Offlaga Disco Pax

"Socialismo Tascabile" is a story as common as goodness, as common as bread. It's a story made up of many stories, set in one very precise place: Cavriago, a town of nine thousand souls on the outskirts of Reggio Emilia, told in the loping cadence of Max Collini's voice. It has an immediate taste of home, of homemade egg pasta and, indeed, of socialism.

And it's that very word — for years both a practice and a chimera at once — that allowed entire generations to found bands like Cccp while turning into religious fundamentalists, to fall in love with the Gaznevada of "Mamma dammi la benza" as well as the one of "IC Love Affair", and, more generally, to give birth to an epic so vast that not even twice the length of the Via Emilia, nor twice the works of Tondelli, could cover it all.

The debut album by Offlaga Disco Pax (Carretti, Collini, Fontanelli) probes that vague, multifaceted thing known as Emilian socialism and the so-called "Emilia-Romagna model", whose only real truth lies in oral tradition: retelling events at the bar, events from the bar, love affairs wrecked by too much idealism, and elementary schools as the nerve centre of an Emilian upbringing. The stories that make up the record move from the mid-Seventies to the early 2000s, passing through the Eighties — more populist than roaring.

The sound of "Socialismo Tascabile" is austere and analogue, stripped of production frills and rich with buried musical references ranging from the Doors to Cccp's "Allarme". It's the wave of "Enver", with its hermetic lyrics and its nod to Hoxha (the statesman and the singer Anna). It's the sound of the Reggio Emilia provinces, of a province within the province, because — amid the many mythological oddities born out of the Via Emilia — the obvious truth surrounding those of us native to those lands has never been stated plainly: we are not a metropolis, we will never be a metropolis, and yet something has always worked as if the urban fabric between Piacenza and Cattolica never stopped connecting and stretching between the Po and the Apennines, letting voices run free, scatter, and change so many times that they keep constantly renewing themselves.

In the narrative of "Socialismo Tascabile", that's exactly what happens: Collini's stream of information tells of a landscape that is peculiar yet familiar, a horizon that not only bounds the view but runs through the land with real force, giving rise to the pitiless Kapplers, unwitting masters of national socialism, and to the terrifying Ylenias, for whose sake we'd have sold off books and Leninist theory in a heartbeat — because perhaps the only thing stronger than socialism is sex, capable of corrupting even the most indoctrinated teenagers.

The stories told by Collini wink at an instant nostalgia that is never black-and-white in its judgments, except toward the one great historical enemy: capital, which chews up and digests everything, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the former Soviet Union. A cynical, cheating capital that steals the noble soul of Prague in the Bohemian epic of "Tatranky", only to spit it back out Westernized while the crowd on the dancefloor goes wild to Samantha Fox and Al Bano & Romina. And it's the market again — this time for chewing gum — that becomes a metaphor for the changes in that "little old world": Cinnamon gum disappears, the left declines, protections vanish, and along with them go the points of reference that a hundred and fifty years of socialism had taken for granted, crushed by American mint gum and pseudo-pharmaceutical products. The socialist horizon of Cinnamon-flavoured chewing gum will resurface eventually, but only in the background, behind more modern products, in some provincial social club.

There's still little left to say about a record that marked an era (or at least a week of Soviet revanchism, for the less sentimental comrades). What remains is the flavour of the supposed little feud with Julie's Haircut, a small stamp of naive, exaggerated pettiness within the stories that "Socialismo Tascabile" passes through — even through trivial squabbles over a Mark Lanegan record and an irritation resolved into nothing, amid bar-counter head-slaps and the smell of fried food at the Festa dell'Unità.

What remains are the popular touches of "Roberspierre": an anthem built like a list and an illegitimate constitution for us, orphans of the best century in the history of humanity (the 1900s, for the more distracted comrades). What remains is the popular poetry of "Piccola Pietroburgo", of the Nuovo Cinema Novecento cooperative and the mythical bust of Lenin: both enduring symbols of an Emilian spirit with a sweet heart, capable of dreaming in Cyrillic. What remains is the popular love of "De Fonseca" and nothing more — so as not to dwell too much, without speculating on what inevitably comes to an end.

Normally, pieces like this close with general remarks on the scope of the album and the impact it had on the world, and I can assure you — friends — that it had one, on countless people who still today quote it, steal from it, and aspire to it, all thanks to this homemade record made by three friends. But I'd rather close this piece — comrades — by saying that not only are Offlaga Disco Pax gone, but Enrico Fontanelli is immensely missed.

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28/10/2018