The news is simple and sudden, to be honest a bit chilling: Lucio Dalla died, struck down by a heart attack, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday. He died in Montreux, an anomalous piece of green Switzerland sung even by Deep Purple and overlooking Lake Geneva, a strange elephant cemetery (Rilke and Nabokov also died here) which hosts 25 souls, various music festivals and a statue of Freddy Mercury in the main square.
For someone who sang about wanting to die in Piazza Grande, in the midst of ownerless cats, maybe it wasn't exactly what he had imagined, but you can't always choose.
This is the news. Then comes everything else, and it's hard not to be rhetorical, because sadness becomes contagious when a person who has moved so many passes away, when one of the founding fathers of the (decadent) homeland of songwriting dies. A father perhaps a little sterile, without children if not lopsided, halfway, because too rare, too unique and inimitable, as certain slogans say.
You start thinking until the last time you saw him, on that stage in Sanremo, while he conducted the orchestra wrapped up in a midnight blue suit that made him look like an aged child, someone who borrowed a dress not his from his parents and now wallows in it embarrassed. He was there to accompany Carone, perhaps another failed child, born obliquely, in the performance of Nanì, which, to be honest, wasn't even a good song, and in a melancholic way it recalled "Desperato erotico stomp". Dalla also sang in the refrain, her black voice slightly cleared, but still girlish, somehow ageless.
Thinking about it, what hurts you is that you didn't know it was the last time.
Then comes all the rest, the celebration and the social networks invaded by mourning and links, his continuous cycle images on national television, the usual condolence rush. Right or wrong, in front of Lucio Dalla, every celebration becomes superfluous, every idea of the perpetuation of memory pleonasticto. It's just not needed, there's no need.
"I will not die completely," said Horace. Dalla died for himself, for the people he had beside him and who had loved him, but his artistic body is safe, immortal, because it is a beautiful part of our popular culture. A lover will still look at his woman imagining a little girl as beautiful as a star who is his miniature, someone will still write a message to a distant friend thinking of writing it louder, to cancel the distance, and a group of friends will still sing a desperate erotic stomp, yelling out of time optimistic and leftist whores. We will use his words again to name our thoughts.
Today the lucky ones will take out a vinyl or an old half-burned cassette that they haven't listened to for years, the others will resort to an mp3 or a video on Youtube, put on headphones or turn up the volume, and his voice will still be there, the same as always.
Turn off the light and so be it. May the earth be light on him, for the rest.
