They say that those of my generation, the millennials, have grown up with a certain predisposition to nostalgia. And whoever says so is right. In fact, you can find us at the cinema at the various anniversaries of Back to the Futureon YouTube to watch clips of Friends (rest in peace Matthew Perry), at Max Pezzali's concerts to sing The Friend Rule.
Our verbs often begin with the suffix ri-, that of re-member, re-see, re-hear. We are thirty years old but we look at our past with the nostalgia of the veteran. To the future, forced to try to make space among the Peter Pan syndromes, we prefer the memory of what marked our youth. Maybe it's because we stopped thinking about the future early, when with the 2008 crisis they told us that that imaginative future where everything was possible would no longer exist. Maybe it's because then came eco-anxiety, global political instability, the specter of fascism and nationalism. Or simply Gen Z telling us that we had it all wrong. “But what fault is it of ours?”, sang Shel Shapiro. The fault for this hyper-nostalgia is not ours, let's be serious, it's Max Pezzali's. It's all his fault.
Poor Max, you will say. But think about it; it was he who told, framed, idealized the Italian 90s (those of our youth, or those of adolescence or post-adolescence for the generation immediately preceding us) like no one else, who brought into focus the unlucky provincial reality and, consequently, of us unlucky people who until that moment had no one capable of talking about us, like us, with our language. The deca and the Zündapp, the raudi and the miccette, the unlucky and the one who shows off. A provincial jargon common to most, capable of resonating precisely because this is Italy, a large province made of fixed summers at the Bagno Sirena in Gatteo Mare (am I projecting my childhood too much?), of pharmacies that numerically outnumber the discos (now abandoned), of new mats and Arbre Magique while waiting for an unattainable love, perhaps with the local Queen of Celebrity. “Who invented photographs / Who convinced me to bring mine here / And then we know, paranoia kicks in”. Now tell me again that it’s not all his fault.
Max Pezzali's songs are sung with your hand on your heart pic.twitter.com/rKmtQmx1EU
— ⧗ Tonia△⃒⃘ ✪ 🦢⚡️🥞🎍 (@BHXG90bis) June 30, 2024
But nostalgia, as we know, is a false, fallacious feeling. The 90s weren't so special, the province wasn't so special, nor were we or our past. However, Max, with a disarming simplicity, and a uncoolness unique, he managed to make us believe it by enclosing the images and slogans of that historical moment in a series of songs that soon became absolute and evergreen. Years, The harsh law of the goal, In the night. It's still, You're a myth, They killed Spider-Man, How come. How many people who grew up in Italy between the 90s and 2000s can put their hand on their heart and swear that they absolutely do not know the chorus, or at least some passages, of songs like With a decade, Route to God's house or You're a myth? Ok, I imagine that certain aristocratic salons and certain very partisan social centers had banned any possible listening to what were the 883 of Pezzali and Repetto, but for all the others there is no excuse that holds. Max Pezzali is Italian culture, he is the pasta with sauce of the pop of the beautiful country.
There are 150 thousand people who in three days (from Sunday to Tuesday) have populated the San Siro stadium in Milan for the former leader of 883 (compared to two years ago only with the band, without the parade of historical collaborators like Paola & Chiara or Repetto). 150 thousand nostalgics, including me, who at 35 years old, escaped from the Piedmont province 18 years ago, still remember all the words by heart without having listened to these songs again over the years (with the exception of the outtake Leave her alonea cringe masterpiece from the early 883s, stuff for the picky eater). Over the past two decades I've tried every way to emancipate myself, locking myself in some auditorium to listen to the most experimental music on the planet, immersing myself in hours and hours of ambient music baths, studying and researching to become the music journalist I am today. But in the end, when Pezzali started singing one of his hits in his robotic way at San Siro, that lost provincial boy who lives inside me reappeared, reminding me that he will forever have his home in me. Pezzali settled right there, in the center of us, forming a brotherly friendship with that part of our youth. At the very least he could have given us a tenner for the rent.
Some studies on ayahuasca claim that the Amazonian medicine has the ability to reveal the transgenerational memories that our body inherits from those who came before us, in our family. In the same way, Max Pezzali's music seems to have been part of us long before we listened to it for the first time, as if passed down in the air of our provinces. It is the cigarette vending machine in the center of town, the stop at the service station, the Sunday trip out of town. It is our geography and our socio-cultural context. It is the 90th minute of our lives. Our history, pop and popular, sung in the simplest, clearest, most direct way imaginable. Even in the midst of all our personal superstructures, that eternal boy without hair still manages to reach us as strong as yesterday for his honesty, a characteristic now in disuse in the music industry.
Maybe I have to change my mind. Max is not to blame, but rather has many merits. Like that of always believing in himself by remaining faithful to his own path, keeping a smile, staying up even when a stadium tour was a mirage and a whole series of cultural and social areas denigrated him or, like me, were almost ashamed of having made it their own. In his own way – and perhaps it is no coincidence that Max has a fascination for the discos of the 90s – his path almost reminds me of Gigi D'Agostino, so much so that I imagine that a large part of the audience present at San Siro could very well have been at the big Gigi Dag event a few weeks ago in Milan. In Max, as in Gigi, it was pure artistic honesty (and an off-scale ability to write or compose memorable songs) that prevailed. Far beyond the objective quality (often subject to review and judgment), Pezzali reached much deeper inside most of us.
Ok, Max, so you win. Max forever.