How can you not love a Renato Zero. Yes, it’s okay, certain inconsistencies, certain gaffes in the sacristy, but in the end you pay for it because you know it His 50-year career is half a century of life spent, fused with the lives of others: no one like him has known, and no one will ever be able to portray the double mask, the tragic and the comic of the ordinary days, of life’s misery noble in a desperate, impatient grimace. So that he can rightly excommunicate the pale clumsy supporters: “pink chemistry, I’m not angry with him, but with the one who sends him there without identity, without preparation.” Up there, in front of twelve million screens, the Ariston continue to tell where the clones are melting away. Who is better than him? Who with so many assumptions?
Unlike Rosa Chemical
Renato accepted the transgression: not in the world, but it’s a fact that he doesn’t owe anyone a shit, the Lou Reeds, the Bowie, the rest of glam went mad and he took a parallel but totally autonomous path: it wasn’t Alberigo Crocetta’s piper who invented it, if never, to unleash it, but the chutzpah, the ambition, the paraculaggine, to absorb the humility, it was all his stuff, period. One by one at the end, money, age, business logic, too much success always normalize, he too has cleaned himself of makeup, diamonds, but never quite: instinct is genetics, artistic history is personal, there is always a cobra sleeping in the madman who, dressed like a madman, said common sense things, and then dressed like a wise man, dressed like a wise man, also said demagogic things, but still occasionally disturbing. And those wedges weren’t random or even calculated, they were substantial, aimed at affirming a life, and a specific proposition, precise goals. When Loredana Bertè introduces him to Panatta “and this Martian descends from an impossible 500, all silver, tinfoil, I don’t know, to which I turn and say to Lori: “Who the hell did you bring me? Then we immediately became friends because it was impossible not to love him”. This is the uncensored version collected by the author. And this is the meaning of “Zero to Zero”another tour to sing about yourself.
Renato is Nietzschean, a bit beyond good and evil and with the philosopher he could say: why am I so neutral. Today we are born transgressive, so transgressive that they immediately start with corporations and the family clan, the army of image consultants, social media, the asshole: he really did everything by himself, instead of Gucci, he had his imagination and he imagined the stage clothes and then sewed them. Or he resorted to the Roman seamstress and closed the circle of art and life. Thus arose real, worrying, lush and pathetically provocative riots, always and brilliantly brilliant–that pink tuft of hoopoe on the onesie, encasing a skeleton overflowing with life cursing the sullen voice of a false conscience! Sermons and atonement, torn souls, zero and zero: it took him a lifetime, a career to free himself from a middle-class upbringing, never quite got over it, but we’d say it worked and he’s fine with that. With the inevitable guilt turned into material, Songs that can reflect normalitywho couldn’t be normal.
Zero, the only true Italian rock star
It was disturbing: with the voice, with the music, with the settings. Who didn’t grow up there, in the seventies, can’t understand it, but archive footage remains wild, devastating, For a really long time, Zero was the only true Italian rock star. Capable of dissolving into debauchery, disappearing on board after a concert, who knows what an unexpected event, intruding into the lives of those around them – these daffodils are all ponderous, even in affection, and then themselves to find in the rhetoric of a tavern a table of worshipers to pour wine. Or maybe in the peace of an abandoned church. Or to get the first found fan onto the street to negotiate a contract. Or entering Rai with the hen on a leash. Or to anger the impresario Aragozzini by propping his bony bootlegs on the sofa, “Cocco do you want me?”. Aragozzini kicked him out, but he would never stop regretting it.
He did everything alone, come and go every day, every record, every tour. We must consider that he came from papal Rome to a Vatican Italy, where every excess weighed twice as much, where Pasolini tried him on behalf of the PCI before killing him, where the clown, if he wanted it, the Doors closed: he never gave up, not even in tears. It’s true that success came early, at 26, with the explosion of Mi vendo, of Zerofobia: but he’d been through ten years of fucking chaos and no one could deny it, for that was truly the triumph of the will. And talent. After success, a ten-year crisis: he didn’t hide it, he sang it too, he reemerged differently, like someone who discovers that the audience is not this sea of drifting souls, but of faceless faces ready to deny you as soon as it suits them. He didn’t stop running to the rescuehere is one of those Don Quixotes who mounts his steed and sets off “in every direction”, but the conditions had changed: if you want me, you will be the one looking for me, following me.
