Marc Ribot – Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist (Akashic Books, 2021)

If you don’t wanna to use Amazon to grab copies of books and records for your own – ideological and practical – reasons, it is harsh to find out what you’re looking for at the right time. In Milano, the town most near to the place where I’m currently living, you have to pay extra fees for import books and records once you’re ordering them. Things goes that way. So I put my hands on a copy of this book by Marc Ribot only after it was translated, unexpectedly, in my own native language one month ago.

Divided in four parts, and with only the first one devoted to music, the other three being dedicated to small novels in a style that reminded me the one that belonged to Bukowski – “bloody funny”, as Elvis Costello said – in a way, I was just reading a small novel about a Jewish girl that lived the first part of her life as a hippie and the other part as an attempt to become, after the harshness of life hit her, acceptable to her social milieu again before going to cinema to see the last movie by Arnaud Desplechin, the one titled Brother and Sister featuring two great actors such as Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard.

Curiously enough, the story in the movie was at the opposite of the story narrated by Marc Ribot, that of a liberation from their social milieu, but in order to do so the main characters, both Jew interestingly enough, needed to get outside of the society that gave life to them. One writing more about himself, the other leaving France for Africa. What both the book and the movie have in common is the fact that they try to cope with what remains of our cultural heritage and roots as part of the Western civilization. Nothing less, nothing more.

One can think, superficially, that the best part of Unstrung is in its first part: the hommage to Henry Grimes, the narration of the life of guitarist Frantz Casseus, some notes on people like Robert Quine, Derek Bailey and Hal Willner, some liner notes for Ribot albums or the text for Ceramic Dog’s rap The Activist. Nothing more wrong than that. The entire book, even the most funny parts, is interesting because it is an attempt by a navigated musician to fight body against body with his culture and even his own life.

Obviously the book can seem at a first reading as not pretentius or even superficial – even if there’s a line by James Chance quoted by the guitarist himself here, “I only live on the surface – I don’t think people is very pretty inside”, that can explain the aesthetic of Ribot style as a writer. Not that Ribot is a “nihilist”, he is in fact more as someone very gifted with (sometimes black) humour, but this tinge is more a testimony of an ancient culture that survived the Holocaust and still ask itself how to believe in a God whatever, talking about a people or a culture and not necessarily about a single human being.

Interesting as it is reading this book, as a critic I’ll bring back that note about musicians laughing hard at the attempts by people like me to understand and making comprehensible to the masses – two different types of translations at the place of a single one, that means two different possible types of mistake – the work of a musician, complex as it can be. You can take as an example the beautiful passages of the book where Ribot try to explain the difficulties in playing non-Western music like the one created by Susana Baca and others, thansk to cultural and existential – I mean, experiential – difficulties.

In the end, Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist is a book worth reading, full of notes about the music we all love and full of fantasy and fantastic stories to pass some good time with. Like those discussions with a friend who traveled the world around a table and a beer, full of strange facts but also full of new, interesting things to learn and to store in order to enrich your own personal luggage. Curiously enough, the Italian version of the book, the one I own, was published by the same publishing house that issued the last edition of Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog.