Dolly Parton
Heartbreaker

THE REVIEW

Dolly Parton - Heartbreaker (1978)

What could drive us to review certain records and, above all, to buy them: masochism? No. Proselytism? Certainly not... Extreme exoticism? NO! Laziness? NO!! Intellectual masturbation? Ehhh.. mm Maybe. Perhaps just masturbation.

Our consumer era continuously bombards us with a returning matriarchy in advertising, TV, cinema, and social relationships, it's a fact, man watches shipwrecked at the mercy of the revenge of the Amazons and the Minerva of Lesbos in every field. Woe betide contradicting them, talking about conspiracy... Thus the banter about the fairer sex becomes less rowdy and more refined and intellectualized: we discover new antennas, new senses, and we end up talking about them again, our new mistresses. The less young women have hermeneutical value, the more it makes sense to let them sing.

If a Madonna is reviewed, I counter with another vita di donna illustre: Dolly Parton is all there in her little voice all-American woman healthy and from another era, not too intellectual, actually zero, provincial (Sevierville, Tennessee) but not too much, and with the right brain to sell millions of records in the USA and around the world. A decent country composer, a skilled strummer, a g-o-o-d actress (9-to five), what's her secret?

Dolly Parton, like many singers, is more an icon (milky) than a woman, I would dare to say a sort of Mediterranean Great Mother blonde (?), whom you might find in the peroxide shampooer at the shop next door, in the aged first-time pregnant saleswoman who gives you a languid smile at the coop, or in the breezy pharmacist who merrily wraps up your condoms. The secret of Dolly's iconic polysemy is the antithesis of the other pocket-sized blonde Venus, Madonna, dread virago inane and vacant: whereas Dolly is always the same as herself like a sacred icon, Madonna is the gay medusan urninga that moves frantically riding the tides of fashion, a woman monkey of herself inside an adoring Cage aux Folles.

Dolly is the mater matuta, the resting and sexual Bona Dea, who slams in your face in every photo, concert, record, the secret never fully discovered: her Junoesque breasts are the poles of her sanctifying aura, physical and metaphysical protuberances of a multimammia Diana that qualifies her body as an episode of language that becomes a fetish of meaning. Her soft shapes and her stylized smile make us sense a world of mother goddesses and loves of the girl-next-door that is vanishing. Almost all aspiring starlets have their breasts redone. She, graced by Mother Nature, even considered it, but asking the surgeon's scalpel for a reduction: hers is a breast that makes the province but fortunately, the fans rebelled, preventing her from committing the outrage. Not being able to touch her secret with my own hands, I will turn to the stars: physiognomically, she does not present angularity of Mars influence, but a softness tinged with melancholic detachment, with flashes of brightness and cunning; her breast is not a Titian, or mantegnan breast, but it is of a pagan eruption, all earthly; we see her planets; in fact the terrestrial dominance is evident from the zodiac signs: she is a Capricorn with Virgo rising, with the Moon at the horoscope in conjoined Virgo: this round and low Moon, waning in the mercurial sign of the earthy Virgo, are her large and hard breasts, tough enough to hang a picture on, the ruler of the ascendant is Mercury, in the fifth house, fortuna house, applying to the conjunction with Venus, goddess of love, in the leaden sign of Capricorn. Mercury, Venus, Hermes, and Aphrodite, love, and beauty at the service of ingenuity.

And the music? Oh, I almost forgot... This is one of the records of her vast discography, also garnished with a Grammy, which almost rivals U2 or Depeche Mode, and is the record of the pop disco turn started in '77 - the year in which even starlet Olivia Newton John left country to jump into new rhythms - and that culminates with Heartbreaker. Among the songs: I really got the feeling, melodic pop; It's Too Late To Love Me Now, a ballad tinged with country; "Baby I'm Burnin" the track most in disco music style; "Heartbreaker", a tear-jerking melodic gem, now a classic of Dolly. Impeccable session musicians for easy listening.

V.R.