by Aldo Grasso
Battiato’s songs are first and foremost a game and deserve to be interpreted as such
A year after the death of Franco Battiato, Rai Documentari presented “The courage to be Franco” (Rai1). Written and directed by Angelo Bozzolini and produced by Aut Aut Production, the documentary traces the life and career of one of pop music’s most versatile, inquisitive and happily postmodern writers. In reality, “The courage to be Franco” is more than a singing biography, a kind of beatification of the Sicilian singer, with Alessandro Preziosi (the narrator and not only) in the guise of the postulator. Nobody ignores his great merits: he was an experimenter and very fine interpreter of all the smallest fashion breaks, he oxymorally cultivated pop hermeticism and “the tantric Shaivism of the Dionysian style”, the natural taste for the artificial and esoteric and the spirituality of books with pastel colored bindings. It takes courage to be frank and admit that the Sicilian artist should be taken less seriously. Battiato’s songs are first and foremost a game and deserve to be interpreted as such, for they represent a yet-to-be-deciphered strand of Italian culture: sophisticated kitsch, not to be confused with camp.
“We are clearly talking about Battiato – wrote Antonio Iannizzotto – of the period of greatest splendor, ranging from” The Era of the White Boar “(1979) to” Like a Camel in a Gutter “(1991), which opened with the the thoughtful “Povera patria” destined to become the official soundtrack of the anti-mafia demonstrations of the 1990s, and in a way monumentalizing Battiato as an intellectual – which was also a way of normalizing him.Soon the partnership with Manlio Sgalambro, the philosopher with the raspy voice and apocalyptic prose who, when he went on stage with Battiato, it was not clear who was the ventriloquist and who was the puppet, except for the insiders Angelo Bozzolini limited himself to that to question the usual suspects.
May 18, 2022 (Change May 18, 2022 | 19:01)
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