You underestimated it for a long timebut he had the best of it, Ruggero Cini, the group of RCA session workers, Piero Pintucci, who tells me: “He was born there, he could only become what he was, but it took immense effort because he spared nothing”. When the mainstream accepted him, even exaggerated, smoothed him out as a poet, a collective conscience, a genius, he was already something else, already on the way to normalization, but he grasped everything like someone collecting his debts , and with a kind of disillusionment didn’t run, almost tenderly, but decisively: now you realize it, assholes. His best seasonwhich remains the first, say from 1975 to 1980, it was a cornucopia of creativity, of songs to memorize, of fits of impatience even on stage: no one could tell him what to do. Then it’s difficult to explain the difference between talent and the instinct that makes you unique: when Rino Gaetano, with whom there was a bit of rivalry at RCA, goes to Sanremo in 1978, he gives him a top hat: that’s how you spread them . You remember that he sang Gianna scappellando.
The big Zerofolli successes
It was already launched in ’79, carrying EroZero around which remains perhaps his best album, the most complete, epitome of him, gigantic ballads like Il Carrozzone (discarded by a Gabriella Ferri who didn’t feel suitable), La Tua Idea, probably the definitive piece, a wonderful production that enchanted Lucio Dalla : “What a beautiful record, Piero [Pintucci]you did!”; but he is not satisfied, in the backstage of a broadcast with Boncompagni he sees Dario Baldan Bembo, who is Baldan Bembo, he has played with Battisti for a long time, with many others, and he invests him as a Roman rock star: ah Pisè , quanno me fai ‘na canzone ?The other was amazed, but shortly afterwards he sent him Più Su’s scaffolding and he called him at two in the morning: “Fantastic, Pisè, a masterpiece. He takes it, what should I do?” say, throw it, embroider the words on it and here’s another one of those masterpieces that never fade. At this point it got really complicated to snub him. Then Baldan would text him a little something, like Friend sort of.
Not loved by the circle
The Barrikadero engagement activists disagreed on two chords: But they are light songs with simple harmonies, and where is the content? They meant: you’re not like us, you don’t raise your clenched fist on unity day. They pretended not to know that simplicity is an arrival, but when Mario Vicari, aka Caviri, known as Micio, packed them, Mi Vendo (according to legend, wrote them together in a hotel room in 20 minutes), Triangolo, Ancora Fuoco, Angeli , Baratto, the structural complexity was resolved with Verdi’s quote. And they didn’t want to understand that someone who had spoken before about pedophilia, disability, prison and asylum couldn’t really come and upset them. The artistic freedom bothered me, by the way, I say things but in my own way and I take care of the music and I take care of the clothes, the stage and I dance and act because I know how to do it all, in short I create magic, because a concert, record, any work without atmosphere is nothing. But what do we do in the songbook when each episode is a document of the collective conscience?
The decades have passed, the big tours, in an eternal recurrence of the same thing that is never quite like that, not all moves were right, not all magic was successful, the market has changed or rather, it has intertwined, today with twenty-five thousand copies is already a triumph, back then a million records was a minimum goal, albums as excuses for touring and clicks on social media, but not for him who got in touch in good time, old age helps him, the greatness of a noble father saves himand this rhetoric of the fruit seller, the grocer, the intercom repeats itself, it is exaggerated but it is forgiven because it is finally coherent, a red thread of life that has never been broken. It’s the lifeblood to keep going and Renato is back again, he doesn’t need money, he badly needs to be around people to settle scores that will never come back, a damn oddity: one more round, one more self-celebration, okay, but there’s always a mirror edge where you can find yourself and to get lost : for everyone. With the tenderness and brutality of a person who stands beyond the monument and knows: at the last flood of concerts in autumn, Fabrizio Moro was among the guests, who pretended to be the son of the village and appeared tough: it wasn’t him to commit and Renato blurted out that he had bullied him like a son: “I learned more in these two hours of rehearsals than in my entire career,” the boy commented, slightly annoyed.
The existential magic
There are many who are mistreated by this atypical rock star, who could pose more, but in doing so at least maintains a curious reticence, if not shyness; Be careful, like all suns, Zero can heat and burn, it can enlighten you and immediately after bring you into the frozen darkness of confrontation. But those who have accompanied him during these trying seasons cannot rest, they still dream of one last round, maybe because he is one of those who have an existential magic, it’s hard to stay close to him, you swallow a few bucks but you feel fine and you don’t understand why. Not quite. Maybe because He’s one of the few who can live with surprises every minute, even in pain and boredom. Even if he was angry: “The only one who didn’t answer me was the boy who doesn’t know what his job is yet.” He couldn’t even call him the perennial young man Cattelan, now overcooked, but who can fix him like that, with a rock star phrase that every now and then remembers it’s him? It wouldn’t hurt if Renato or Zero or both reminded the clones at this point what true transgression is, what it really means to break my balls: no suggestions, He knows exactly what to do and what to avoidShe knows where to aim and how to wake up that sleeping cobra, good cobra yes, but don’t piss him off.
Max Del Papa, February 22, 2023