Yu Guerra! - True Hatreddocument available in:English Español Italiano 
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WM1: Met Yu Guerra one February afternoon at the post office on via Mazzini, Bologna. Yu is a veteran of the city’s rock’n’roll scene. A scene that once, not so many years ago, produced bands in abundance. Bands that had spaces and opportunities to play and experiment while today… Today Bologna is drowning in its hopeless decadence, a decadence that unctuously embraces all sectors. The bands that do exist bust their asses and keep going with cantankerous dignity, because they believe in it. Like Yu’s band, which is called Yu Guerra! The ‘added value’ of being a group all lies in that exclamation mark, which expands the name of the single and turns it into a shout. [I recognise this completely: in the pseudonym ‘Wu Ming 1’, ‘1’ is me, ‘Wu Ming’ is the exclamation mark.] Yu Guerra!, sons of proletarian Bolognese punk-rock, the ones who have their pictures taken on the bridge on via Matteotti, a real iconographic tradition. Leaning on the parapet, levitating on a tangle of tracks and sleepers, they have the feel of working class heroes. ‘We come from the area behind the station,’ sang Stab. Yu talks to me about old partisans stabbed by the lacking public memory of the “rogue country” we live in, survivors of the Battle of Porta Lame that he met after reading 54 and Asce di guerra, then he talks about Manituana. When he read the novel, Yu had a song ready. Song and book merged. When Yu sings it, he tells me, he borrows Joseph Brant’s voice. I go home, I visit the band’s website: they give links to us. They name us. I download the song: it’s a re-evaluation of hatred, against all cowardly reconciliation. It is the claim of the need of a certain hatred, not blind, but thought right through. We aren’t a long way from the praise of a certain sadness made by EELST on their last album, against fake, forced forms of happiness, the kinds of commodity happiness that make people stupid. I phone Ricky [Wu Ming 5] and he explains: ‘In interviews, when he’s asked to name a band that’s influenced him, Yu replies “Wu Ming". For him we’re musicians.’ Why not? We’ve never drawn boundaries between the different ways of telling stories. On the phone we decide: True Hatred will go on manituana.com True hatred WM5: There’s a fundamental core of rock’n’roll that’s always present, always noticeable. It passes from the grooves of the records to the words of the fans, it’s a sensation in the bottom of the belly. It isn’t the hot valves of the amps (even though that’s the technical heart of the thing) or the lifestyle of the stars, which is basically superfluous. Anyone dazzled by style misses the essence. Rock’n’roll always speaks the same language, it always says the same thing: even in the middle of shit we’ll do it, baby. A little paradise within reach exists, if you know how to fight to have it. I like this in Yu’s music. It’s nothing but this, but that’s quite a lot. YG: Depth of night. I go home the survivor of a raid by the Financial Police after one of our live gigs. I turn on the computer, slip from my shirt pocket with which I played a fine the cops gave me and, accessing my email, and I find the brilliant news that the band of writers Wu Ming declare that they approach True Hatred. I wrote that piece long before I read Manituana. It came out of me like a river in spate. The praise of hatred as a noble form of survival in hostile times. I read Manituana, I’m thunderstruck, it contains the development of all the concepts that I can just hint at in the song. Since then when I sing, I’m the Mohawk crushing the settler’s skull with his tomahawk. - From Yu Guerra! (musicians’ collective) to Wu Ming (band of writers) Dedicated to Joseph Brant and Philip Lacroix
03 March 2008 |
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