Lucio Battisti

“By the time we got to ‘Cosa succederà alla ragazza,’ even Luzzatto Fegiz had started speaking well of us.” So said Pasquale Panella, sardonic as ever, in one of his rare interviews, on the reasons that led to “Hegel,” the last album released under the name Lucio Battisti — widely considered the most extreme and cerebral of the so-called “white albums,” and consequently the least accessible record in the career of the greatest Italian pop star of all time.

The chart performance certainly confirmed the dismay of an audience increasingly worn down by the experimental twists and turns of the former king of Italian love songs: the album stayed on the charts for a mere eight weeks.

Yet it stands as the most logical culmination of the Battisti-Panella partnership that began in 1986 (or, if we look closely, as early as 1983 with Adriano Pappalardo's "Oh! Era ora", entirely written by the duo). The series opened with “Don Giovanni,” the most accessible of the Lazio-born singer-songwriter's last five albums, close to the most elegant sophisti-pop, yet already poised to dismantle the conventions of verse-chorus-hook pop songwriting. Every two years came “L'apparenza” and “La sposa occidentale,” two labyrinthine synth-pop records in which Battisti began experimenting with the writing method that would shape him from then on — diametrically opposed to the one he'd used in his days with Mogol: Panella would send him his poems first, and, according to sources close to Lucio, “if he couldn't make sense of them, he'd start setting them to music.” The process reached full maturity with “Cosa succederà alla ragazza,” the most martial, techno-driven album ever released by a singer-songwriter who came up in the '60s.

“Hegel” marked the point of no return, and indeed there would be no further studio return for Lucio: the dance impulses of the previous record are, if anything, pushed to extremes — not so much in terms of sheer beat intensity, which is actually somewhat muted, but through an anti-melodic tension and rhythmic layering that is “crooked” and complex like never before (it's no coincidence that the album was produced and almost entirely played by Andy Duncan, a drummer who had previously worked with Simple Minds, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys, among others). In this sense, the record can be defined as the most representative of a phase in which the artist tried violently to contradict his own past — a past built on heartfelt melodies that, while never trite, were undeniably immediate and crystalline. So pure, in fact, that they helped shape the very ideal of Italian pop songwriting.

“The record has no emotion” is indeed the favorite line among “Hegel” detractors. But is it actually true? Isn't the contemporary alienation so vividly portrayed here an emotion in itself? Isn't the frenzy of dance, embodied in 1994 by electronic dance music, an emotion too — and an overwhelming one at that? Moreover, if one resists the temptation to stop at a few cursory listens — a fatal mistake with songs as intricately detailed as those of “white Battisti” — it becomes impossible not to notice how most of the tracks feature catchy vocal melodies built on chord progressions typical of the Italian songwriting tradition. The unfathomable, singular allure of these musical explorations, which here reaches its peak, lies precisely in their eternal elusiveness: they constantly echo something familiar, something tangible, yet never allow themselves to be fully grasped.

For once, it's no exaggeration to say Battisti “was ahead of his time”: just consider how the intro of “La bellezza riunita” closely recalls Depeche Mode's “Barrel of a Gun” from “Ultra” (1997), or how “La voce del viso” — an insistent, boyish falsetto laid over one of the most extreme eurodance backing tracks — anticipates, a full year ahead, the Sparks of “Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins” (and, in this writer's opinion, even manages to pull it off more effectively).

In general, the curly-haired icon always had a peculiar gift for picking up on the most innovative Anglo-American trends and absorbing them into his own authorial voice, without distorting either the aesthetics of the imported sounds or his own — but in the years of his withdrawal from public life, this skill grew ever sharper. You can spot rhythmic breaks reminiscent of Underworld's progressive house in “Almeno l'inizio” (also notable for its lovely eurodance organ arrangement), dub and trip-hop in the title track, and the Madchester sound of Happy Mondays in “La moda del respiro.” “Stanze come questa” even dares to hybridize the then-nascent jungle genre (again, explored here three years ahead of even Bowie) with acoustic folk guitars! Try finding another Italian record of the era so richly contaminated by such different styles and worlds (and it's not as if there were that many elsewhere either). Within our borders, only Battiato's “Gommalacca” pushed things as far, though he did so while staying almost always closer to the classic song form.

