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From The Desk Of The Sharp Things’ Perry Serpa: Antonino D’Ambrosio And The Concept Of Creative Response

Having actually included MAGNET as one of my favorite things (and I promise that’s not sucking up, I really love the publication), you can imagine how chuffed I was at the prospect of a guest editorship. Over the past, well, several years of the Sharp Things‘ existence, Eric Miller has been a friend and an advocate, even when no one else was, so I’m honored to be able to ramble on a bit about a bunch of shit that I dig, because I want everyone to know about it and, more significantly, because it makes me feel important. 😉 Over to you, me …

Antonino

My friend (the one with the coffee press) is a fellow Italian named Antonino D’Ambrosio. If you don’t know Antonino, you either should or you will. Antonino is not only a noteworthy filmmaker/producer (he produced Lewis Black’s No Free Lunch), he’s the author of a handful of some of the most important and powerful books this side of the millennia. The most heralded, perhaps is a book originally published in 2004, released in paperback in 2012 and slightly re-titled: Let Fury Have The Hour: Joe Strummer, Punk And The Movement That Shook The World. Initially using the activism of the punk movement, the Clash and Joe Strummer as its springboard, the book pays tribute, moreover, to the idea … or the ideal of creative response.

Antonino produced a documentary of the same name featuring folks like Billy Bragg, Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), Ian McKaye, Wayne Kramer, Tom Morello and many others (not just music), giving voice to the concept and the history of generating change in politics and society through art.

Coming of age around the late ’70s/early ’80s, I mean, starting to pay attention to music around that time, there was a dichotomy of aesthetic leanings in most of my friends. Most of us, especially the ones who actually played music, fought an inner conflict between the complicated structures of classic and prog rock and the three-chord fervor of punk rock, and later, hardcore. I realize it’s odd for a musician who’s primarily a keyboardist, but I chose the latter.

While the former addressed what little instrumental prowess I aspired to, it was punk that really resonated with me. At first it was the unbridled brashness of its sound alone, but anyone with a sense of social duty—anyone who was restless and unfulfilled and poor and put upon and pissed off could hear the strains of the Clash, the Jam, the Damned and, later, Minor Threat, Agnostic Front, Fugazi, the Descendants, etc., and feel something profound, and far more frightening than Dio or Gene Simmons because it was real shit issued forth by real voices. Those with a social conscience who are making music these days have to take their lessons from the aforementioned and get over the jaded fuckery that prompts them to soak and bury their own words and pander to a fractured industry. We don’t need to look for trouble, it’s all around us. We just need to point to it. Take your cues from Mr. D’Ambrosio whose instrument is The Pen, and be fucking dangerous. The world needs it. Again.

Video after the jump.