by the editorial staff
The Foo Fighters’ song Learn to fly is based on the enthusiasm, it’s a hymn about the courage to put oneself to the test, the will to learn; it’s a love song for a person who is the person, as if the feeling was the access key to our own interior growth; it’s a love song for the life, a shouted prayer. It’s a jump in the emptiness, stamp the ground to restate the desire of knowing ourselves to get then a place in the world, a listened to voice.
A voice; that voice we hear over a coral wave of musical instruments when the cursor clicks on play and Learn to fly starts in Rockin’1000 version. A voice female and male at the same time, modulated on hundreds of percussion rhythm, supported by the guitars and bass electric flow, got all together at the same time, on a field in Cesena town (Italy), for what I would define as a mission. For over a year, a group of youngsters has ceaselessly worked to organize this event: thousand, between singers and musicians, met in Cesena last 26th of July to play Learn to fly and ask the Foo Fighters to come to play in Italy during their next tour. Meanwhile, as the months for the organization went rapidly by, the American band fixed a date in Italy, Bologna; anyway the Rockin’1000 hasn’t abandoned its initiative: the first foundation stones had been placed, the construction deserved to go on, taking slowly the shape of an event with no precedent, something unique from both musical and human sides, on national or international scale.
That 26th of July, under a very hot sun, the drums boundless line up was the most suggestive thing, that catches pleasantly the eye in the video shooting uploaded by the Rockin’1000 team, especially in the drone’s views. The video, directed by Anita Rivaroli and Alberto Viavattene, drifts into the details of those satisfied and conscious musicians’ faces, alternating them to views that reveal the event dimension; never before so many instruments and amplifiers had been tuned and synchronized in unison to play the same song. At 4:10 minutes, Fabio Zaffagnini, the project creator and coordinator, makes a speech full of pride and emotion. “Italy is a Country where dreams cannot easily come true, but it’s a land of passion and creativity, so what we’ve done here is just a huge miracle”, he says. A new version of the Italian miracle, made of renewed models of communications and networks, of a kind of sharing that rewrites the society and social concepts.
The video put on youtube, reached 20 million visualizations in a week; the event’s had worldwide resonance, the thousands in small Cesena have found spaces on the pages of newspapers all over the globe; David Grohl, the Foo Fighters front man answered with a grateful video, which has been soon absorbed and given back from internet, in the form of hashtag: #chebellissimo.
Against the ”brain drain” rhetoric and the idea of hopeless and no chances for the future generation, Rockin’1000 is the quintessence of these new Years ’10, where everyone’s resource multiplies through the encounters and generates increasing resources in team work.
Now we have to wait to see the Foo Fighters in the delightful Romagna. Then Rockin’1000 will be Rockin’1005.
For more info: www.rockin1000.com
