Franco Battiato
Patriots

THE REVIEW

It's summer, and we all deserve a well-earned rest. So even the reviewer is going on vacation, but before that, the last review. Unsure about what to write, I wanted to say a few words, or even more, about one of my favorite Battiato albums, "Patriots."

Admittedly, Battiato from the '70s, experimental and crazy, in a good way, is enjoyable, but from "L'era del cinghiale bianco" onwards, he drives me wild. The decade from 1979 to 1989 brought us his best works ("La voce del padrone," the aforementioned "cinghiale bianco," "Patriots," "Mondi lontanissimi" and "Fisiognomica," all in the strict order of my preference). The '90s and 2000s, honestly, bore me a little, yes, including "L'imboscata."

But "Patriots" is "Patriots," a high-level synth-pop condensate. Paradoxically, the less famous tracks are what I prefer, so I've devoured side B millions of times. There's "Arabian Song" that says, "La mia parte assente si identificava con l'umidità" (eh?):

"Man – as we read in the book Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P.D. Ouspensky – is always in a state of identification, what changes is only the object of his identification. Man identifies with a small problem he encounters on his path and completely forgets the great goals he was proposing (…) He identifies with an emotion, with a noise, and forgets his other deeper feelings.” (Fabrizio Basciano)

There's "Frammenti," which seems like a hodgepodge of scholastic quotes, from Pascoli to "Spigolatrice di Sapri," but then it surprises: "What a great convenience secretaries who speak multiple languages," and here you discover Battiato's citation game, referring to G.I. Gurdjieff and his training apparatus, an Armenian philosopher who compares a part of the human being to an office.

And, in conclusion, "Passaggi a livello," musically very lively, which contains some phrases worth memorizing: "Nelle carrozze letto sposi in luna di miele, facevano l'amore con l'ausilio del motore," or "Giocavano sull'aia bambini e genitori, Calasso li avvertiva dal Corriere della Sera: 'Copritevi che fa freddo, mettetevi le galosce'" and then on to quote practically everything, from Galileo to the Beach Boys, from Kurosawa to Odoardo Spadaro.

Of course, there are also the famous songs. The legendary "Prospettiva Nevski," everything has already been said about it, and it continues to be an immense masterpiece, in its initially restrained music that explodes in the beautiful finale ("And my teacher taught me how difficult it is to find the dawn within the twilight"), even if the stroke of genius, especially on the literary level, is the passage where the protagonist crosses paths with Igor Stravinsky.

The album, which, moreover, was originally supposed to be titled "I telegrafi del martedì grasso," opens with the solemn "Up patriots to arms," with a spoken word in Arabic, as is the refrain of "Arabian song": "Ogni giorno guardiamo le cose insignificanti, guardo tutto e tutto il mondo che vive di speranza, e non vivo..." and it joins a fragment of Wagner Richard's Tannhäuser, no less. It takes issue with everyone, from art directors to fools dancing in clubs.

A fundamental record, and the first really successful album commercially for Battiato, it represents him to the fullest, in a new dimension that morphs from experimental to pop, but bans any form of banality. A track like "Le aquile" (another gem) lives in words and memories, as perhaps no musician, at least Italian, had proven until then:

"Maybe a memory of the period, a photograph from the '40s, the 'orthopedic' shoes then in fashion (with wedges, later back with the 'zatteroni' of the '70s and again in the '90s). A woman, perhaps the young mother, moves cautiously on high shoes, the wide skirt blown by the wind on the seafront of a Sicilian city." (from the Musica & Memoria website)

Personally, only "Venezia-Istanbul" did not excite me, but that is my opinion, obviously.