, Paolo Tofani, Lucio Fabbri, Lucio Bardi, Pepè Gagliardi, Paolo Donnarumma, and later his friend Roberto Colombo (who had already arranged for various artists, including Fabrizio De André on his concert with Pfm), he set out on his own. For the first two or three years, he began experimenting in an attempt to create a modern form of pop, drawing not so much (or not only) on classic paradigms (blues, country, rock'n'roll, beat, folk singing, etc.) as on the rhythms and sounds of his homeland: Brazil.

“I was born under the sun of a vast country,” he recalls, “one that has perhaps never truly been free, a great country of happy people, of great forests and great cities…”

So to electronics, synthesizers, the electricity of the instruments, and the typically rock song form, Camerini adds samba, the Catira dances of the indigenous peoples, marimba percussion, saudade, macumba liturgy, the afoxé of Bahia, and all the genres that make up that heterogeneous melting pot of a vast and highly distinctive nation, one that has absorbed influences from every people who settled there, where voodoo, candomblé, the legends of pirates and gold prospectors, and the orchestras of jazz musicians (bossa nova) have all coexisted.

Ares Tavolazzi, former bassist with Area, took part in making the second album (as well as producing it), playing bass, Portuguese guitar and cello. Camerini himself dabbled with the most unusual instruments, from the mandolin to programming samplers.

The label change (from Cramps to Cbs) also marks an even more evident shift in the singer's interests towards electronic music, and kicks off the fortunate period during which his explorations led him, for a certain stretch of time (1980-1984), to commercial success, platinum records, front pages of specialist magazines, invitations to TV shows and even appearances at various festivals (which, in some way, sealed the end of that golden moment in which his band went as far as using five synthesizers at once!).

Subsequently disgusted by the stifling, shortsighted demands of his new record label, Camerini decides to allow himself time to reflect, study and mature, perhaps also forced into this choice by personal and health problems. He will do so in Brazil and in Venice. And that will be no coincidence.

Having returned with the idea of keeping more to himself, of supporting the cause of the centri sociali, of putting on shows in small venues where he could have a closer relationship with the audience, after an awkward self-produced attempt with the album Where the Rainbow Arrives (1995), he takes up his experiments again, above all that attempt to keep popular traditions alive without being musically backward in the rock field, without ever falling into any kind of revivalism and without giving in to Anglo-American "dominance". In doing so he widens his horizons, also drawing on typically Italian genres that, between the end of the seventeenth century and the start of the nineteenth, broke through across the whole of Europe. Highly noble experiments that perhaps few people ever got the chance to appreciate. For most, Camerini will remain simply the electronic Harlequin, more commercial and exhibitionist.

Among other things, even during his period of greatest fame, Camerini never gave in to easy commercialism. A passionate scholar of the Commedia dell'Arte and of countercultures throughout history and around the world, he simply understands, as many had already done outside Italy for some time, that image is a fundamental component of the pop music universe. And for a while he has fun playing with it. But between a strangely shaped guitar and a bizarre hairstyle, between a "Tanz Bambolina" and a "Rock'n'roll Robot" (his biggest hit ever), his albums invariably feature now a ska track, now an eighteenth-century Venetian air, now a ballad, now a salsa-tinged piece, always wrapped in a comic, playful guise.

Carnival

There is something in common between Brazil and Venice, the city where Alberto goes to study after eight years of tireless work and three to five of tremendous success, and that is Carnival. The lyrics of Camerini's songs, their atmospheres, their stories, often take us back to Carnival. A feast with ancestral flavours, typically popular in character, which has always walked hand in hand with music (the carnival songs of the Renaissance... soul and funk during New Orleans Carnival…)

Camerini brings Carnival to the pop music audience in a rock key, or rather, new wave key.

The world he sings about is a banquet of masks, an enormous, dazzling Carnival, much like how the cities of the Movement could also appear - Rome, Milan, Bologna, powder kegs in turmoil, post-77, swarming with addicts, artists, politicians, terrorists… There was Ultima Spiaggia, Area, Harpo's Bazar, Cramps, heroin, Re Nudo, Cannibale, Il canzoniere del Lazio, Gianfranco Manfredi, Finardi, the free radio stations, the tanks…

Years of bewilderment, of coldness, of failed communication, and the exits, the possible horizons, the paths to salvation - at least musically - were mainly two: punk's "no-future", or the virtual world of new wave. Camerini finds himself more drawn to the latter, singing of the mutation from man to robot, from a thinking being to a computer, from thought/idea to electronics (with "Computer Capriccio", in 1983, Alberto appeared at the Festivalbar).

