Lucio Battisti
Amore e non amore

Fresh from the great success of the two previous works "Lucio Battisti" from 1969 and "Emozioni" from 1970 (although actually, especially for the second, one should talk more about collections of 45s released up to that moment rather than real albums), the Battisti-Mogol duo released the album "Amore e non amore" in 1971: a sort of concept album about...sex (scandal!), explored in its various facets; at least as far as the "sung" pieces of the album are concerned, as it consists of eight tracks, four "sung" and four instrumental.

Sex immediately makes an appearance in the opening track "Dio mio no," heavily censored at the time, where it discusses an invitation to dinner at a woman's home, with a meal of steaks, caviar, and wine, followed by an incorporated sexual encounter. The incriminating verses, subject to censorship, were the following: "After eating the fruit, she gets up and asks where the bed is, then disappears behind the door. I hear her, she calls me, I see her in pajamas, and she comes closer and closer, closer, closer, closer. My God no, my God no, what are you doing? What are you doing?" The fact that these verses were juxtaposed with the "invocation" to God in the title made the censors (prudish?) of the time jump out of their seats: it was really too much, so much so that someone even talked about an affront to religion! In "Una," we are dealing with a girl who is not so pretty and not even intelligent (but she doesn't know it), with rather extravagant behaviors, yet: "But why you, you with that face? Is it possible that I like someone like you?" Yes, why? Could it be she excelled in something less romantic, as her suitor wanted, and decidedly more prosaic? Who knows!

In "Se la mia pelle vuoi," the stereotype of the woman as an object is even reversed to give birth to one of the man as an object: here, the protagonist is dealing with a sex-addicted woman who wants to do it almost at all hours of the day and night, while he would like to do other things, like going out to the cinema or the restaurant. Not only that, to escape her pressing sexual demands, the "unfortunate" man even begins to invent "women's excuses": "I have a headache, but you say no". Seeing the futility of all his alternative proposals and excuses, he is forced to capitulate and surrender once again ("If you want my skin, do as you do"): poor thing!! In "Supermarket," finally, we encounter a man who is in a love affair with a woman, a clerk in the fruit department (bananas, in particular) of a supermarket. One Thursday, he goes to the shopping center where she works and doesn't find her; then he shows up again at the same shopping center the following day, and this time he finds her "in her place". The ending is tragicomic: "Supermarket, Friday, you work there: tell me yesterday, why were you not here. "All the fault of the fruit, I ate too much of it. And so I stayed in bed on Thursday". You also love bananas so much, you do; but bananas cost too much, and therefore, this great love of ours, what bad luck, will end today, for reasons of vegetables, savings, and also practicality". I don't think you need to be a genius to understand that "bananas" didn't refer to fruit, but something else. It's strange that the censors of the time, always attentive even to the smallest stupidities, had nothing to say about this piece, which was much more sexually explicit compared to "Dio mio no". Or maybe they really thought it referred to fruit and naively missed such a golden opportunity? Mysterious mystery, as someone would say. Dulcis in fundo, at the end of the piece in question (although not recorded in any official document) instead of "Supermarket", I seem to hear "Supermarchette", and I think it's not a coincidence!

As for the four relatively short instrumental pieces, they too are "branded" Battisti-Mogol. It is true that Mogol wrote the lyrics and Battisti the music, but the titles of these pieces were the work of Mogol and are a sort of mini-poems. Here they are in rigorously sequential order: "Sitting under a plane tree with a daisy in my mouth watching the black river stained by the white foam of detergents", "7 August afternoon. Between the scorching sheets of a car cemetery only I, silent yet extraordinarily alive", "In front of a flower vending machine in the Brussels airport, I too closed in a glass bubble", "An armchair, a glass of cognac, a television, 35 deaths on the borders of Israel and Jordan": Mogol certainly did not lack imagination! Probably, then, these mini-poems expressed Mogol's own point of view on themes dear to him: in particular, the first three seem to adhere to an ecological logic, while the last seems to refer to the general indifference towards tragedies that seem distant.

Even the title and cover of the album seem to reflect this interpretative logic. "Amore e non amore" seems to divide the instrumental pieces, which mainly feature "Amore," from the non-instrumental ones, where "Non amore" (sex, then?) predominates. The cover depicts, among other things, a naked woman portrayed from behind, with her backside prominently displayed. The woman in question is supposed to be Grazia Letizia Veronese, Battisti's girlfriend at the time and his future wife, although Veronese herself has recently denied it was her. On a musical level, the album is very varied and also very experimental, alternating rock, blues, celestial and almost dreamy melodies, progressive, even jazz, with the use of organ, electric guitar, piano, drums, strings. Everything is played with a lot of virtuosity, and given the musicians involved, it could not have been otherwise: besides Battisti himself, we also find Flavio Premoli, Franz Di Cioccio, Franco Mussida, Giorgio Piazza (in practice, the future PFM), Dario Baldan Bembo, and the unfortunately recently deceased Alberto Radius.

Therefore, a very experimental album, both in the lyrics and in the music, that starkly differed from previous Battisti works, so much so that the record company Ricordi initially did not want to release it; they decided to do so only more than a year later, and it also led to a fallout with the Battisti-Mogol duo and the near-simultaneous birth of their new label "Numero Uno". The duo's merit was to insist on carrying forward their experimental project, disregarding some potential poor sales (which, however, were very good, even if not at the level of previous works and not even many subsequent ones), and also the "politically correct". Ultimately, besides feeling a healthy envy for those with such a lively sex life (whether it’s Battisti’s, Mogol’s, or simply fictional) and realizing that if market logic and political correctness had been heeded, this album probably would never have seen the light, I close by saying: long live sex and to hell with politically correct!