The first time I listened to Simone Cristicchi’s song brought to Sanremo, I cried. I also cried the second and third. And I saw several people cry around me, both during the Ariston tests and in the press room. The emotion effect then went to diminish, together with the power of the song, perhaps destined to hit the first impact than to remain and sediment in the long tail of the Festival playlist.

“When you are small” it touches universal ropes, those of the disease – which is democratic and does not make discounts or favors – but also those of the parent -child relationship, which climbed a certain age are certainly more discovered. Alzheimer – who then is never explicitly mentioned in the song, but is the first association that comes to be done, this yes – is a pretext. Strong as an affirmation, especially in the light of the controversy on which you still have inflamed, after three weeks, but art often does this, uses symbols – in music, as in cinema, also themes – which everyone interprets as they want and applies to his present based on his own experience, takes from the work he needs. For this reason, the same song has always have different meanings for those who listen to it.

Cristicchi did his job

I, when Cristicchi sang, cried thinking about my father’s tumor and how we faced him last year in the family. Obviously he never lost his memory – as the text says – but for the first time he showed himself “small” in my eyes, and the only memory was enough to excite and tear my soul in those scarce three minutes. A story mine, in the midst of many others, all certainly different. Then there are also those who have not cried, those who have not appreciated, certainly even those who have felt anger because those stanzas, however, only reminded them how much the disease sucks. And maybe he preferred to forget, but the truth – unfortunately – is that it is impossible to do it. For this reason Cristicchi did his job – and well, I add – because he excited, made to reflect, he moved consciences, he went deep, addressing a theme unfortunately always current. And that’s what an artist should do, not necessarily through autobiographical stories.

The sterile controversy

The fact that Cristicchi has “romanticized” a terrible disease like Alzheimer’s, leaving out the most painful and ferocious aspects that mainly touch family members, as Selvaggia Lucarelli pointed out – the first and unique to raise the matter – is an opinion. Lecita, but an opinion. The media shades that was unleashed immediately afterwards, however, a sterile controversy on which it is also useless to return. To understand, however: Tony Effe in his texts is free to speak as he wants about drugs, sex and women (between a “bitch” and the other) – otherwise we shout at censorship – and has every right to act to ‘Gangstar de’ Noantri ‘(except cleaning himself on the Ariston stage) because “eh, the trap is so”, but Cristicchi cannot sing how beautiful he is taking care of a mother in his most fragile moment, To “return all that love” that he gave him, otherwise he lacks compared to someone, or worse still exploits the emotion? What a strange artistic balance.

Ideological fury

The other great knot to dissolve is the fury – which has taken on more and more ideological traits – towards Simone Cristicchi, accused of ambiguity in the story of the disease. Or rather, in the story of his mother’s illness made in the various interviews during and after Sanremo. The singer -songwriter clearly said that the mother does not suffer from Alzheimer’s only to finished festival, explaining that she had referred to the song to a brain aneurysm that had hit her years earlier. Therefore, always for Selvaggia Lucarelli – and all the outrageds of the case of the case to which the pappa ready to make controversy continues to serve – to Cristicchi would have made it comfortable to let the public believe that the song spoke of Alzheimer’s, or in any case play on this misunderstanding and on the mysterious health conditions of the mother, to ride the emotional wave until they place himself in the Top 5.

Now, admitted and not granted that Simone Cristicchi has cleverly pulled the water to his mill, leveraging the sensitivity of the theme, what changes for a song capable of arousing so much to such a large audience? Should we really make him a trial of the intentions before choring his hands possibly? It is so necessary to make fleas to mother’s health, as if it were only this to give credibility to a nice message? The journalist Grazia Sambruna, commenting on the story to “the good vault”, even spoke of “willful misconduct”. So should I feel deceived by Cristicchi, who honestly moved me, and not by Fedez who recited the part of the beaten dog in Sanremo, showing off one of his great classics like likes, the depression, trying (and succeeding also) to archive the latest gossip theater set up by his friend Corona? Evidently to him playing on empathy is granted, outside the aims of a certain “circol” – to stay on the subject – which instead prefers to rage on who, like Cristicchi, has committed the Madorna ‘Error’ to take a position in thorny debates and today very dangerous for an artist, such as gestation for others. Let alone if in the past it has even brought the sinkholes to the theater. Then not even to say that Ironia shines, and it also seems rather self -financed. An artist, think. Unforgivable. But it is the duplicism of a certain ideology: there are those who are free to write any song, and those who first have to bring a medical report.