Franco Battiato
Patriots

"We are fireflies in the darkness..." is just a line from the opening of this album, but it has always captivated me, ever since I was in diapers.

Oh no! Another review filled with feminine whims, God save us!

Okay, I admit it, it was just a trap, but it’s not an arbitrary digression: because this "Patriots" by Battiato is full of traps, musical and lyrical. Some, very profound, seem easy to avoid, only to fall into another, perfectly camouflaged, wrapped in a childish melody (has Battiato ever written such?), and come out completely detached from the sense of reality.

The first notes we hear in "Patriots" are by Richard Wagner, the Tännhauser: the overture. To keep it brief (otherwise you’ll say I’m rambling), Tännhauser is a troubadour who, seduced by the goddess Venus, finds himself in the middle of an orgy. Like any good singer, guilt, or perhaps the penetration of the Dionysian, or maybe just the satisfied senses, turn him into a Christian in search of sacred love so that he appeals to the feminine purity of the Madonna to implore Venus to let him go free. Battiato loves Classical music too much to think this choice is random! Not if only because on a Wagnerian cue, he recites verses in Arabic that roughly say: "Every day we observe insignificant things, the whole world living in hope, and in the meantime we don’t live…" and we cannot overlook the readings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (he himself tells us in many interviews), we cannot consider it a pure Dadaist digression. "Patriots" is a concept, a hymn to the contradictions of Western society and to the music that is an expression of that culture, if you will a contrast between innocence, childhood, the past, the East and corruption, decay, the West.

"Venezia-Istanbul" opens with a nod to the futurist fanaticism of the young D'Annunzio and is nostalgic for the "passion for airplanes and for legionary bands", that time that changes everything, that God who gave to men the forgetfulness of their innocence as an act of mercy because the memories of adolescence hurt more than bullets. After a slow start, the track quickens and surprises us as scenes of change unfold: "Yesterday I saw two men holding each other in a small suburban cinema and I think about how quickly morality changes", "Once Christians were killed, and then these, under the pretext of witches, killed pagans, Ave Maria"... That West which sees in capitalist prosperity its height of dominance over the world is ultimately pointed out as the cause of pain and devastation: after all the boom, the reconstruction, the Marshall Plan, the Hands Over the City are nothing but a direct consequence of horror, behind the veil of socialist hypocrisy: "And for the dawn of the future to still shine over the earth, let’s make room with another war."

After the political invective, "Le Aquile" is imbued with a lyricism where youth and old age merge into an opposition (someone might as well have enjoyed it with "dichotomy") that becomes an embrace. Youth, physical energy spent in the gym stands against the blue background of a sky that is a distant memory of childhood that is not carefree but orthopaedic leg braces that force the eagle to walk instead of soaring. This reading is dictated by the text partially borrowed from the prose of Fleur Jaeggy as in a passage from "Water Statues" taken from the beautiful "The Sweet Days of Discipline":

KATRIN: Only five minutes have passed since I saw a crow silhouetted among trees and sky – after a small exhilarating flight, walk lame and fast toward me. You too will have seen eagles walk in aviaries, their gait is like a majestic agony and their polished eyes of hate assent to the farewell. I did not, at that moment, feel the puritan inclination to make an innocent vision a fable but, looking at the crow, there was in its way of lingering, of standing still, a kind of stubborn waiting, like it was following its own thought, I would almost say spiritual, as if it were about to tell me something, maybe to think of the water – or to follow it, I didn’t know, I tried to understand by looking into its eyes, but the crow’s eyes turned elsewhere, opposing my gaze with two tiny pieces of velvet. I tried to touch it, but she moved away, walking away without flying, calmly. I thus pursued, almost without realizing, that leaden and clumsy tangled mass that advanced cautiously toward the cliff. Up there, the limestone humps slope toward the water, ceremonious and lethargic, at that hour the rocks are of a sickly green, continuing in the water with marshy reflections. It seemed like the crow was sniffing the long-lost ships, stared at the stars and shadows, without understanding how far they were. Meanwhile, the feathered adornment disintegrated, the wing ribs began to bend.
Inadvertently I brushed her elbow, she had elbows like mine and the same stature. She barely smiled at me, as if she felt a kind of dark and cautious joy in seeing me similar to her, in having copied my shape.

In some circumstances Battiato has cited this work as containing "flashes of Truth", with a capital T implied by the Master’s wisdom studies.

