Franco Battiato
Clic

The "experimental" Battiato was a late-adolescent fetish for my generation. After spending my childhood singing next to a tape player, rambling on about Jesuits, Euclidean, bonzes, and white boars, without knowing the meaning, I found myself as an adult who, as Morgano in Bluvertigo said, had to "understand Battiato."

And while Franco “the crazy” was giving the world the piece of pieces, "La cura," it left me indifferent, perhaps also because it was a period in Bologna, fuckin' away, orgies and big joints. My theosophical aspect would emerge later. At least mine did. Years ago, a journalist from those “local network” types approached Mastro Franco and between one useless question and another, ended up in a thicket with the related consideration: "I love the piece La Cura and the images seen in that song, like, for example, wandering in the tennis fields. Do you play tennis?”

Franco today is a cheerful man at peace with himself, who tells it chuckling and then flies off a stage to the notes of "Voglio vederti danzare."
Franco is the man who hit rock bottom and rose again. It's also written in the Clic booklet: “Only by touching the bottom can you understand how much water is above or at what height you are”. Franco was fairly battered, he had known haunting ghosts with losses of self. To know himself.

Knowing oneself is one of the most dangerous practices for a human being.

No u Turn is the piece that describes all this. At a certain point, the song has a part of the lyrics turned backwards, and to the "turned" melody, Battiato wrote the song. A couple of decades ago, using a Fostex multitrack (the home PC was still a hostile, little functional gadget), I turned the track around, because what a dose of curiosity and patience accompanied by some not bad herb can do, cannot be understood.

Now, I'm not saying that message tells some great indispensable truths. In fact: the commoner's coda, later strengthfully reprised in "Povera Patria," leaves a bit of sadness and at bottom, the whole reversed text is a concentrate of pathetic sadness bordering on Fassbinder-esque.

But Battiato at that moment was in a limbo of "dark thoughts," the whole album talks about sociopathy, exclusion, the uselessness of the discursive form, well described in "Ethika fon Ethica."

However, ok. It had to be done. It's the sense of the journey that leads you to do this. I thought I’d find this reversed snippet on YouTube, but there was no trace and I took care of it.

I bought Clic in the mid-nineties in a little dive in Bologna, probably defunct like all those human record stores.
Listening to Clic, I also discovered that the title track of TG2 Dossier, which I waited for as a little boy to close my eyes and go into a sort of mystic peace of the senses, was his (Propriedad Prohibida). I was two years old and hadn’t yet understood by what strange algorithm, every so often the television released this wonder.
I hadn't yet understood that it was up to chance to determine when I would experience that moment of peace. Chance was a remote control, a TV tuned to Rete2 right at that moment. I couldn't choose independently when to give myself that moment of peace.
Adulthood confirmed to me that it is still that way. It is not the age factor that chooses for us, but the variables of life. That moment of peace we manage to find in our daily life is the reward for having had patience. Not tolerance, but patience, towards the distortions of life and the black thoughts that can defeat us.
Mastro Franco also had patience. Then he found Giusto Pio and told all this to millions of people.
And he did well. Because that is where the popular assumes an essential, real, sincere, and useful meaning.