And then, of course, there are Panella's lyrics. Labyrinths that seem virtually unapproachable for anyone without at least a couple of humanities degrees — or perhaps only truly approachable for Pasquale Panella himself, or maybe not even for him... Or maybe they are?

What's certain is that the Roman poet's lyrics represent one of the most perverse jabs ever aimed at Italian pop, and not only because of their learned, elitist nature, but above all because they're built on top of songs released under the name Lucio Battisti.

Without trying to dissect their meanings in detail — after all, we're talking about hermetic poetry, inherently open to multiple, non-exhaustive interpretations — it's nonetheless fascinating to observe the various levels on which these lyrics operate and how they interact with the music beneath them. In “Hegel,” the connecting thread, the concept (to borrow a term dear to rock historiography, one Panella himself would probably despise) is the life and work of the famous German philosopher. And yet one gets the impression it would be a mistake to analyze these lyrics by dwelling meticulously on Hegel's writings or his university years in Tübingen, because the references actually come across more as devices — decoys that, like aesthetics itself, “settle on the ground” (as a line from “Estetica” puts it). In other words: the lyrics exploit philosophical and dialectical imagery as a pretext, dressing up songs that are actually about entirely different — sometimes even simple — subjects.

A track like the title track, for instance, is nothing more than a love song — a love certainly marked by conflicts so intense that gossips have suggested it was about the relationship between Battisti and Grazia Letizia Veronese. Leaving the gossip aside, though, what strikes most is the sheer power of the historical and literary analogies and metaphors used to address the subject (“Which of us was the governed and which the governor?/ These are matters of History/ who was the province and who the empire/ isn't the point/ the point was the fire”; “It was the collision/ the first epic clash/ because it wasn't written but ridden bareback/ and each demanded the other's land”).

“Estetica” also seems to be about love, this time in an idyllic guise, not even sparing images refined enough to conceal likely sexual double meanings (“And we lovingly clashed”... “over the bird and over proportion”). Playful touches like this, too, are part of Panella's trademark. In any case, there are many memorable images painted throughout these lyrics: “And whoever fears fashion is immersed in it regardless/ and steeped in it like a thistle with a severed stem,” from “La moda nel respiro”; “What would you have done to feel a little more alone/ and to sweetly sail/ on your back or on your chest/ and turn a somersault that would flip the sky,” from “Almeno l'inizio”; “Every gesture of yours is understood/ within everything that gesture/ knows of you,” from “La bellezza riunita”; “And so the voice of the face resorts to miracles/ not a laugh, a cry/ not a grimace, dense with oracles,” from “La voce del viso.” Hard to match, even for the most inspired pens in our tradition, these verses are but a taste of a poetics that, by 1994, had reached full maturity.

To complicate matters further, and turn a first listen into something of a Herculean task, there's the near-total disconnect between phrasing and meter, so that some lines sound cut in half, torn from their original meaning, and end up sounding, on first listen, as if they belong to the following phrase. One example among many, to clarify: at the 1:29 mark of “Stanze come questa,” the line “è qui quel lavorio/ dell'erba simile al pensiero” connects to the following “che contiene nel vello/ quell'orma del tuo corpo/ ed uno stelo sconvolto,” yet the latter is sung as though it were the incipit of a new melodic phrase. These are techniques designed to override the habits typical of songs of any era; the ambition is enormous, and only rigorous study and iron-clad attention to what's being shaped can keep the whole thing from derailing into a pompous, superficial exercise.

And that is exactly what happens in “Hegel,” as in the whole of Battisti's final phase: the pop song loses its historical footholds and its most established conventions, arriving at a concept that was unheard of at the time, yet today finds an unwitting echo in the most recent strands of alternative R&B, where loosely metered melodic cells chase each other frantically over narcotic, obsessive beats.

In short, one can say many things about “white Battisti,” but not that the provocations of his mature period were mere nonsensical oddities; on the contrary, they represent one of the most elaborate and visionary bodies of work Italian music has ever managed to conceive.

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09/12/2018