Franti

An agitated smoke, thick as a bad dream with no end in sight: fog, smog, a molotov cocktail just gone off, or maybe just a chorus pedal cranked to the max. War in the streets, everyone else already in prison. Frayed nerves, beyond disconnected. Personal and collective at once, the tragedy is irreversible: the moon is a dark boulder, the tongue stays mute, the future is already over.

In the tricolour Motor City, the sun still warms only the top floors; for everyone else there's a daily ration of despair, and not just outside their front door. Three years were enough, between the red flames at the Angelo Azzurro and the white collars of the 40,000 marching, to dissolve the Movement. The hardcore phalanx closes ranks, but it's not enough. There's a need for a collective, like in the days when things still seemed to work. Absolute freedom: no distinction between inside and outside, no limit to the imagination that seemed destined to seize power, no copyright in an age that denies the right to exist, no lift from strangers without a blue bus. The healthy shrubs of Area transplanted into the sour soil of Crass, defying an oppressive sky streaked with barbed-wire birds. You need to be dead or mad, you have to survive. By any means necessary.

And here they are, the only means possible: as many frescoes as there are sensations evoked by that desolate bewilderment, gathered into a polyptych as cohesive as a declaration of love and as tense as a phone call between terrorists. No one will be left alone. Two anguished voices that recall X, added to a sax that recalls Siouxsie: punk and new wave have finally made peace, public and private can return to the same side of the barricade. This time, though, “No future” is evoked, not invoked: there's no room for nihilism when they're already shooting at you. Maybe you can still dream, even if the only thing left to lull you to sleep is a sweet asphyxiation. Winter is long, but those distant stars will rain down their message of freedom. The last great anthem of struggle in Italian music, and one of the most powerful.

Never repeat a move, unless you want to end up flat on the canvas in round one. And what could be more diabolical, to wrong-foot an already bewildered opponent, than turning Robert Johnson into Husker Du, outflanking Gun Club on the left? To hell (blues devil or dark devil, makes no difference around here) with barriers and prejudice: if you like them and you need them, you can be iconoclastic while embracing your roots. You can be hardcore and folk. And if the plan of attack is clear and shared, you couldn't ask for a better manifesto than a "Preachin' blues".

The current decade comes back to claim its toxic slice of the pie, to the tinkling of frozen stalactites. Asylums are already banned, but mental distress runs rampant regardless, disguised in a lifeless arpeggio. It's in disguise, but I still recognize it: it really is "Io nella notte". It's harder to identify that rusty slide guitar and that New York Dolls-like strut, but just lean in and you'll hear it whisper "heroin", and it all makes sense: "Only a new film", nothing more.

So then, Italian or English? Elsewhere people are at each other's throats over it, but around here there are one or two more urgent items on the agenda: like frightened tales of happiness on the neon-lit sidewalks of Beirut, with little sun and few games, yet where we can still hear "Le loro voci", a macerating autumn of the senses that knows how to turn into an electric storm. And at this point, who's to stop us exiling the Virgin Prunes in a Zen temple, painting a "Chiara realizzazione di Ryonen" with the tip of a twelve-string, or shipping Bruno Bettelheim off to Canterbury aboard the astral convoy of "Joey"?

There's no turning back now, the free die is cast: and so "Lasciateci sentire ora" these autistic voices and this freeze-dried CP 80, but also march on proudly, driven forward by a triumphant "Vento Rosso", like Henry Cow no longer knowing what to resist, so surrounded do they find themselves. Anything but "Solidi", those alienated jets of sax: yet it's a sickness without venom, a mutual infection to die embracing one another. One last wish, since we were never heroes anyway, not a bullet but a lullaby: "The Week Song", and may the tape rewind forever, for better or worse.

Clearly little more than a dried-up puddle next to the lush "Giardino delle quindici pietre": the point is that to clear your head, a run does more good than a horse ride. And if Universal is already winking at you from behind a hedge, better to keep running past the edge of the cliff.

Only Franti could laugh in the face of such horror, and Franti laughed. If we let that echo fade away, it will be right to despise us.

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07/07/2019