Storia di un impiegato

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2026: #33 An album recommended by someone in the Sound & Vision server (37th Album)

Storia di un impiegato is a movie condensed to a 35-minute album. The story is how a 30-year-old man gets inspired by the 68 protests and wants to become a revolutionary.

Prior, I've heard La Buona Novella, and while there are some paralells to be drawn, like Fabrizios knack for telling a story thourgh his lyrics, with picturesque detail, and his almost deadpan voice, Storia di un impiegato is much more "free-sounding", partly due to La Buona Novella having such an intimate theme, while this one being so gung-ho and rebellious, is bound to be larger in sound. Especially with those synths in La bomba in testa, and the closer, which are sort of a opening and closing number to the story.

The whole story is also very sharp. What started as a poetic interpretation ended up being a sort of a manifesto towards acting on an anarchistic whim. Thankfully you have songs like Verranno a chiederti del nostro amore that show a humane side to a somewhat bitter album, and Nella mia ora di libertà, that sort of serves as a "moral of the day" to cap off the entire thing. Still, to me Il bombarolo is a favorite of mine. Something about the way Fabrizio closes each verse with "
son bombarolo!" gives vigor alongside the subdued oomph of the instrumental that makes you want to walk alongside the man, while simultaneously knowing it's the wrong thing.

This album is the playful, folksy telling of the “story of a white-collar worker”, conceptualizing the worldwide popular uprisings of 1968 in which militaries and other elites responded by ramping up their political oppression. This album is about some random white-collar worker who decides to go out and riot with others.