At the beginning of the eighties, in fact, right in 1980, that is, when politics (I don’t mean professional politics, but rather the kind of self-taught not-for-profit politics that marked those youth movements that based their reason for being on a contempt for the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Senate, mass media, free market, and religion) was dead and its body was cold, all that survived, for just a short time, was the practice of proletarian self-discounts at concerts.
The practice of self-discounting, in the second half of the previous decade (the late seventies, in other words) had been imposed with the caustic savagery of a political right, self-evident, requiring no theoretical justification. The message (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the lesson) conveyed by the act of self-discounting was inhibitory in its nonnegotiable self-righteousness: we don’t pay to get into concerts because it’s right not to pay. Full stop. Nothing more need be said. And if the security team tried to do its job by defying that diktat, bim-bam-boom, bricks and bats would fly.
And it wasn’t as if, when faced with the arrogant practice of self-discounting (which was actually more of a self-exemption, because these people weren’t demanding a discount so much as they were saying: “Let us in or we’ll wreck the place from floor to ceiling”), anyone was willing to provide explanations.
In those years, if you asked why, then you just looked like a fool (in which case you’d be banished with a smack to the back of the head or a chorus of insults such as: “You’re out of it,” “You’re freaking out”—that one had almost exactly the same value as “You’re freaking me out”—“Ouch, you’re bringing us down,” “You’re harshing our mellow,” etc.; and then you were mocked for at least a semester as the political equivalent of the Lampwick character from Pinocchio, as much as if you’d said “between you and I” at your high school final exam) or, at the very worst, you’d be taken as a political know-nothing (in which case you became the target of derisive whistles and spit, as well as possibly being physically attacked by some aspiring, homegrown Che Guevara, beet red with fury for the occasion, who actually had no intention of hitting you at all, but just planned to be stopped in the nick of time by a couple of volunteers and thus still come off looking like an implacable leader unwilling to brook dissent).
The movement, in other words, was unwilling to tolerate uncertainty, much less debate. It treated you like a mental defective if you failed to understand. So what happened was you went along with it. Okay, you said, intimidated by the thought that someone might suspect you didn’t know what you were talking about. So you behaved like Obelix in that old comic book where his friends, the other Gauls, are readying a military expedition, and they spend days and days arguing about attack strategies and battlefield conditions and finally, without understanding a word of what they’re saying, he screams: “I don’t know why, but I’m coming with you guys!”
But it should also be said that in those days there was also a degree of self-interest in obtaining self-discounts (or I should say, self-exemptions), truth be told. Though it wasn’t clear why the same principle didn’t apply to pushers. Did anyone ever get a joint through proletarian self-discounting, I wonder?
In other words, for a good long while in Italy self-discounting was the nightmare of musicians from around the world, but especially Italians, who were often subjected at concerts to genuine authentic people’s trials in addition to the self-discounting. The self-discounters would climb up onto the stage, take the singer prisoner, and subject him to the third degree. They’d ask him: why did you go on TV, what the fuck kind of song did you write, what kind of bourgeois smart-ass lyrics are these, look at your cute little fashionable shirt, where do you think you’re going to wind up with this music, at the Sanremo Music Festival?
This was militant cultural criticism—forget about the number of stars and smiley or frowny faces at the beginning of reviews in the local newspapers. A musician (especially an Italian musician, because a foreign musician, as soon as he got a whiff of what was happening, would turn around, leave the country, and not come back until things began to improve) was not allowed to act like a rock star. He couldn’t treat the audience with disdain or superiority, make money, screw fashion models, appear on television, or give autographs. Music was a political matter, a way of making a statement; you couldn’t sell out or be a whore or catch the syphilis of success. It was brutal, back then, to climb onto a concert stage.
At the beginning of the eighties, though, all that was finally coming to an end. And the astonishing thing was that the end came with a velocity that verged on the technological. It came, moreover, with such a discretion, a silence, an absence of warning signs, that once the results became evident it seemed as if it had all happened without the protagonists themselves being aware of it—as if they’d discovered they were dead while still walking, meeting, organizing, and making a ruckus in the general conviction that they were actually still alive.
