Enzo Jannacci

There is a name in the realm of Italian singer-songwriters that has always been somewhat overlooked and not valued and loved as it deserved for its greatness, even though recently Roberto Vecchioni, someone who knows about music, called him “the only great musical genius we have had.” This might seem excessive – and surely Enzo, wherever he is, is probably having a good laugh – when we think of Fabrizio De André, Lucio Dalla, and Franco Battiato, just to mention a few names at random. But there is something true in the hyperbole. Certainly, his all-encompassing artistry was never properly recognized. Starting with record labels, they always made his life difficult. Enzo Jannacci was a troublesome singer-songwriter because he didn’t just sing about feelings and various sorrows, dear to “those of the ’60s/’70s,” to paraphrase one of his old songs, but more than others, he was a complete artist in every sense of the word, and he didn’t make concessions to anyone, not even, first and foremost, to politics and politicians, but not only them. Not even to the causes of social malaise, to the unhealthy behaviors and habits of the society of his times, which perhaps was better than the one we are living in now. Often corrosive, even stinging, but also suffused with a sweet bitterness and always on the side of the last, the rejected by society, with a hand always extended to the humble and the misfits. That’s why he wasn’t very liked by those who do business. Someone who shoots inconvenient truths in your face and doesn’t offer a glimmer of hope or redemption, someone who doesn’t have a ready-made happy ending in his pocket, becomes inconvenient and doesn’t sell many records. He expressed this irrevocable urgency of empathy with extreme versatility. Starting with choosing the profession of a doctor, which he never abandoned, and then becoming an actor and a cabaret artist, often using allegory to deliver fierce political and social satire, working closely with the greatest figures of that magical period, starting with Gaber and passing through Dario Fo, to reach all the major exponents of Milanese cabaret in those years. Vecchioni is right… if not the greatest, certainly a genius sorely missed in these difficult times.