Franco Battiato

About ten years ago now, rummaging through my parents' records and cassettes, I remember my surprise at seeing how, amid dozens of 45s from the '60s, there popped up a 1981 cassette tape, "La voce del padrone", by Franco Battiato. Why on earth had my parents, stuck as they were on Nico Fidenco and the Dik Dik, bought it? The answer is simple, even if it took me a few years to figure it out: in the early '80s Battiato had become essential listening for anyone who tuned in a bit of radio or watched a bit of TV.

Double the surprise: how was it possible that an album of pop songs this refined, with such convoluted lyrics, managed to sell over a million copies (a first in the history of Italian recorded music)? The answer, in this case, is even simpler: what we have here are seven songs that are practically perfect and intelligent, and, no small thing, catchy and even danceable. In short, it had everything going for it (some more highbrow types might say "multiple levels of reading") to appeal to just about anyone.

In truth, "La voce del padrone" is the result of a path Battiato had been following since the early '70s: after seven electronic and experimental albums, he had turned towards pop in 1979 with "L'era del cinghiale bianco" and then, the following year, with "Patriots". Excellent as they are, these two albums don't yet have that compactness, simplicity and clarity that would later allow Battiato to break through for good.

Musically the album presents itself as "pop", but updated with splashes of what the music scene of the previous years had produced, from punk to electronics, from new wave all the way to the "classical-leaning" touches largely owed to his close collaboration with maestro Giusto Pio, who co-wrote the music alongside Battiato himself.

The lyrics are a brilliant pastiche of literature, music, advertising, politics, religion... and we can never quite know to what extent it's pure nonsense or clever juxtaposition. What's certain is that Battiato isn't afraid to mix high and low references: from Adorno's "Minima moralia" (which in "Bandiera bianca" becomes "Immoralia") to Alan Sorrenti's "Figli delle stelle", from "Cantami o diva" to Nicola di Bari's "Il mondo è grigio/ il mondo è blu".

The social criticism is merciless, and some lyrics, read today, lucidly and strikingly anticipate the so-called "riflusso" (retreat) years of the '80s, with their yuppie ambition, the crisis of ideologies and the chase after money and comfort ("We are children of the stars/ great-grandchildren of his majesty money"): after all, the waving of the white flag in the song of the same name (itself a quotation, from Arnaldo Fusinato's 1849 "Ode a Venezia") is nothing but a sign of the singer-songwriter's surrender to society, something akin to the metaphor of the return of the "white boar" from a couple of albums earlier. There's no shortage either of social critique, albeit veiled in irony ("...those demented programmes/ with electoral debates", "So many squalid figures crossing the country/ How wretched life is amid abuses of power"), or of jabs, again more sarcastic than heartfelt, aimed at music itself ("I prefer salad to Beethoven and Sinatra/ Raisins to Vivaldi, they give me more calories", "...and above all submerged by musical garbage", "I can't stand Russian choirs, fake-rock music, Italian new wave, English free jazz punk/ not even African music").

It’s thanks to this mix that Battiato climbed the charts while also winning over critics, even though the album, alongside its three most famous and still unforgettable tracks (“Bandiera bianca”, “Cuccurucucù” and “Cerco un centro di gravità permanente”), also features some more refined and less playful songs, such as “Gli uccelli”, an elegant and poetic description of flight, “Segnali di vita”, a meditation on time and space that anticipates much of the Battiato to come, and “Sentimento nuevo”, an atypical piece in his catalogue, essentially a hymn to physical love, albeit scattered with classical references.

Some might raise an eyebrow at seeing this record included among the milestones, and a clarification is indeed in order: “La voce del padrone” may hold no historical or social significance for the world at large, but it undeniably holds a great deal for the musical and social history of our country. Franco Battiato would never manage to replicate a success like this again: already the following album, “L’arca di Noè”, feels like a faded copy. Things would go better later on (for instance with “Caffè de la paix” and “L’imboscata”), though with more cerebral records, ones that would appeal more to critics than to the public.

“La voce del padrone” remains an almost unique case in Italian discography: an album that managed to please everyone. And even today, a single listen is enough to immediately understand why.

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31/07/2007