You Can Call Them, If You Like, Emotions: The (Un)Orthodox Songs Of Lucio Battisti

In hard years, politically and culturally, for Italy like the 1970’s, Lucio Battisti (1943-1998) was, without the shadow of a doubt, the greatest popular success in music (particularly from ‘69 to ‘73, but with some important hits in the 2nd half of the decade) as singer and songwriter (with lyricist Giulio Rapetti, aka Mogol, 1937): the amount of songs by Mogol & Battisti in the memory of the mass Italian audience overcomes every other musical production of the time, and it’s important to remember that many hits sung by other singers and bands of the time (like Formula 3, Equipe 84, Mina and more) were written by them. Maybe the main reason of this success is the “simplicity” of Battisti’s music, whose songs represented (and still represents) the first approach to the guitar for many young musicians: this led to a deep relationship of intimacy of the Italian audience to those songs. Helped by this easy-to-remember melodies and easy-to-play chord sequences, Mogol’s simple lyrics weren’t hard to remember. An interesting fact is that usually he wrote them after the music: he was, for the Italian label and editor Ricordi, the main lyricist and adaptor of English and American songs for Italian bands in a long time. In those years the role of the writer not singer is fading away, at least in the common sense, but Mogol was the only one (between lyricists, but even producers, songwriters, arrangers, musicians…) who became as famous as a wide-known singer. Battisti’s peculiar identity complicates the idea of cantautore (both singer and songwriter; it’s a pun, it could be adapted as singwriter) in many ways. First of all, he didn’t write the words of the songs, Mogol did, when a cantautore (especially belonging to the “2nd generation”, releasing his first records in the late 60’s – early 70’s) was – and still is – identified mostly by the lyrics; for this reason, in the Italian common sense, De André is seen as “more” cantautore because he is considered the lyricist of his songs even if he didn’t write the music (sometimes he didn’t even write all of the lyrics). The themes of the songs themselves are another important element to differentiate Mogol & Battisti from the other cantautori: they are mainly sentimental and intimate tunes, and sometimes they follow the so-called ecologist-oriented Green Line, created by Mogol himself, intended as an opposition to the political-oriented Red Line led by Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano and the new cantautori of the time (like Guccini or De Gregori). Besides that, Battisti’s references were not the chansonniers or the American folk singers, but mainly soul, rhythm ‘n’ blues (he only went once to the Festival of the Italian Song in Sanremo, in 1969, with Wilson Pickett…) and rock singers and songwriters, not just for the sound of his rough voice, but even for the brilliant sound of the brass sections and the funky-rock groove used for the rhythmic sections, so the sound of his songs was similar to beat bands (in his records we hear rock bands playing like Formula 3 and PFM): more than that, he was the only one between his “colleagues” who used to be the producer of his very first records, supervising the arrangements. He was even one of the very first singers who opened his songs to the sounds of progressive rock (sometimes even to its forms) and, in the later 70’s, to disco-music too, making them sound both new and traditional. The aim of this analysis is, after a brief historical introduction to Battisti’s career, to point how the relationship between lyrics and music (compared to others hit songs of the same years), the sound and the structures of his most successful songs marked the difference between him and the other Italian songwriters of the time and influenced his image’s mass perception, not his music’s.