“I was on the left side. Gaber much less”. These words from Sandro Luporini, painter of Metacosa and close collaborator of the Milanese singer-songwriter, who still lives in Viareggio, would be enough to put an end to the question: who really owns Giorgio Gaber? And he remembers to him as a petty bourgeois who was convinced that personal matters, the so-called private ones, were more important than politics.
Gaber came to this conclusion in the second half of the 1970s, in particular with a song, Quando è moda è moda, which marks the final break with the movements of the extreme left, their falsehood, hypocrisy, their conformism: he takes it out on everyone , spares no one and the committed public is speechless, they don't know how to react, some deny it, whoever has more courage applauds with gritted teeth in front of their own guilty conscience. With this album, Polli di Alleanza (1978), another Gaber was born, the definitive one, whose words continue to cause a certain embarrassment among his old companions: Pierluigi Bersani, Gino & Michele, Mario Capanna, Ivano Fossati, Gianni Morandi and many more He interviewed, together with the younger Fabio Fazio, Jovanotti and Claudio Bisio, the documentary film Io, noi e Gaber, directed by Riccardo Milani, which was broadcast on Rai 3 with excellent ratings on the evening of January 1st after the presentation in the last one Rome Film Festival.
Mr. G left the country, still too young, exactly 21 years ago and has not had time to understand the changes of a new world that was emerging, with a different language and a progressive impoverishment of ideologies. Right left, His song, which made us laugh so hard because it enumerated every possible cliché of the opposition theory, lost its effectiveness over time, as did his famous insults, which began with Quando è moda è moda and culminated in the disaffected monologue of Someone Era communists remain a cultural trace of the late 20th century or so. In short, you have to be of a certain age to really understand them.
But the attempt to claim Giorgio Gaber's affiliation is not over yet, because this very heretical, unclassifiable component that accompanied the indifferent character of Mario Monicelli's “Borghese piccolo piccolo”, a wonderful and very hard film, awakens even more wanting him to continue taking it as his own. Gaber was many things: rocker, sophisticated musician, singer-songwriter, television presenter and, above all, the inventor of Song Theater, a form of entertainment in which the actor stood alone on stage, between monologues, melodies and careful direction. For his part, he declared himself a leftist, but emphasized that no one had succeeded in angering him as much as the leftists. He remains a citizen of the north, fundamentally right-wing, annoyed by extremism. “Man is almost always better than his own ideology,” he wrote in one of his most beautiful works, “Portrait of a Fascist Uncle.” Io, noi e Gaber has the fault of being too long (with one serious flaw, namely the lack of straps, so it's your business if you don't recognize one) and less lyrical than Jannacci. I also come whose complementary vision would help to bring the Milan phenomenon into even better focus than what the Lombard city gave to the world of music and entertainment in Italy in the 1960s. At times it even doesn't seem to be the cup of tea for the director and writers, who may not have studied Gaber's writing enough to understand his persistent contradictory spirit. In the haste to make it a matter of ours (but more likely yours, because there are many Gaberians in Italy and they are not just those of Rai 3), we forgot to give the correct role to Ombretta Colli, who is a whole was life. Actress, singer, attentive to feminist issues, has been involved in politics with Forza Italia since 1994. A first-rate career tainted by an original sin called Berlusconi. Perhaps she did not want to speak in the film and leave the memory of her husband to the many who loved him, not just to the intelligence of the former third broadcaster: Gaber as a common inheritance, from everyone and no one, without dissolving the doubts. “It’s clear that people don’t mean it when they talk about left or right.”