Tony Effe explained with 1980s wrestling

When I was a kid, I loved American wrestling, because it was pure theatre passed off as truth. Everything was obviously exaggerated (the good, the bad, the flying kicks, the somersaults, the friendship and 0dium between the 'athletes'), and yet all fake. Except that in the eyes of the 1980s child there was no pretence: Hulk Hogan and André the Giant quarrelled over a specious trifle, insulted each other from a distance for months and sometimes through an intermediary, then finally came the actual wrestling match. And there the public success could only be assured, because everyone wanted to know how it was going to end between the good guy and the bad guy, the blond and the dark-haired, the buff and the plus-size.

At the end of last summer, we witnessed the dissing between Tony Effe and Fedez, the rhyming insults that the two rappers exchanged over backing tracks and samples without sparing women and children (a dissing 'sponsored' by Red Bull, it is worth remembering). Then, when we learned in early December that both artists would be competing at the next Sanremo festival, we said to ourselves: there goes the classic 1980s wrestling move! These two are Hulk Hogan and André the Giant, the quarrel is a perfect marketing operation to raise the hype for each other in view of their imminent participation in the Festival and, judging by the worried questions the specialised press is asking the artistic director Carlo Conti, the operation can be said to be more than successful. There's no denying it: really good thinking on the part of those who thought of it!

The thing that is not clear to us, however, is why politics is lending itself to these promotional dynamics. In Rome, the centre-left junta led by Roberto Gualtieri, a discreet classical guitarist, organises New Year's Eve and, since it evidently wants to show itself contemporary to its young voters, invites Tony Effe to sing, along with Mahmood and Mara Sattei. Clearing customs is a good thing, so much so that even the Pd secretary Elly Schlein at the Milan Pride danced Sex and Samba. Then at a certain point one realises that Tony Effe's lyrics are sexist and violent - exaggeratedly sexist and violent, because the basic rule in wrestling remains that one - and then enough: let's uninvite him from New Year's Eve in Rome. With at least two effects: the first is that even Mahmood and Mara Sattei, out of professional solidarity, felt they had to decline the invitation for the 31 December performance. The second is a further teaser to the participation in Sanremo of the former member of the Dark Polo Gang. Who in the meantime, at the Palaeur, has arranged his own private New Year's Eve. For a fee.

But it is well known that the Italian centre-left, from the fall of the Berlin Wall onwards, is obsessed with the race to be contemporary and, while running, ends up stumbling every now and then. Not like the right-wing government, which last May - moved by mos maiorum and disdain for the lyrics of rappers, trappers and the like - organised an event in Verona to start a permanent round table with the music industry on the topic Violent songs against women: what to do. With at least three paradoxes: the first was the presence as testimonial of Morgan, whose trial affairs for charity are not the subject of this article. The second is that most trappers, in the secrecy of the ballot box, vote right, but quite right. The third is that the governing right has ended up giving even more publicity to Tony Effe and his fellow wrestlers.

Some might object that this article is also giving them publicity. It fits, but the objection is accepted with a call to action: however much you who have read it up to this point believe yourselves absolved, you are still involved.