Switters: Pol-Potistic in a good way

[Wu Ming 1's liner notes to the Switters album Current Trends in the Contemporary Italian Music Disaster , released by Improvvisatore Involontario in 2008]

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Koliko košta talianski giezz?

[...meaning "How much does Italian jazz cost?" in bogus Serbo-Croatian]

Who are these Switters that dare describe as a "disaster" the state of music in Italy, and especially the state of jazz and the likes? Jazz – or, as Italians pronounce it, jetz – has taken over, jetz is everywhere, they teach it in music schools, there are jetz festivals in all towns from January to December, and the Beautiful Country is churning out young sophisticated talents that are very successful in clubs and theaters all over the world. What "disaster" are these guys talking about? I answer on my own behalf, as I've renounced the mandate to speak on behalf of the band. They answer by playing their music, and I play my instrument too, and my instrument is language. "Disaster" because it couldn't be otherwise, because the whole country is a disaster and there can be no "happy island", not in the middle of an oily sea with a plundered sea-floor, where you can see filthy mutant mussel-beds and rotting seagulls floating by. Art reflects and re-elaborates and re-vomits the world around it, and if it doesn't, then it's just a fraud, it's "phishing" for gullible folks, a rip-off like those Argentine bonds were. Riots flare up everywhere, the stench of shit has reached the exosphere, and yet today's successful jetz acts sound like commercials for holiday villages. Jetz is light and smooth, it's soft and low-salt, an enervating, new-agey, consoling, lullaby-like plink-plunk-plink for weaklings, a gym session for politicians with the hobby of writing books, a launching ramp for carreers in bogus political parties. On the other hand, jetz is lifeless virtuosism, a freak-show of infant prodigies (i.e. infantile prodigies) or a convention of zombies in a geriatric ward, people who had nothing to say twenty years ago and now are completely void of anything except for their own arrogance. In any case: no vigor, no nerve, no hard dicks hitting like battering rams the doors of academia (or reality). A nation like ours, with its gorey crime news and its social fabric soaked in pus, deserves a music that's tense, uncomfortable and obscene, a music that implacably opposes clichés and cracks heads like those sticks in zen stories, the ones brandished by masters beating satori out of disciples. In plain words, a music that's educational and pol-potistic in a good way (!), a music that threatens at gun point those robot-like jetz geeks and forces them to wear dunce caps and shut the fuck up, and if they say one word they get kicks in the butt, haute école pedagogique! Art must practice the paradox, and imagine the world upside down. Again, who are these Switters? They're shitheads, they're killjoys and ball-busters. They're unblocking the sink and unclogging the tubes of Italian jazz. They're like those small bags you throw into the WC to clean the septic tank. They're people who settle their scores. They're what it takes, and I'm what it takes too, and there's no word in these notes that's not indispensabile. The journey begins, for fuck's sake. Put your hands on your balls, and off we go!

Links:

Switters on MySpace
Improvvisatore Involontario