Squallor, the free music that understood everything before anyone else

For a long time, Squallor were considered merely an oddity. An irreverent, vulgar, irreverent group, formed almost as a joke and intended to entertain a particular audience. At the time, however, it wasn't yet clear what was truly behind those songs, those voices, those seemingly absurd lyrics.

Behind Squallor were some of the most important and extraordinary figures in Italian music: Alfredo Cerruti, Giancarlo Bigazzi, Daniele Pace, and Totò Savio. They were songwriters, musicians, arrangers, and producers capable of writing melodies, crafting hits, and perfectly understanding the mechanics of show business. Perhaps that's why they decided to do something completely different.

The Squallor were their safe haven. A space of absolute freedom, where they could play with words, dialect, double entendres, satire, and all the contradictions of Italian society. There was no requirement to be elegant, reassuring, or presentable. They didn't have to abide by the rules of radio, television, or morality. They could be vulgar, surreal, mean, or brilliant.

And it was precisely in this freedom that a surprisingly modern music was born.

Squallor wasn't just nonsense. It was theater, cabaret, social satire, and observation of reality. Within those songs were grotesque characters, men full of vices, petty social climbers, inconsistent moralists, unfaithful husbands, the desperate, the ignorant, and the crafty. An imperfect humanity, told without filters and without the need to make it better than it was.

Their language could be extreme, but it often hit the mark with impressive precision. Their lyrics addressed sex, power, money, hypocrisy, television, religion, family, and society. They did so through paradox and provocation, but beneath the comic surface lay a profound knowledge of Italy and Italians.

Today, many of those songs still seem incredibly relevant. The media have changed, the trends have changed, the way we communicate has changed, but the same vices remain: the desire to gain popularity, opportunism, duplicity, the pursuit of consensus, and that quintessentially Italian ability to be publicly outraged and then behave completely differently in private.

Perhaps time has allowed us to better understand the value of Squallor. They weren't a curious accident in the history of Italian music. They were artists endowed with a rare creative freedom, capable of transforming entertainment into a form of social analysis.

While many tried to appear serious, proper, and respectable, the Squallor chose to say what others couldn't or wouldn't say. They did it by laughing, exaggerating, smearing their words, and pushing them to the limit.

But it was precisely beyond that limit that they were able to see reality more clearly.

Squallor have become a benchmark because they've demonstrated that even the most irreverent music can contain intelligence, writing, and memory. And that, sometimes, to truly tell the story of a country, you have to have the courage to stop pretending.