But his Carnival is also a Carnival of sounds, one that almost never draws from the more conventional singer-songwriter genre: the words, the lines, never overpower the music, he never seeks some convoluted musical construction able to contain a message that doesn't fit within the bar. There's no need for it. This typically Italian operation is denied precisely because the message - as the natural counterpart of "ordinary" thinking/living - is exactly what Camerini is targeting.

The message lies in the music, if one really wants to find it, in the pleasant yet also unusual melodies, in the sonorities, in the noises.

In this sense one could even speak of demented music: because Camerini is having fun. He experiments, mocks, piles things up, mixes, laughs and makes others laugh.

In opposition to the greyness and glacial chill of the landscapes described by the likes of Joy Division, Fall, Pere Ubu, Suicide, our man shows us his curiosity, his irony, his madness if you will, and ultimately what he shows us is how at ease he feels in this world of masks. Openly disguised as Harlequin, out of place, he tries to change it by mocking it, poking fun at it, pointing out the contradictions, the masks that lie within (and define) every person, the roles already written, the endless imitation/simulation, the simulacra.

One almost seems to glimpse, in Camerini's lyrics, the thought of Baudrillard: society is destined for implosion, since the path it has taken is that of the simulacrum, the infinite repetition of models whose original memory has been lost; reality has been replaced by a hyper-reality promoted by the mass media and multinational corporations. And listening to the songs, we can almost see them scurrying about, the many puppets that populate this hyper-reality: "la gente, gli sconvolti, i danzatori, i maghi, i clown, gli scocciatori, i parlatori, i politici, i filosofi, i poeti, i giocatori" ("Macondo" - 1978), "il Presidente, la mafia, i terroristi, la camorra" ("Maccheroni Elettronici" - 1982), "signori, signore, amici, compagni, spettatori, grandi e bambini" ("Gelato Metropolitano" - 1977)

More masks, then, all characters who play (without knowing it?) at acting out this or that part, and for whom Camerini doesn't seem to feel much sympathy.

The Movimento itself (comrades… revolutionaries… the comic-strip restaurant…) is too dark, too angry, by now devoid of irony.

Camerini loves the various Pantalone, Ricciolina, Serenella, Pulcinella and Colombina figures. But most of all he loves himself: Arlecchino, the mad clown redrawn for our times. A dancer, a crowd-puller and a lover as ever, but also schizophrenic, pilled-up and jittery. Still cheerful, though, and every song carries with it, and hands over, a slice of that irresistible cheerfulness.

Incommunicability

Fortunately it's not only that. Fortunately, amid the games and the laughter, there's also a line of shadow. And it's precisely when the magical fusion comes about between the melancholy of that line of shadow and the epileptic joy of our electronic clown that the highest peaks are reached.

Going back briefly, and roughly, to Baudrillard and his denunciation of the loss of values within the technostructure we live in: triumphant modernization has wiped out every possibility of escape. The future, as has been said, does not exist. We're doomed to implode at dizzying speed. Perhaps only "seduction" can open up a way out. The concept of seduction is the one the French sociologist later made use of, in order to crack open, within the bleak landscape his ideas painted, a faint glimmer of salvation. Seduction is an exchange that isn't necessarily purely symbolic. A feeling like love, even just as a desire for sex to give or receive, is an impulse that can still say something despite the age-old speculation it has been subjected to, and it can still say something precisely because it is strong, elusive, not fully controllable. To seduce means relating to other people, understanding the Other, and also understanding oneself. It is transgression. It is anti-reproduction.

So our Arlecchino tries, attempts to seduce, to be seduced, but is keen to point out just how complicated that turns out to be. The level of incommunicability we've reached is a heavy obstacle that the clown, with irony and with madness, keeps trying to overcome. It doesn't matter whether he succeeds, as far as the song's effectiveness goes — what matters is that the attempt is there, the awareness that, in a world of machines, this attempt might just as well fail, the veil of uncertainty, the doubt, the sense of being lost when faced with the other's emptiness. It's all of this that blends wonderfully into Camerini's sonic universe. This is what his music expresses to us.

Take "Tanz Bambolina" (1982), for instance, “Come faccio a dirti/ vuoi ballar con me/ se non riesco a dirti/ che ti amo già” or “Basta che mi accendi/ sintonizzati con me/ basta che mi cerchi/ io sarò vicino a te” ("Sintonizzati con me" – 1980) or again: "Vorrei saper dirti tutto ma se ti vedo vado in palla e riesco solo a dirti che… bip bip rock bip bip rock…" ("Bip Bip Rock" – 1981). Pure incommunicability.

