Last night yet another collective hallucination of retromania broke out and the web went crazy to get it straight away: photo of the complete CSIs posted on social media. It only means one thing: reunion tours… so millennials go crazy.
We won't have time to go mad before the jinxes will appear today ready to comment in unison against Ferretti the Melonian, Ferretti the Catholic, Ferretti the traitor. Boo! But precisely these umpteenth and obvious chants are the synthesis of how much Ferretti was not understood even by those who said they respected him. It was only used on t-shirts like a Po Valley Che Guevara, which is why it disappeared before ending up tattooed on the ass of some influencer. He had already taught us that mythologizing singers and politicizing them was a mistake when he sang “don't make me an idol I'll burn myself, if I become a megaphone I'll jam”. And he kept his promise, on the other hand he is loyal to Mishima.
Ah, I forgot the chants: there will be the conspiracy theorists, those who “announced the reunion on October 28th, the very anniversary of the March on Rome”. Ridiculous. Then there will be the choirs who will bring up the price of the tickets. Once this chaos has been removed, the desire to see them as soon as possible remains. Why?
CSI's sound is the cultural culmination of 90s Italy. They are the Adelphi of music, the Carmelo Bene of the rock stage, the different, the only ones able to look away from the stereotypes of Anglo-American rock when the world was drunk on it and to focus the radar on Asia, on Arabic sounds, on experimentation, Blixa Bargeld and church choirs. The only ones capable of talking about the end of an era and ending with it, of collapsing with the Berlin Wall, with the twentieth century, with the counterculture. The only ones capable of giving up right at the peak of what would have been success.
The idea they conveyed was that they did it first and foremost so as not to be subjugated; This is what they taught us, this is why we listened to them. We had an asshole boss at work, a family that wanted us to graduate in law, professors who wanted to shape us. We had marketing on us, fashion chasing us, companies that were already starting to profile us from afar and taught us to divide the world into good or bad, without nuances. We had this monster called progress (an anxious presenteeism) that came to flush us out even in dreams, forcing us to keep up with it even when we didn't feel like it. But, every now and then, we could find ourselves in a run-down festival between the Po Valley and Salento and sing: “I know the habits and I know the prices and I don't want to buy or be bought”. And we felt at home there. Still sounds very current, doesn't it?
On the other hand, it was written by someone who fills books with things like: “Those who don't aspire to a salary, don't want to live within a unionized employment contract, those who believe in free initiative and are willing to take on the uncertain fate see their world disappear, have lost the legitimacy of existence. Legality? Too many days become illegal, unable between rights imposed and duties pursued. There is a servile and paranoid legality, abusive from every context, in divergence deaf and obtuse with concrete living” (Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, Not in vainMondadori).
CSI are part of an era in which bands struggled to stay together, they didn't come out with reality shows or with a single, you couldn't find them featuring. They put down some unrepeatable records like Ko De Mondo, Gothic Line or Electrified Tabula Rasa and they went on tour. End. They were in their little house in the fields of Fellegara and they lasted a few weeks, then they couldn't stand each other, they each had to go their own way, but when they achieved the results they were peaks.
You know, today they say that reunions are fashionable, but I think the real reason is the need to plug a hole. The music industry has eaten everything up, there is no alternative scene anymore. I mean, from the 60s to the 2000s we had very few reunions, they almost didn't exist. Wonderful stuff was constantly coming out that replaced what was there before, no one wanted what was there before back, they all wanted to stay in the now.
I don't want to venture that there is a lack of good music because it's not true, but certainly in Italy there has never been anything as significant as CSI. So welcome to these gentlemen who have aged, who wear Blundstones, who are no longer what they once were and who betray expectations: they know the truth.
