At least three lives passed through Gianni Morandi’s eighty years. Like: did you know, for example, that the first time people started saying he was “finished” he wasn’t even thirty? It was the beginning of the seventies, the season of singer-songwriters and political commitment, and his face as a chronic good boy, daughter of a world of Great songcovers, beat generation and first of all cultural provincialism, to be looked at as the Renaissance people looked at the Middle Ages, was considered out of time, commercial, false. They forgot that in 1966 he had sung There was a boy who, like me, loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stonesan anti-militarist anthem that later became an evergreen, a gesture of courage which was no small feat: at the time, due to the diktats of a moralistic and “Christianized” country to the core, Rai could not say that that damned anti-Vietnam song was at the top in the charts, and on broadcast it skipped the charts.

If the sixty – and Celentano, and Yellow flagand the Beatles, and rock’n’roll – they had invented young people, Morandi, the future, eternal boy, had however soon stopped being one. To make the hostility clear: years later, De Gregori will sue him in the name, let’s say, of outrage, for having sung his Goodnight Little Flower omitting a verse; only much later would he apologize to him, admitting that he didn’t know “what had gotten into him”.

There was a boy, like us

With a shoemaker father and a housewife mother, Morandi is the son of a other world: he was born in what was then still the Republic of Salò, he grew up among the child prodigies of the various Emilian Unity Festivals, somehow he invented a profession that was about to be born. Fine brain. Today we would say pop star, in the United States perhaps they would have already called him a crooner, here he becomes a “pop music singer”. As well as an immediate constant and reassuring presence in the lives of Italians, mainly through television, which first acts as a vehicle for the various events I was going at a hundred miles an hour, Have your mother send you for milk, On my knees to you And Girl’s eyesthen offers him a lifeboat – but really, a small one – with little-important dramas, when his popularity is plummeting. He also studies double bass, goes through tough years, but never loses his way. His friend Lucio Dalla, one of the songwriters mentioned above, takes care of grabbing him by the hair, but we are already at the end of the eighties. He relaunches it with the duo disc Dalla/Morandiwhere you indulge in the urge to sing, among other things, What will remain of meperhaps his best piece, written by Franco Battiato, in which for the first time he talks about a red and partisan past (of his parents) that he had never flaunted, but which gives a completely different reading to his music. We’re getting there. Note here too: in Invitation to travelthe 2021 Battiato tribute concert, Morandi will be by far the best, with a tear-inducing version of What will remain of me.

Because Morandi was first of all an interpreter, someone who, to go well, had other people’s songs sewn onto him, more often he had to take them himself, always outside the creative process. So what? And so it is a talent that is difficult to measure and legitimize: all the greats have had something with which to distinguish themselves in the imagination, but not him; ok, the clean voice, but in short, she never had, or looked for, Mina’s aura, in fact she has more or less always made the same songs. How did he manage to resist all these years?

A piece of Italian history

Yes, because, precisely, Morandi there is always been. With Banana and raspberry here we are in 1992, Open all doors – composed by Jovanotti, platinum record, third place at the trappers’ Sanremo – is actually from 2022. In the midst of Ariston, again, as competitor and host, the endless TV programmes, the tours in theaters and sports halls, even the social media usage a decade ahead of today’s ubiquitous and revered masters. His career also includes the eighty years of our country, its transformations of customs, but also its constant resemblance to itself. And inside, of course, Morandi: never a word out of place, never one over the top, never a moment in which one thought it was better of someone else in something, if not in remainwhile around them they disappear or grow old.

The eternal boy, yes: but you never say how many obstacles that smile had to overcome, to still be here; how much, above all, his approach to the profession is indebted to the working-class, humble, Emilian attitude that his parents passed on to him. The key was this. And the simplicity: take a song easysing it Well. You said nothing. Because in the end Morandi, the one that no one can speak badly of, is like bread and salami: the easiest recipe in the world, which can be complicated in a hundred ways, the enemy of intellectuals, but national-popular and which never goes out of fashion. Of course, he deserves the credit for having used quality ingredients.