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Enzo Jannacci

a cura diMassimo Macaluso
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  • friday, 8 september 2023

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.

ENZO JANNACCI VENGO ANCH’IO

ENZO JANNACCI VENGO ANCH’IO

Physician first, artist second, as he loved to point out, Enzo Jannacci accompanied the history of Italian pop music with overwhelming originality. Jannacci worked with Giorgio Gaber, Cochi e Renato, and showed the world the face of a growing, b...

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Enzo's Seven
El portava i scarp del tennis
(1964)

A sad and fierce brushstroke of the life of an outcast from society.

Ho visto un re
(1968)

Jannacci’s sarcasm mixed with Dario Fo’s in a irreverent fable. What else?

Vengo anch'io, no tu no
(1968)

I’m coming too (no, not you!) But why? (Why not!)

Messico e nuvole
(1970)

A little tale for free dreamers. Its soundtrack, by the way, was for the 1970 World Cup and remains in the memory of those who experienced it.

Vincenzina e la fabbrica
(1974)

One of the saddest songs written by Jannacci about the alienation of the factory. Heart-wrenching and beautiful.

Ci vuole orecchio
(1980)

Whoever doesn’t know how to keep time, please go.

Se me lo dicevi prima
(1989)

An intense and relentless vignette about the world of work. It seems as if it were written today.

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