Carmelo Bene, "Lectura Dantis," Bologna - 31 luglio 1981
Bologna was still shocked by the enormous bomb that, one year earlier, had decimated women, men and children at the city's main railway station. Bologna remained naive, still not knowing what "the strategy of tension" was, set up by those who said they were with us but we were dying.
Carmelo, "mortally wounded" (by the Lilliputians of a certain press who, out of inertia or design, wanted to muzzle him) dedicated that evening "not to the dead, but to the wounded of the horrendous massacre", offering a memorable verbal solution to the enigma of that massacre. [On which, 36 years later, there are many theories but few certainties: including one of the condemned who had always professed innocence, also adding: "If this country does not seek the truth, it is another reason to remain silent".]
Bene placed himself at the top of the Asinelli Tower a year later, to mark Dante in a temporal dimension of a crazy, sticky metronome, and a knowledge of the pre-16th century text that allowed him to screw much of the well-known Dantean metrics, mortally wounding instead of homini the hendecasyllables and the syllables with acciaccaturas, changes in tone, curling, minimal lengthening ("fiinnnn nel Marocco"; "unna monnntagnna bruuna").
And through that death generate a "brave new world" of freedom such as the one we would have liked to see born from those deaths, from that August Holocaust that could have, in pain, made utility arise from smoking-rubble-and-screams and in its place saw subjugation and contumacious culprits.
In these verses, power is returned to the sound that - as always in Carmelo - was the only, undisputed, non-semantic all-round winner of his musical works (called theatrical: you can listen to them without looking at them, but you cannot look at them without listening to them). A Good beyond any temporal power.
You can imagine yourselves Uzbeks and leave the grammatical, syntactic, historical - in short textual - dimension and let yourself be transported by the beauty of the sound alone, the syncopations, the gutturals, a helter skelter with register jumps that garland the syllables and the deafening clamor of distorted trumpets and flutes, which envelop the beginning of each Canto with unheard-of violence.
Or admire the constant, meticulous intellectual abstraction - as a mythical craftsman of the sound of the soul - aimed at dividing every space in such original ways. How good it is to slow down words - to give more meaning - that break down very famous phrases ("Amor... ch'a nullo... amato... amar perdona..."), marking them out or entering into micro-sounding labyrinths ("assai t'en priego e ripriego che 'l priego vaglia mille") or removing punctuation and entrusting oneself his own feelings.
And shouted or sinusoidal crescendos to make one understand why today we don't do theater anymore, or almost, that even research is sponsored by the fashionable slipper. And how - not European! but - Mediterranean this voluptuousness sounds in turning over in phonemes, as when we wake up on a cold winter morning we love to roll over in a warm downy quilt.
They were Canti rightly so: because we are talking about voices, souls and Notes of the Spheres ("Si che m'inebriava il dolce canto ciò ch'io vedeva mi sembiava un riso... [pause] ... dell'Universo"). The Songs must be sung and Carmelo does this: subtly, as a Lacanian aware of the devastating power of the word; revolutionary, or conformist depending on taste.
Sparkling with intelligence and irony as an excellent musician as he was, he read from the text. It was Music. He could be listened to at a very low volume, but playing him louder, you get to listen to all the harmonics of that dry or salivated voice. And appreciate the silences, which as Miles has always said, are more important.
Carmelo is the only true undisputed Italian rock'n'roll star even if he never played an instrument - my fave music mag, BlowUp, said so already ten years ago. But today is time to double up: Bene is one of the greatest Italian musicians of the twentieth century: a voice raising to heaven, an astonishing technical control, the marriage with the amplified technical means as an amplification of possibilities, constant improvisation.
And let them not say that the voice alone is not enough to create music or (let alone!) His is old rubbish: because find me another one like him, today. Yet I went to Salento last summer, right near Cesarea, and among the young people no one knew who he was, to ask him point-blank... and Lord, why?
A living human show, Bene always kept you awake and took you back to understanding the human voice is really the first and last instrument; and that culture is its crutch.
The concept is made clear in the film "
Nostra Signora de' Turchi" where the viewer navigates an artistic world of poetry, sound, vaudeville and psychedelic deliriums. [In it the image of Carmelo crushed to the ground was so stunning that it got kindly re-used by Bowie in the "Lodger" cover photo: this thesis is mine and mine only; but I'd say it gets reinforced by the presence of a bandaged hand in both artists' photos. It almost looks like an
hommage. See pictures above.]
David Bowie, I Can’t Give Everything Away (2016)
“I know something is very wrong”...
(I Can’t Give Everything Away)
2016 started off badly also because of Bowie. He had decided to talk to us about certain death (his own) and, in the middle of getting out of this circle towards another return, he decided blatantly (I say) to push the button... hence the synchronisms between video, music and then - poof! - the disappearance.
