Hamilton Santhià, “Under Track. A contemporary indie story”
Books are a place, that’s for sure.
They have walls, but few borders, skies without ceilings and a variable number of inhabitants: sometimes it is necessary to furnish them and dress the characters, crossing the descriptions with one’s own experience, the memories and the feelings they arouse. They are places to stay for a few hours, days and, when it comes to thick bricks, even months.
Naturally, it happens that we get out of it to deal with other things and this certainly depends on the strength (sometimes violence) of the external calls, but also a lot on how comfortable or stimulating it is to stay inside: this is how the stories they contain become a refuge.
It also happens that some are difficult to abandon, so much have they marked our thoughts, so much have they sunk deep into old wounds or have fluttered around new joys.
The case of the book of Hamilton Santhià However, it is different and I well understand the difficulty of the author himself and the publishing house in defining him: wise? memoir? manual?
And what is he talking about? Music? History? World? People?
All.
This is why while reading you feel dragged back in time, delivered to nostalgia and at the same time to a strange inexplicable curiosity for the future.
The book starts from some reflections on the very concept of “indie” in the musical field and does so by giving great prominence (as is natural) to the now almost mythical figure of Kurt Cobain. I was ready and very interested in a musical tale of those years, in a dive into the recent past enriched by a splendid soundtrack, from that shot in 1994 to the London Olympics in 2012.
And this is where Santhià revolutionized everything.
There’s a lot of music, sure. But there is everything else: cinema (Wes Anderson stands on a pedestal), literature, society and history. There is the courage to tell and interpret what happened practically everywhere during the years in which we were distracted building our lives, and it does so with a refined ability to find a common thread among all these elements, perhaps several intertwined threads between them and look at them from above, from below, from the sides, to discover a complete figure that ultimately includes us too.
An embroidery woven in reverse, because behind those songs, those rock stars, those groups that are a bit legend and a bit meteors, there are the knots, the tears, the holes of broken dreams, of disappointments, of the daily efforts of a world that has went through crises, scandals, clashes.
It is a book full of ideas and stimuli for new readings, new listenings: we recognize, between the lines of each page and in the very entertaining and rich notes, a brilliant preparation, a darting mind, the search for a language and a way to tell which brings it closer to an adventure novel, full of characters and their destinies.
Santhià has done an incredible job, literary, detailed and documented with wit and passion, which expands the space, makes it fertile and welcoming.
That’s how it’s written.
If this book were a place, it would be where I would like to live.
Home for my thoughts.
