Fabrizio De André

The poetry set to music by Fabrizio De André has captivated at least three generations of listeners, decisively influencing the majority of Italian artists from the mid-Sixties to the present day, without ever losing its allure or relevance. "Creuza De Mä," released in 1984, is one of the most important albums of the decade, and its impact and greatness have still not been fully grasped by the Italian and international music scene.

"Creuza De Mä," sung entirely in Genoese dialect, was born from a project of artistic collaboration with Mauro Pagani, the composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist whom De André had already come to know during his time with Pfm.

De André began thinking about "Creuza De Mä" after more than twenty years of top-level activity, having already broadened the scope of his sources far beyond what was usual for an Italian singer-songwriter: from the Apocryphal Gospels for "La Buona Novella," and from Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" for "Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo," he had moved on to the hermetic flavors of "Volume 8," made in collaboration with Francesco De Gregori, and to the Mediterranean hues of "L'indiano," inspired by his kidnapping ordeal. "Creuza De Mä" is thus the culmination of an artistic journey of enormous depth, a fine distillation of thirty years of reflection, humor, poetry and compositional exploration. It is a work of staggering sonic and dialectal richness, in effect a cornerstone of what was then the nascent world music genre, arriving four years ahead of Peter Gabriel's "Passion" and two years ahead of Paul Simon's "Graceland." The album's sound, in fact, moves decisively away both from the singer-songwriter simplicity of his early work—heavily influenced by Leonard Cohen and Georges Brassens in its adoption of the "ballad" form for guitar and voice—and from the technical sophistication inherited from prog-rock that had characterized his mid-Seventies albums. "Creuza De Mä" makes use of a multitude of instruments drawn from Mediterranean, North African, Balkan and Middle Eastern folk traditions. Already at the composition stage, the use of these "ethnic" instruments decisively shaped the writing of the material.

The decision to write the lyrics in De André's mother tongue, Genoese, came very late in the album's gestation, shortly before the final recordings. Up until that point the project called for lyrics written in an invented language, or as De André put it, a kind of "macaronic Arabic." Beyond giving us a sense of the spirit of invention and experimentation that accompanied the album's gestation, this detail offers an important clue for identifying the symbolism behind the choice of a language "other" than that of the potential audience. The choice responds first and foremost to considerations of pure linguistics: Genoese is a language better suited than Italian to poetry set to music, because it is extremely rich in truncated words. Moreover, Italian is a language that is "lofty" by birth, in which the "low" style is always doomed to the grotesque and the farcical; dialect, by contrast, retains its popular character without automatically becoming comic, which makes it the most suitable language for speaking about the life of the "common folk" so dear to De André. Add to this the further consideration that Genoese is a language extremely rich in Arabic phonemes and words, which suited the musical atmosphere of the record perfectly. The Genoese of "Creuza De Mä" is much more than the particular dialect of a particular area of Italy: on a symbolic level, it is rather a universal popular language, and in particular the language of travel and poverty, that language of marginalization and revolt that De André had been pursuing since the very beginning of his career. In this light, it is far from meaningless to hear, in "Sidun," a Palestinian mother singing in Genoese — as if leaning out from a harbor pier — addressing her son, crushed beneath an Israeli tank.

In the same way, the Genoa of "Creuza De Mä" takes on multiple symbolic meanings, and while retaining its own geographical and cultural peculiarity (with delightful glimpses drawn from the history and customs of the ancient Republic of Genoa), it becomes an extraordinarily rich semantic hub: Genoa is every place, every home and every destination — a true "navel of the world." The particular stories that unfold there take on universal meaning: the prostitutes of "A Dumenega" walk the streets of every city, and behind every corner of every town there is a "pittima."

