The pop exoticism of Franco Battiato – Daniele Cassandro

Silver samovars on kilim rugs, whirling dervishes and Balinese dancers, Egypt before the sands and the governor of Libya in a jingle of sistrums, rattlesnakes and Katakali anklets. The figure of Battiato in the eighties, of his research and successful pop, is exoticism. A fragmented exoticism, enumerating and evocative rather than descriptive, a postmodern exoticism still indebted to a certain seventies freakery. In some verses of that Battiato I could smell the familiar scent of the worn-out tolfa of the babysitter who took me to the park as a child; her wide floral skirts, leather sandals, tiger balm and Sai Baba’s incense that in that bottomless bag mixed with Camels, petrified Charms candies and maybe a bit of smoke. An exotic hippie out of time and one new age alla amatriciana of which Battiato was very aware. It is the esotericism a so much per kilo that he describes in so well Magic shop (dall’It was of the white boar). Yet in the 1980s Battiato there is not only that ironic awareness, there is also the awareness of being connected to a much more ancient and settled tradition.

Since the eighteenth century, exoticism has been a flight of the white European towards a mysterious elsewhere, full of aesthetic and electrifying promises; from the chinoiseries of Madame du Barry’s parlors, all trinkets and boiserie lacquered, turquoise and Mozart’s menageries. And then toucans, parrots and monkeys that were painted everywhere, on fans, screens and cups, coffee cups, snuff boxes and boxes. A graceful and libertine exoticism, that of the eighteenth century; more cruel and openly erotic that of the romantic nineteenth century: from Death of Sardanapalo, which the painter Eugène Delacroix sets in a harem in which naked slaves are slaughtered while Sardanapalo awaits his death, in Moorish Spain, all blood and sand, of the Carmen Bizet, to the increasingly rarefied and almost liberty orient of the works of Camille Saint-Saëns and Léo Delibes. The orientalism of the second French nineteenth century is a very bourgeois escape into a phantasmagoric elsewhere, in which scents and colors promise a wild and sensual world away from the chaos and greyness of boulevard Paris. It is however and always a invitation to travel, a centrifugal escape from a suffocating inside towards an outside full of beauties who are there to be grasped and enjoyed by the white man.

It is with surrealism and the historical avant-gardes that exoticism and orientalism cease to be necessarily linked to elsewhere and travel, and therefore inevitably to colonialism and pillage, but become something more introspective, a sort of orientalism of the unconscious. André Breton, the leading theorist of surrealism, in the book The magical art this is how he speaks of Paul Gauguin and his painting: “His work, especially his Polynesian work, gives proof of a perpetual transcendence of plastic, simple means for him, fully informed by the true purpose of every artistic activity, poetry. Gauguin is, before the immediate promises of surrealism, the only painter who has noticed that he carries a magician within himself ”.

Even Franco Battiato of the late seventies must have realized that he was carrying a magician within him. Like Gauguin, who while seeing true Polynesia in front of him chose to look at what was inside him, made of yellow seas and blue gardens, so Battiato chose to use exoticism to travel not outside himself but increasingly within one’s being. Those were the years in which he approached meditation and returned, after years of extreme experimentalism, to pop music. But he came back not as a songwriter, bound by force to the thread of a story to tell, but as a magician. Choosing, as Aldo Nove says in his biography not biography of Franco Battiato, “evocation instead of narration”. Here is the whole paradox of the “trilogy of success” (The era of the white boar, Patriots e The master’s voice): pop music, what was then still called a song, became for him a very personal form of inner exploration and continuous esoteric experimentation.

On Google Maps exists Mappiato, a map of the world created by Alessio Arnese with (more or less) all the places, far or near, mentioned by Franco Battiato in his songs. Just click on the red pointer to discover a place and the song in which it is summoned. It travels from Tozeur to Tripoli, from Carthage to Baghdad and reaches Siberia and Japan. Each place is a name and each name is a lockpick to force a lock of the unconscious.

That exoticism made up of words, endless lists of cities, objects and people so full of charm is indeed the exoticism of the traveler, but of a traveler of the interiority. It is besides all the exoticism of a Sicilian, of a man who was born there in a place considered exotic. Franco Battiato therefore sets out on a journey but not to go on a safari among the “savages” or to discover unspoiled nature, but he leaves for an adventure in the jungle of his own soul.

Marcel Proust describes well the evocative power of words, especially that of place names. “In Florence I thought of a city miraculously perfumed and similar to a corolla, because they called it the city of lilies, and its cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore”, he writes in Research. And then there is Parma which feels like “compact, smooth, mauve and sweet “and of course Balbec, the place par excellence of the Proustian dream:” One of those names on which, like an old Norman terracotta that preserves the color of the land from which it derives, we can still see the image of some abolished custom, of some feudal right, of an ancient state of places, of an obsolete pronunciation “.

Battiato recognizes the same charge of enchantment and magic in words: Tozeur, Tripoli, Baku and Baghdad are not cities, they are passages to immerse yourself in a bottomless dream. Franco Battiato died on May 18 at his home in Milo, Sicily. There are those who consoles themselves by writing that he has only fallen asleep, that he has passed from one plane of existence to another, that he has left for one of his worlds far away, like the jazz composer and mystic Sun Ra who, according to his followers, did not die in 1993 but just moved into another dimension. In fact, for me, it is as if Shahrazad, the narrator of A thousand and one nights, that ancient casket of marvelous exoticisms, had been left with no more stories to tell to her cruel lord and that the death she had managed to elude, night after night with her tales, had finally managed to take her.