The year before "Patriots" was published, the world learned of the excitement over the Sotheby's sale in London of Vaslav Nijinsky's diary. "Prospettiva Nevski" refers to the St. Petersburg walk and offers us watercolors apparently from another time, while we realize that it takes place beyond the Iron Curtain, a little further away compared to the civilized West. The album "Patriots" is from 1980 when Glasnost was far from coming and the opposition between blocs was material and omnipresent. These scenes follow with a rhythm and choice of details that evoke a palpable antithesis with the themes of American popular culture and references to a life essentially more real, though marked by great deprivation. Beauty is symbolized precisely by Russian ballets and the love between Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky himself who, in his madness, wrote pages of delirious inspiration in his posthumously published diary. It is difficult to find the dawn inside the twilight, the text warns us, glancing at the real decadence that is not in the "women hunched over looms" nor in the "piss pots placed under the beds for the night". The piano arrangement of this piece is then a masterpiece in itself and captures romance and love for beauty as if watching a flower bloom in slow motion.

Next is "Arabian Song" which is hard to interpret. Starting with the refrain, strictly in tight Arabic, for which there is no precise translation in the notes. On the site battiatotribute.net, no longer accessible, the following translation was found: "The head of the village said: I was climbing the mountain. Peace be upon you and upon you. Now I live." which I do not know how accurate it is, however, the essence of the song lies precisely in the mystery of the exact meaning of these catchy words. Maybe it’s the famous mountain of Muhammad, which, however, is created by the alchemist Francis Bacon in his Essays. What kind of Master, then, are we talking about? It is impossible not to reference Arabic alchemy, the Emerald Tablet where "what is above is like what is below", symbolically represented by the kites' flight and by that "My absent part was identified with moisture" which is a reference to the Dry Way which is the shortest and most dangerous way to reach the Work (another reference to D'Annunzio’s living dangerously?). What appears to be the lightest song on the record is in fact a complex fresco full of wisdom references, including the nod to frugal living that leads to wisdom more than any academic knowledge. All references that may seem artificial, but as with all wisdom paths (and that of Gurdjieff pursued by Battiato and his mate Giusto Pio is one), it is necessary to follow it to grasp them naturally.

"Frammenti" is also rich in cross-references. At first glance, it appears as a scholastic collection of fragments from various poets, from Leopardi to Pascoli and Carducci. However, even here we find a deep esoteric groove. Gurdjieff writes: "The office is our forming apparatus, while the secretary is our education, with its automatic concepts, its narrow formulas, with the theories and opinions that have formed in us." expressing a concept very dear to his Fourth Way, namely that the ordinary human being is a mechanical being living an artificial life as an automaton. Battiato leaves us with the line: "What great convenience the secretaries that speak more languages" which, without precise references, appears cryptic to us, however, following the comparison of G., a secretary speaking more languages would symbolize an education capable of mediating the external language from that of the true man who lies dormant in the inner world. However, without wanting to further overload this text with meanings, it suffices to linger on the shore of scattered texts, poetic fragments, noting that poetry and art, in general, are a means to communicate with our inner worlds and find alternative lives in which to realize ourselves, maybe leaving the city and making a commune down in Tuscany.

The record concludes with "Passaggi a Livello" which is yet another small masterpiece of cross-references that starts with a classical introduction followed by a synth following a harmonic progression with an oriental flavor. From bucolic visions, it follows the Proustian quote (the air filled with manure jokingly like the Madeleines of Lost Time?):

The music, very different in this from the company of Albertine, helped me to go down into myself, to discover something new: the variety I had vainly sought in life, in travel.

Which, at this point in the record, sounds like a closing remark to interpret, searching for the hidden meaning in what precedes and perhaps follows since the track ends with a real list of credits, sources of inspiration for the work that concludes, or perhaps keys to understanding: "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, "'O Sole mio" a Neapolitan classic but also a reference to the philosopher’s stone, "Lux Aeterna", the work by György Ligeti (which, among other things, appears in the soundtrack of "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick), "Einstein on the Beach" which probably refers to Philip Glass's 1975 work.

Okay, I definitely overdid it and wrote a lot of nonsense, forget everything: the review starts here.

"Patriots" is a true journey, both physical and interior. It’s a less Pop album than the next "La Voce del Padrone" and maybe also less mature and precisely for this reason closer to the experiments of the Battiato of the '70s. But maybe, for this very reason, it is dearer to me and is also dear to a certain Italian New Wave that has drawn enormous inspiration from "Patriots". From this scene I want to mention briefly only Litfiba of "17 Re" and the great Disciplinatha.