The title track opens with the sounds of the chaotic market of Genoa, soon joined by a solo on the gaida, a kind of bagpipe used by shepherds in Thrace. As soon as the vocal line unfolds over the simple melody, any lingering doubt the listener might have about De André's linguistic choices is dispelled. In "his" Genoese dialect, De André's voice becomes even richer and more expressive than it had ever been before, and the obstacles the dialect poses to immediate understanding are, in fact, a source of endless sonic suggestion. Whoever doesn't know the language of "Creuza De Ma" is, paradoxically, in a better position to fully grasp the richness of the work than someone who can grasp the meaning of the words "on the fly". The gap between meaning and sound means that the listener's attention focuses first and foremost on the sound itself, allowing for a listening experience unburdened by the psychological expectations tied to narrative. Which of us, listening to Italian singer-songwriter music, hasn't at some point reached the end of a song in the disorienting position of having paid scant attention to the music because we were focused on the "story" it was telling? It might seem an overly formalist approach, but De André's linguistic choices on "Creuza De Mä" clearly reflect an intention to place the phonetic aspect of the sung language, and its sonic fusion with the accompaniment, on the same level as the narrative of events. A small step in this direction had already been taken by Bob Dylan, who abandoned polemical, "engaged" songwriting to focus on his own personal, hermetic symbolism, as in "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands", thereby achieving a deeper interweaving of music and words. On the other hand, once the album has been appreciated purely on its "sonic" terms, it's extremely interesting to turn to Italian translations of the lyrics, only to discover that on the narrative front too, De André reaches remarkable peaks of inspiration here, unspooling one after another some of his greatest poetic masterpieces.

"Creuza De Mä" is about sailors returning home after fishing, and it is charged with the resignation of one who is forced — like sailors, like Ulysses — into an endless journey, a journey as sentence, in which stops ashore are a source of frustration and occasions for getting drunk ("And in the boat of wine we shall sail upon the rocks / emigrants of laughter with nails in our eyes / until the morning grows enough to be gathered / brother of carnations and of girls / master of the rope rotten with water and salt that binds us and carries us along a mule track of sea"). The song can evoke the smells and aromas of Ligurian cuisine ("fried little fish / white wine of Portofino / lamb's brains in the same wine / lasagne to be cut with four sauces / sweet-and-sour hare pie under tiles") or conjure flashes of a distant, mysterious Orient ("Shadows of faces, faces of sailors / where do you come from, where are you going? / from a place where the moon shows herself naked / and the night has pointed its knife at our throats / and God has stayed behind to mount the donkey / the Devil is in heaven and has built his nest there").

"Jamin-a" is perhaps the most beautiful ode to a prostitute ever written: an ideal continuation of the stories told in "Via Del Campo" and "Bocca Di Rosa," but here the narrative loses all polemical or iconographic weight. Thanks to his adoption of Genoese, De André fears no censorship, and tackles the song with explicit, raw, irreverent, irresistible sensuality: Jamin-a's body is the protagonist, and with her "lengua nfeugà" — fiery tongue — and the "knot of her legs," she chains the listener in a whirlwind of erotic and sonic suggestion. The song's harmonic structure is entrusted to the oud and the bouzouki, stringed instruments of Arabic and Greek tradition.

"Sidun" has already been discussed: the Palestinian mother's funeral lament is at once one of the peaks of De André's poetic expression and one of the greatest musical achievements in the Genoese songwriter's career. "Sinan Capudan Pascià" is the (true) story of a Genoese sailor who was captured by the Turks and became a pasha after saving the sultan's ship from shipwreck. The refrain, an adaptation of a sailors' song widespread in the Tyrrhenian area, is a small nonsense verse with pretensions to symbolist metaphysics ("in the middle of the sea there's a pufferfish, that when it sees pretty girls comes up to the surface; at the bottom of the sea there's a round fish that when it sees ugly ones goes back down to the bottom"), and further on the same refrain becomes an apologia for "making it on your own" in a register of low, surreal comedy ("Bad luck is a dick that circles around the nearest ass... a vulture that flies around the fool's ass"). There's also room for a tirade from the newly minted pasha on the universal obsession with money ("And tell whoever calls me a turncoat that to all riches, to silver and gold, Sinàn has granted the right to gleam in the sun, cursing Muhammad in place of the Lord").

The next two tracks bring the narrative and atmosphere back to ancient Genoa, giving full voice to marginalized figures. The "pittima," the debt collector hired to chase private debts on behalf of others, laments his precarious and dangerous condition, proudly claiming the "respectability" of his wretched trade. In "A Dumenega," Genoese prostitutes, confined to the ghetto all week, out on Sunday leave, stroll through the city like grand ladies, mocked by the hypocritical crowd of regular patrons of the city's brothels. It's also worth remembering that in the old days the proceeds from the brothels were collected by the city of Genoa, which used them to cover almost entirely the costs of maintaining the port.

The final track, "Da me riva," is an "ode to parting," the melancholy thoughts of the sailor setting off once again, bidding farewell to his companion, left behind on the shore, now just a distant silhouette, backlit.

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29/10/2006