‘All right!’

by whiteray

My music collection – the 1,000 LPs, the 1,500 or so CDs, and 82,000 mp3s (with much duplication all over the place), is sewn from several basic threads, one following the other: 

First, the music – pop, rock, soul and all their relatives – from 1960 through about 1978, the tunes of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. 

Second, tunes from the late 1970s through today, with pop, rock and soul’s preeminence at the start gradually being joined by country and then later by the genre called Americana. 

Third comes the music from before my memory, whether it’s 1950s pop, R&B or blues, 1940s big band or jump blues, or the mélange of music, some of it uncategorizable, that was rolling out of record plants from the turn of the 1900s until the advent of World War II. For a couple of reasons, that last category – music recorded during the first forty years of the Twentieth Century – is a current fascination of mine, and we’ll talk about that here on another Monday or two. 

And there is a fourth category of music I collect, one less well defined than those first three. I look for music that is popular but just strange. And as I consider that category, I think of the strangest recording I’ve come across in the past few months. 

Adriano Celantano is an Italian multi-talent: actor, director, producer, singer-songwriter. In 1972, according to what I’ve read, he had the idea to write a song with lyrics that sounded English but were actually nonsense. So, he wrote and produced “Prisencólinensináinciúsol,” enlisting his wife, Claudia Mori, for some vocal parts. 

Wikipedia says “Celantano’s intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers.” The website quotes Celantano: “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang – which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian – I thought that I would write a song which would have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.” 

That’s a little more high-minded than what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Celantano thought that English-sounding lyrics were so popular in Italy that he figured he could have a hit with a record of gibberish if it just sounded like English. 

Either way, it worked. The record went to No. 5 in Italy and in the Netherlands, to No. 2 on the Belgian Wallonia chart and to No. 4 on the Belgian Flanders chart, and to No. 6 in France. The Germans, however, didn’t seem to get the joke, as the record went to only No. 46 in West Germany. 

It’s kind of a hoot, so here’s “Prisencólinensináinciúsol” in its basic form. There is a video out there from an Italian television show setting the record in a large dance routine, with Mori’s lyrics lip-synched by Italian actress Raffaella Carrá, and that’s kind of fun, but for now, here’s the original: