“Sitting under a tree to meditate / I saw myself dancing motionless with time / like a blade of grass / bowing to the May breeze / or its bad weather.” We need the opening words of “Haiku”, an ancient hymn to silence and pearl of his “santautorale” repertoire, to say goodbye to Franco Battiato in the breeze of a bitter May morning, even if the news of his death at the age of 76 gave Franco Spadaro, director of «La civilization Cattolica», quoting, inevitably, the lines of «La cura»: «And you will recover from all diseases / because you are a special being / and I, I will take care of you. Hello, Franco Battiato ».
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He has not recovered from the rogue disease – he had said to himself alzhheimer, he had said everything, in truth – that had taken him away from the song, from the word, from his Sicily Franco Battiato da Riposto (then Ionia), in the province of Catania, where he was born on 23 March 1945. And his absence opens wounds that have never healed, shakes the dying world of Italian historical songwriting. Today his songs will resound throughout Italy, it will be said, and it was true, that for many of us he was and will remain a “permanent center of gravity” and that no j’accuse shook Berlusconi’s Italy as much as his piercing cry of ” Poor homeland ”, like that disconsolate look on a spring that was late in coming.
We will remember him as a two-faced Janus of our popular culture – get up, who is passing the popular song, the one that marks a nation in the body, not that of the academy coffins and the happy few always happy and increasingly few – both experimental and pop , alternative and mainstream, author and performer (what he was when he sang the lieds, “Amore che come, amore che vai”, “Ruby tuesday”, “La chanson de vieux amants” and, above all, “Era de Maggio”). In the bombing of soulless crocodiles, we will talk about how it allowed us to keep together the search for the spirit (“An ocean of silence”) with that of earthly love, rather carnal (“Between sex and chastity”, “The cure”) , the most refined and suspended pop («And I come to look for you») with the most full-bodied and impactful rock («Shock in my town»).
One, none and a hundred thousand like the fellow countryman Pirandello, Battiato challenged “The void” and “The days of monotony”, alien to the song routine right from the titles, records and songs. Convinced, like the philosophers of Magna Graecia to which he was proud to belong, that “Nothing is as it seems”, he recovered the Sicilian philosophy in “The interminable path” like the futurist explosion in “Strange days”. The lyrics of his songs, not only those signed by Manlio Sgalambro, are as rich in quotes / allusions / puns as much as a book by Eco, they move between very light nursery rhymes (“Cuccurucucu”, “The era of the white boar”), lightness coexists with depth, epidermal pleasure with the cultured awareness of a former avant-garde converted to popular communication, subtle but inexorable melodies
with sudden electric upsets and / or signs of the near future digital future.
He, who sang sitting in the lotus position on an ancient Persian carpet, provoked the world he came from (the avant-gardes) with the nursery rhyme dedicated to “The era of the white boar” and, from that point, also conquered the primacy of hit parade and festivalbars teased the new planet he had landed on with non-songs like “Nietzsche’s Aching Soul”, electronic symphonies and guitar walls reminiscent of Glenn Branca and early Sonic Youth. In recent times he had felt more of an (elite) director than a mass musician but it was still wonderful to get lost in his spell.
Hi Franco, hi, and thanks for everything.
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