CHAPTER 90

 

 

#11: ADRIANO CELENTANO

“Prisencolinensinainciusol”

Single released: November 1972

 

 

My mother and her family were Italian and Italian was the first language I Iearned, ahead of English. Had she come to Britain as a child, during World War II, she would have been imprisoned as an enemy alien. Glasgow and most of Lanarkshire belonged to the Italians in the fifties, sixties and early seventies almost as securely as it did to native Scots, one of whom was my father. Nothing we liked – food, culture, cinema – was readily available or fashionable in that Britain and we had to hunt it out. We Italians are a dogged lot. We don’t need our assumed tastes dictated to us. We know what we like and believe you could like it too. While leading later trends, we do so primarily to reassure ourselves that our voice exists and is valid. Sounds like a fucking MBA Powerpoint demonstration, doesn’t it?

 

The Italian Elvis, bored in an amused way by the cultural dominance of the English language – particularly as he himself does not speak English – elects to remind his people that they can assert their own culture whenever they like, by turning pidgin English into rows of accidentally (or was it an accident?) associated imagery completely worthy of Dylan (Bob or Thomas; take your pick). He then sets it all to a repeating tribal groove, slightly reminiscent of John Kongos, except that the drumbeats, horn section and lead guitar are all looped. He drawls cheerfully meaninglessly over those loops and hip hop blah de blah. Were I a mediocre music critic I would probably have inserted a pained remark here about imagining Elvis and Kool Herc hanging out in Milan but both you and I are better than that otherwise what the fuck are we doing here? As with Mel Brooks’ “To Be Or Not To Be” (the full twelve-inch mix, please) it is a unilateral declaration and indeed reclamation of doodlyplips. It’s nonsense, Celentano admits, but isn’t all pop that we love, if only we could loosen up like Morton Jack implies Nick Drake should have done, nonsense that means whatever you want it to mean because the people around your head sneer that everything’s been said, but “Prisencolinensinainciusol” induces a movement in your brain.

 

It didn’t come out in Britain until perhaps early 1974. The BBC didn’t play it but Radio Luxembourg did. For we Italians, the song was like Gramsci doing “Tutti Frutti”; cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining and legitimising the capitalist state, subverted with pleasing delicacy by the need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class. Hold something; it’ll almost drive you crazy.