The first time I saw the video of Blackstar there were two memorable images: Bowie's face (those edges of the mouth turned downwards!) that only later became clear: Death was involved. And then the “black book” that a very intense Bowie held is in his hand as if it were an extender: it was an anti-Gospel and an anti-Red booklet - with the pentagram (and not with the G key: that other one.)
David seemed serious like a skinny Dick Cheney and the video was evidently a political and religious commentary, spiced with more or less misleading symbols.
Starting with the “Ormen villa” whose explanation unleashed the imagination of the goliards (“the Aston Villa of Ormen”), economists (Ormen Lange is the main Norwegian off-shore oil field), hermetics (“snake”, Ormen in Norwegian; with the related myth of the Viking killed by a snake stuck in his throat), astrologers (the Serpens constellation: Bowie, in his astrological chart, had its brightest star, Unukalhai, in Jupiter), etc.
Plus various corollaries for art collectors (the £50M jewel-skulls of plagiarist Damien Hirst; that feline woman similar to Frida Kahlo), lovers of dark cartoons (the button eyes of “Coraline”), symbolists (the sun, a star, black), hagiographers of Bowie (the inevitable astronaut) and so on.
A preview of the album that was a real omen, an ominous omen from the prog moments to Toni Pagliuca in Rohypnol... Then that year everything-that-happened happened and I believe it if then, in December, I saw the “Fuck 2016” T-Shirt in a bookstore (The Strand) in New York.
But I am talking about the song with which the album ends. Where Bowie honestly admits “I can’t give it all away” and in that situation the phrase gave me shivers because it actually spoke of redemption. It was a “prodigal son(g)”, as the lyrics sing, a final gift after the sadistic misfortune sung in Blackstar. And the words - more than other times - revealed what was going on in Bowie’s brain.
It was also a false warning, because if (as is very evident) he chose the day of his death, in a sense he really gave “everything away”. The lyrics were a Stalinist self-criticism, but also a prayer and an act of love for his fans - like: please, don’t ask me for everything - sung with an incredible voice if you think about his conditions (I know from those who worked with him in the last year that his health was visible: he was very frail and tired). He could have stayed with his family, waiting to die, done other things but... no.
Musically, as a in a true DB song, the piece starts with a note-for-note quote (or is it a sample?) from “Low”, more precisely the initial harmonica of A New Career In A New Town: “the beginning of the end” of the album - so - starts with a veiled double meaning, ad usum of those who said that Bowie believed in reincarnation.
And then? NEVER in Bowie had we heard music played with such an improvisational, clearly North American, nerve. Not even with Lester Bowie, who with DB had been great. A delightful five-chord song on a mid tempo, an 8-bar verse in which four develop a short melody that the next four repeat (new notes on same rhythm) and then the twenty-bar chorus (or is the whole song based on an odd yet even single verse of 28 bars?) In it DB dedicates himself to reeling off the climax of the song. Of this album and of his life. It is that I cannot give evrything away - with those two very long “away” that give... away the final meaning of the artist. This twenty bars are his mantra, having Bowie - during this last artistic endevour - his mind dead set to prepare himself for - let's say - “a new career in a new town”.
Three sung 28-bar verses are followed up by two further improvised verses: first Donny McCaslin's tenor sax,
electric guitar with Ben Monder using a guitar timbre recalling Robert Fripp's (in Eno's St. Elmo's Fire) called 'Wimshurst'. With this fuzzy tone Monder performs fast nervous swerves, and dazzling flourishes enter, early, while the voice finishes the refrain, aided by an intelligent drum that, in counter-tempo, confuses the boundaries between the refrain and the “new beginning” of the verse. There is the blues (after all, the piece is a blues in F) but there is also a be-bop feeling that Fripp never possessed; because he was born in England.
On the sax Donny McCaslin blows a dream-like solo; in the sense that it is what Ziggy-sax could have dreamed of playing: a post-Breckerian quality delivered with such ease that. it transforms the fingering of David Sanborn of Young Americans into the son of a minor galaxy.
And after three verses and refrains with vocals, Ben Monder enters with a guitar using a timbre recalling what Fripp (in Eno's St. Elmo's Fire) had called 'Wimshurst'. A call that Monder uses to perform nervous swerves, dazzling flourishes: it enters, early, while the voice finishes the refrain, aided by an intelligent drum that, in counter-tempo, confuses the boundaries between the refrain and the “new beginning” of the verse. There is the blues (after all, the piece is a blues in F) but there is also a be-bop feeling that Fripp never possessed, because he was born in England.
(...)