Found between the pages of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (ok, ok I admit it, I had not read it yet, just filled that gap during the Milan-London-Baltimore flights getting to the first show of the tour. My heart grieves, my mouth is full of ash. Your Wiredness, O Wise One, forgive me! And forgive me, you all true believers in the Holy Word of Online Marketing, whose mantle I am not worth kissing etc. etc.)
Through punk rock, we saw a premium on fresh voices, new sounds, vigor, and an anti-establishment sentiment that could have only come from outside the system. It was inspirational to see people out there with no more talent than you, having fun, being admired, doing something novel. To put it in economic terms, punk rock lowered the barriers of entry to creation.
The notion of barriers to entry is used here in a very broad sense, but the meaning is very clear and, to me, very right. Since 1997 – three years before the decline in the recorded music market even started – I have been trying to teach underground musicians to be entrepreneurial. I have quoted extensively Sebastiano Brusco and his refreshing portraits of Emilian entrepreneurs of the 60s, often poorly schooled but endowed with a deep awareness – intuitive, not just formal – of mechanic technology, who would pencil a few numbers on the formica tables of a bar in Sassuolo or Carpi and then just go out, borrow a little money and start a company. This feels like punk to me. Punk somehow implies an entrepreneurial attitude in the sense that “everyone can do that”. Of course this implies taking some risks and go out of one’s role: the farmer, son of farmers, reinvents himself as a machine tools designer and manufacturer, the Arts School kid dyes his hair purple and starts a band. This attitude not only implies, but actually is the refusal to accept the conventional notion of what a machine tool manufacturer or a musician should be.
In this sense I like to put a little punk rock in Fiamma Fumana -and also in my other business as an economist. FF never stood in line waiting for the approval of the small Italian folk music community (part of which frowns upon the idea of trad music played to techno beats): if we can’t convince the circuit of Italian folk-world festivals the way we do in America we just move on, we look for new opportunities, like collaborating with Jovanotti and gaining lots of commercial radio airplay, or making a feature film with producer Davide Ferrario and the Choir of Mondine di Novi. Of course, this does not make me very popular in some circles, where we are seen as blasphemous people that sold out the Music in the name of commercial success (which commercial success, btw?)
As an economist, too, I feel a wee bit the punk rocker. I mix creativity with regional development issues, marketing people with the clergy of high-brow avantgarde culture, hi-tech with everything. I lead workgroups by low-intensity, always-on Msn or Skype chat sessions. I have convinced the (fairly conservative, thank you very much) Italian Department of economic development to run a project - Visioni urbane - through a blog and to seek involvement from the local blogosphere (more on that here). I fight the good fight to keep all decision processes wide open and fully transparent, taking all the risks that come with this. Anyone can click on “Add a comment” and speak out on what we are doing with taxpayer’s money… and I and my people might not like what they have to say. But that will be an incentive to do our very best, and anyway it’s a chance worth taking. We’ve got a wave to catch, folks, a big one which is changing everything. I’m not sure what it will leave behind, but I am ready to bet that the future will carry a healthy dose of punk attitude.
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