Electronic Arlecchino

The fact remains, of course, that Camerini, in this world evolving towards virtual nothingness, towards the victory of mass media, of computing and television, wallows in it with amusement, from the sidelines, mocking himself and society as a whole, starting from the bottom, from values, from principles, from traditions, from clichés, from false myths ("Cenerentola" – 1976). And it's precisely by making use of artificial products that the modern Arlecchino achieves his debunking aim and shows us how, amid the great mess of our times, in the gigantic restaurant, amid the splendor and the useless riches, amid the succulent and varied foods that keep popping up in the lyrics and that, once again, serve as symbols within a system of symbols, destabilizing elements suddenly appear, like "daily bread," "metropolitan ice cream," "electronic macaroni," "the girlfriend who brings so much joy with her white clothes and her colorful smiles"…

After all, the Arlecchino mask was born in the Commedia dell'Arte from the generic stock character of the servant, and it holds within itself, and within the collective imagination, many of the traits Camerini needs to express himself, using these traits as he pleases, recontextualizing them, bringing them back in disguised form, or repeating them to the point of obsession, twisting them out of shape.

The name "Arlecchino," for instance, according to some scholars derives from "Hellequin," a demonic origin, then, which fits like a glove when you think of the figure (and also the life story) of the singer. Arlecchino is also the ever-hungry servant, and indeed food is an element that recurs endlessly throughout the songs. Arlecchino is somewhat cunning, Arlecchino wears a suit of many colors, and, linking up with the multicolored image this mask conjures in the mind, the comparison with the music born of the eccentric Camerini comes naturally too, as does the comparison with acid hallucinations.

Moreover, Arlecchino has undergone many transformations over time, and so has our Brazilian artist in the same way. But here, perhaps, an even subtler parallel exists: it is in fact mankind that has undergone countless transformations throughout history and, in this new millennium, finds itself having to face the most radical genetic mutation yet, namely the one into a machine. And the mutation is also the one from rocker to cyberclown: Camerini's latest mask, arrived at, naturally, by way of the rock'n'roll robot.

Marginality

Camerini is a marginal figure, dynamic, impossible to pin down in clichés, and out of his game of symbols, a non-symbol emerges. Perhaps a robot, perhaps Arlecchino, perhaps an alien ("Neurox," 1978, the proto-cyberclown), perhaps simply a shape-shifting singer-songwriter, perhaps a madman, perhaps a jester, but, certainly, amid all these "perhaps," what remains of him is a slippery image, one that can't be pinned down and that, in this great theatre, enters only for one reason: to strip it bare and mock it, all the while staying on the sidelines.

Even today he can be tracked down in the most disparate hideaways, strumming on acoustic guitar ancient eighteenth-century songs, distant Mediterranean melodies steeped in melodrama and psychedelia ("Diamantina" – 1995), masterpieces like "Cyberclown" (2001), or samba and old Brazilian protest folk songs (from Ernesto Dos Santos through to other minor or semi-unknown composers).

It's become almost easy, lately, to spot him on the stages of smoky social centres, backed by the most "angry" extremists of Italy's bleak hardcore scene, grappling with either raw, scrappy punk or knowing little ska ditties. His current band, "Skidsoplastix", features, alongside a skilled jazz guitarist, a bassist who came from the Punkreas camp and the former drummer of Pornoriviste — obscure characters who, in any case, proved willing to "get their hands dirty" for this Grand Old Man, acknowledging, among other things, that he was one of the first, with tracks like "Divo divo", "Poliziotto per favore" and "Comici cosmetici" (all dating from 1978), to tinker with punk in Italy, and one of the first — if not the very first, in this case — to introduce ska into it, with tracks like "Ska-tenati" (1980).

One of his limitations, if we want to call it that, lies precisely in his inconsistency: looking closely, in fact, almost none of his albums works all the way through. Perennially unstable, often over the top, throughout his thirty-year career Camerini has always paired extraordinary songs with just as many failed ones — sometimes (perhaps) pretentious, sometimes (perhaps) too weak or unfinished. Yet, paradoxically, this too could be read as a symptom of the man's genius, or at least of his eccentricity: his refusal to offer certainties, his refusal to be understood, always leaving the suspicion that, perhaps, there was something to understand after all.

And we might as well close with a line from Roberto "Freak" Antoni, who was talking about Skiantos (other illustrious members of the golden-age Cramps roster), but which could just as easily be "turned around" and applied to Camerini: "To contaminate, with a violence that is entirely conceptual, the predictable world of common sense; to set against a lofty poetics, worthy of a great artist, a low poetics, worthy of a deranged one. The audience eyes you with suspicion, catches you mumbling, slurring strange things in nursery-rhyme couplets, or hears you shouting slang phrases as if you were speaking only to your accomplices, and wonders whether you're clever or a fool, whether this is a deliberate choice or a miserable attempt, whether you have culture, dignity, awareness, or whether you're a fraud."

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