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A few years ago, Simpsons fans had the opportunity to hold the protagonist of one of the most iconic scenes of the long-lived animated sitcom in their hands. The statue put on the market faithfully reproduced Ned Flanders in that tight ski suit that made him feel as if he were naked. At the sight of “Stupid sexy Flanders”, Homer falls disastrously down the snowy slope: the mere thought of his neighbor dressed up like that horrified him.
To understand the return of Lo Stato Sociale we need to start from here, from that ambiguous feeling we feel about what will come, what will become of us. Mark Fisher has to do with it, who explained to us how we are no longer capable of imagining the future, and Reynolds has to do with his retromania. But in Stupido Sexy Futuro we find five people who come to terms with the passing of time and the luck of finding each other after a long period in which everyone has dedicated himself to his own life, contributing to what could be defined as an identity crisis.Crushed , therefore, between the attempt to remember what it was and the awareness that, after all, music does not age, but whoever makes it inevitably does, the quintet has returned to writing many songs. Because, to be honest, there are many things to say in this historical period.
An angry and ironic record
Thus, Stupido Sexy Futuro is an angry, ironic record; a jar of gravy spilled on the ground in which we can see The Universal’s Blur (Senza di noi), This Is Not A Love Song’s Public Image Ltd. (I said it in the verse of Ops), All’s Lcd Soundsystem My Friends (since the title of All my friends). But there is a triptych of songs that represents the backbone of the disc. Fottuti per semper is a look at what has been: the first songs, Sanremo, expectations. “We wanted to fill the arenas,” sings Lodo Guenzi, and Vasco Brondi adds: “We were young, naive, angry.” Vita di m3rda 4ever is a caustic picture of the daily apathy that dominates us, regulated by capitalism and primary needs which, as the band recounts, make us indifferent to unsustainability, to climate change: «It doesn’t even ruin our day ‘is stuff”. And then there is Filastrocca per un disco, a piece inspired by the poems of Gianni Rodari. “A large part of the text is a pretext”, explains the group: “It is the last verses that enclose its meaning”. In an attempt to describe the passage, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti is quoted, who sang in Linea Gotica: «one does not fear one’s time, it is a problem of space». Probably, this Stupido Sexy Futuro is also a question of space: that of a rehearsal room where you can go back to your roots and find yourself. That of a concert, which remains the moment where everything seems to go in the right place, even if in the front rows there is a generational change that pushes the peers of Lo Stato Sociale to the bottom. “You are not afraid of your time”, and that is why you need to dot the famous i’s, show yourself for what you are: with a few more ailments, a few less revolutionary instances. But with the same sincerity of the past.