Franco Battiato, nicknamed “Maestro” thanks to his singular ability to move from the pop genre to engaged music, was a great innovator in the Italian light music scene and left us a legacy more unique than rare.
Franco Battiato: the beginning of the career and the reversal
Franco Battiato was born in Ionia, Sicily, on 23 March 1945. Soon his passion for music took space in his life: in fact, he was only 19 years old when he moved to Milan where he signed the very first contracts with some record companies.
In an early stage of his career as a musician he made compromises, devoting himself to a music that could match the tastes of the time, made of light and uncommitted songs.
Immediately, however, a frustration arises in the artist due to the fact that he does not recognize himself in this activity: therefore, disappointed by the recording world of the time, he decides to dissolve the contracts signed.
For Battiato a period of deep crisis begins and, even if at the time he still does not know, it will be this dark moment to give him the courage to follow his musical vocation.
Thus, he approached the philosophy and musical experimentation that would accompany him throughout the seventies.
The result of his experimentation is made of a great use of electronics so that, Franco Battiato, will be the first in Italy to use the synthesizer in rock music.
raicultura
After the experimentation, Franco Battiato and his musical legacy
When he finally finds himself, Battiato produces albums of unquestionable value, such as Fetus, Pollution and Sulle Corde by Aries.
His ability to bring to the attention of the public something completely new will make him popular even outside the national borders, between appreciation and criticism.
After the decade that sees him engaged in a music with essential and philosophical atmospheres, Franco Battiato back again and back to approach the pop genre but in a totally different way from the first time.
The incredible mix that he manages to create between thick quotes, light typological music and busy words, makes each piece of Battiato unique and immediately recognizable, as well as the fact that it brings a huge success to the songwriter also in terms of sales.
The meaning of the most famous songs by Franco Battiato
A Master, a free man in life and in music: Franco Battiato led his career as his private life, devoting himself only to what aroused real interest in him without ever giving in to external influences.
For this reason, he has often been described as a man with an unpleasant character, sometimes even misogynistic (a characteristic that he readily denied).
Yet, in his free life, despite having received many attacks, he gave rise to a series of songs that have left their mark on the Italian and international music scene.
Songs with a deep meaning and often difficult to grasp, especially in a first approach with the artist, but that can be listened to endlessly.
Here, then, is a brief explanation of some of the artist’s most appreciated pieces.
ilpost
And I come looking for you
A song with soft, warm and delicate notes that gives off a divine character, evident especially from the choirs that accompany the end of the song and that remember a prayer.
The text emphasizes the intrinsic need of human beings to have a comparison with each other, even in a condition of hermit, in which however we would not stop needing our fellow men to know ourselves more deeply.
Poor country
A criticism in the form of song that has in its sights institutions and governments that, despite belonging to the nineties, is still very current.
In this piece Franco Battiato is humanized, moving away for a moment from the atmosphere to which he had accustomed his listeners and interested in the most current events of the moment, those that concerned his country.
About this song he will declare, during an interview, that he wrote it because he was involved in the Italian dynamics of the time: “Every night watching the news is a pain, unless you remain indifferent to this passage, I know, from Riccardo Muti to the dead killed”.
Already at the time he expressed strong criticism of the management of the Italian government, the individualistic and selfish society that was taking shape but nourished, at the time, still a hope for a better tomorrow.
In fact, the song ends with this verse: “You will see that it will change, you can hope […] that there will be no more talk of dictatorships, if we still have a bit to live”.
psicologiacontemporanea
The Cure
A love song among the most beautiful ever written and sung, focused on a love anything but selfish, indeed: on the most altruistic feeling that can belong to man, care.
The words of this passage do not hope for a passionate love or a love reciprocated, what they desire is the well-being of the loved one, made of fragility and weaknesses.
A song of deep human love, one that looks at wine and another realist, in which Franco Battiato with his feet anchored to the ground cries out for change: three extremely significant songs that, in their diversity, represent his ability to range from one genre to another and from one theme to another without ever falling into the banal or giving in to the temptation to give the audience what they expect.
And maybe it was his character, solitary but not misogynistic, solid and particular, that allowed him to use music to show himself naked, in all its facets.
Copertina: rai