At concerts the practice of self-discounting still continued, but there was no mistaking the fact that by now, after the most violent and criminal elements had been pounding on the gates and doors of stadiums and theaters to be let in, nobody really cared that there was a slice of the public that did their talking with their fists, using tough manners to impose an antagonistic vision of popular art.
The message of self-discounting, practically from one morning to later that same day, had lost all its critical value and had become, paradoxically and unconsciously, a demand for things to be free, for no reason other than self-interest. The ones who continued to practice it with the mindset of the political action, once they’d burst into the stadium or theater, realized that the audience didn’t give a clenched fist about the fact that they’d gained free admission after the show had started (“Okay,” the audience in the concert seating seemed to say, “they let you in for free? Now be good and let us watch the show”).
The musicians would only stop playing long enough to leave the now-obsolete radicals enough time to get comfortable and then they’d start playing again, as if they’d stopped for station identification and a word from the sponsors. It was the most depressing thing, a loss of meaning, live, that gave you an unsettling hunch about the tragic drift that was going to characterize the continuing deterioration already under way.
I remember once, at a concert by the band AreA—Demetrio Stratos was already dead, and the group had started playing jazz-rock (in fact, they just strummed and bored their audience after a while)—a band of self-discounters threw an oversized M-80 outside the stadium. It made such a huge roar that the musicians all exchanged glances and stopped playing. Inside the stadium we were all more surprised than afraid. After a couple of minutes Giulio Capiozzo stood up from his drum set and went over to the microphone.
“We’d like to know what just happened,” he said.
That’s it. Nothing more. A sincere, completely nonrhetorical question, which in its simplicity provided a pathetic depiction of the state of affairs.
The fact that anyone would ask to know what had happened in the aftermath of a loud explosion from outside the stadium during a concert pointed to the end of a shared experience, the definitive undermining of a political act that had by now lost its original identity. A couple of years earlier, it would have been obvious to everyone that a mass concert-break-in was under way.
The security crew didn’t make an issue of it, they just let in the rioters who’d set off the M-80. A total of four or five minutes, all told.
“If we’re done with the fireworks, then we’ll start playing again,” Capiozzo wrapped up, slightly annoyed, and went back to his drums and quietly sat down.
The concert started up again, and in the meanwhile the bomb-throwers (there might have been a baker’s dozen of them) were admitted into the empty space between the bottom tiers and the hurricane fencing along the field. While AreA was playing, the radicals who had thrown the M-80 all looked at each other and started chanting their old battle chant: “Workers’ autonomy, organization, armed struggle, revolution.” And the effect was devastatingly pathetic. Both because they were unable to interfere even slightly with the music being played (which, after all, since it was jazz-rock, wasn’t even particularly loud), and because they were just a tiny knot of people, and not particularly robust individuals, either: the last holdouts of a battle that, as you could easily see, had long since lost touch with reality and was already firmly rooted in the past, a melancholy low-budget remake of itself. Like Vittorio Gassman’s line in the final scenes of C’eravamo tanto amati: “The future is now past, and we didn’t even notice it happening.”
After that point, what happened is what happened. And we all know what happened. It all came to an end: the self-discounts, the armed struggle, the revolutions, the workers’ autonomy. Nowadays, people pay for their concert tickets, and they pay through the nose. Musicians have all become rock stars, or at least they’ve all tried to without being shy about it. They’ve lined up to get a spot playing on TV, they’ve all gone to the the Sanremo Music Festival and even to the Festivalbar. And while formerly they were forced to defend themselves at their concerts against people who indicted them and tried them as criminals, now they whine about their albums being downloaded online. They warn against drugs, sex without love, political views that don’t speak the language of the ggente—the ordinary people courted by the populists in Rome. They get married (some of them even get married in church), they raise families, rediscover old-fashioned values, quit drinking, quit drugs, and advise young people not to waste their lives.
In the end, the marketplace triumphed. The audience evicted the people. We’re freer now than we were then. Free to buy anything we want.
But it’s no accident that, when all is said and done, as time goes by, we have less and less music worth buying.