•
Rating:
THE REVIEW
With Hegel, Battisti is at the end of the line, unless in the years between the release of this album and his death, our singer-songwriter had the strength to go further. And that is precisely the point: how far could Battisti go after Hegel? The album is indeed the final stop of the most cryptic phase of the experimental Battisti.
Here, there's no longer a nod to the sixties, which still emerged in the previous CSAR. Here, we go beyond: listen to the 4 minutes of La voce del viso, a song shot at a bpm close to 180, a falsetto that oscillates around frequencies unknown even to female performers, a contorted yet astonishingly clear text, affected guitars and keyboards blending with each other. Traditional instruments throughout the album are merely decorative, the CSAR guitars are submerged by electronic loops, the orchestral arrangements of La sposa occidentale are keyboard carpets, the drums now come out of a synthesizer.
Yet this album is not a soulless record, on the contrary, it's new, booming music, full of overlapping sounds, inextricably entangled in practically perfect lyrics. Panella, the lyricist, does his work without any longer worrying about the musicability of the text; he knows that the Battisti of the '90s can write the soundtrack even for a phone book, and thus no longer writes effect rhymes, doesn't seek utterly musical assonances, often ignores the fluidity of the text. The classic ploys of authors are this time almost bypassed, indeed deceived:
Your enjoyment then dominates you,
disenchanted in that,
the more it resists the soothing tale,
the cheerful summary, and it is not laughter indeed,
and it is not your tears because it narrates laughter and tears are its summary
"Summary" comes when it already seems too late, but it's such a new and fitting rhyme that the connection succeeds completely! Examples like this abound nearly everywhere and when the music fails to chase the text, it is the text that bends, with the singing, to the music.
Hegel is not Battisti's masterpiece and not even a masterpiece in Italian music.
It's more of an extreme experiment, perhaps unrepeatable, a maximum limit, a peak, unreachable even just on the simple technical-compositional level.
It is not an essential album, because it doesn't serve to understand anything other than the album itself. So if you are brave, buy it. If you are also patient, listen to it at least twenty times. And if you love music, by the twenty-first listen, you will love this album as well.
Loading comments slowly
Summary by Bot
Hegel marks the final phase of Lucio Battisti's most cryptic and experimental period. The album features dense electronic loops, unconventional vocals, and complex, non-traditional lyrics by Panella. Although not a mainstream masterpiece, it stands as a daring, technically challenging, and rewarding experiment. Listeners are encouraged to engage deeply and repeatedly with the album to fully appreciate its depth.Tracklist Lyrics Videos
Lucio Battisti
Lucio Battisti (1943–1998) was an Italian singer, composer and producer from Poggio Bustone. He rose to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s with lyricist Mogol, crafting many of Italy’s most beloved songs, and later pursued a radical electronic and linguistic shift with Pasquale Panella (1986–1994). From 1980 onward he withdrew from concerts, TV and interviews, insisting the art should speak for the artist.104 Reviews
Other reviews
By GianlucaGT
Lucio Battisti and Pasquale Panella indulge in conjectural reasonings that arbitrarily wander in the fragility of the human psyche.
Everything is enclosed within the soul: emotion, suffering, joy. Everything sealed hermetically.
By Darius
Hegel, 1994, was the last roar of a man who preferred the semi-anonymity, isolation, press silence, sequence of white covers, low chart achievements, and the bloody crusade of infuriated critics and early pro-Battistians who were disappointed.
The album marries surreal, hermetic, extremely complex texts with diverse and composite sounds, not simply reducible to a vacuous and sterile digression of europop and synth-pop as claimed by many exegetes.
By Abraham
"'Hegel' is the simple combination of the monstrosity of words borne aloft without rest but with enormous grace by Pasquale Panella and Battisti’s appropriate melodies, never so appropriate indeed."
"'Hegel' is a magnificent mockery, the ultimate mockery, the disinterested farewell of Battisti. Electronics, heart, mind, and Panella."
By Battisti
Panella himself said in an interview that only those who have been to high school can understand Hegel, while if someone listening to the album is an idiot, they will admit that whoever wrote the lyrics wrote nonsense.
"Hegel" is, therefore, Battisti's testament... a last attempt at musical freedom by the artist.
