Raffaella Carrà on the side of women – Angelica Frey

At the beginning of Explode explode, an Italian-Spanish musical comedy set in the last days of Franco’s dictatorship in 1970s Spain, María, an airport employee, makes a delivery in a television studio, where she draws the attention of Chimo, director of a variety show.

When María tells him she is not a dancer, he replies: “No dancer with blood in her veins can resist this rhythm”, and makes her listen I dance I dance, a hit song by Italian pop star Raffaella Carrà.

If Sweden had Abba, Italy had Carrà, who sold millions of records across Europe. María cannot resist I dance I dance and Chimo hires her.

He left them all behind
Explode explode, directed by Nacho Álvarez, pays homage to Carrà’s successes, but it’s not a film about her. But it reflects the change in the way of thinking about romantic relationships, sexuality and entertainment in a Catholic country. One of the main battlegrounds in comedy is how high the hems of showgirl skirts can reach, and how dizzying the necklines can be before they have to be covered with a fake flower.

From the 1950s onwards, Carrà was a triple surprise, capable of singing, dancing and acting, which had an unparalleled influence in Italian music and popular culture. Italy has had singers with a more accomplished voice, who combined extension and dramatic vein: Mina, a mezzo-soprano with a virtuosic talent; Milva, known as “the redhead” for her political sympathies and thick mane, celebrated for her interpretations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill; Patty Pravo, an androgynous contralto; Giuni Russo, who sublimated the operatic technique in pop music and had a range of five octaves. Carrà left them all behind.

When, in 1968, youth culture became more politicized and her colleagues gathered to demonstrate, Carrà went to the United States, where for a month, every evening, she attended the musical. Hair. She returned home convinced that entertainment in Italy needed a jolt. “She was the first pop icon, but housewives have always loved her. It revolutionized television entertainment, ”wrote the journalist Anna Maria Scalise in 2008. In 1974 Carrà declared:“ I’m not inspired by anyone. I speak to children, to fathers who are passionate about football, to wives, in short, to Italian families who watch TV ”.

Its stage was Italian variety broadcasts, made up of Broadway-inspired songs and ballets. It became famous during the 1970 edition of the variety Canzonissima, which he led along with others, in which his songs were linked to dance numbers. In the opening credits he sang and danced to the notes of But what a master music, similar to a fanfare, wearing a two-piece outfit complete with a cropped top. It was the first time anyone dared to show their navel on public TV. The Vatican and the more conservative leaders of Rai, where it was broadcast Canzonissima, were scandalized. The TV presenter Maurizio Costanzo called her “the queen of so-so”. This did not prevent her from being hired also the following year, when, together with the dancer Enzo Paolo Turchi, she performed in the Tuca tuca: a dance in which the artists touch each other in different parts of the body as the song progresses. The song is notable for the way it insists on the active role of women. “I want you”, Carrà sings. And he adds: “I invented it”.

The audience was happy to see choreography that didn’t require too much preparation, but the censors stopped this routine after the third performance. To save the situation was Alberto Sordi, who for his participation in Canzonissima he reintroduced ballet, thus strengthening its success in the eyes of the general public. However, the newspapers labeled Carrà as a passing phenomenon and compared her to “champagne left without a cork”.

Take the initiative
Instead the effervescence of Carrà would not have stopped. She wore proto-glam jumpsuits with openings, cloaks, artificial diamonds, feathers combined with a bob of hair in front of which Anna Wintour’s look pales. But what distinguished her from other artists capable of singing, dancing and acting was the fact that she appeared sensual without being an unattainable role model. It taught women that taking the lead in the bedroom wasn’t outrageous, that it was okay to lose your head for a homosexual, and that not all relationships are exactly healthy.

In 1976 he sang his most internationally successful song, You start making love, an incitement to women to make their lovers understand what they wanted to do in bed. Carrà’s version appears in an episode of the TV series Doctor Who, and also Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of the film The great beauty by Paolo Sorrentino, dances to the notes of a frenetic remix of the song at his birthday party.

curiously You start making love was launched on the market together with Strong strong, a passage that contained an opposite message: the pleasure of being submissive in a relationship full of brutal sex. For Carrà, the pleasure could come from taking the initiative but also from being guided. Also in 1976 he achieved great success in Spain. The dictator Franco had just died and she was leading Raffaella’s time, singing and dancing as he did in Italy. “I was lucky, my show was aired right after big football matches, like Real Madrid-Barcelona, ​​this contributed to my success,” she told Corriere della Sera in 2018. Her influence on Spanish pop culture is was such that in 2018 the king of Spain made her a lady to the order of civil merit calling it “an icon of freedom”.

His return to Italy in 1978 was accompanied by a series of new artistic opportunities: color TV had arrived and Carrà was chosen as the host of the variety. But what an evening. The opening song Best wishes it became a hymn to sex and sexuality. The text says: “But turning my land I am convinced that / there is no hate there is no war when there is love in bed”. In one passage he sings how beautiful it is to make love from Trieste down.

In another of his provocations a But what an evening, Carrà donned a sexy nun’s dress and sang on an apple during a montage of the Beatles’ most successful songs, and the dancers whirled beneath her: the whole sequence is a hallucinated masterpiece of pioneering special effects. During the show he sang his disco music single for the first time, Luca, in which she recounts her sadness after having a crush on a “golden-haired boy”, who however cheated on her with a blond boy, and whom she has never seen again.

Queen of South America
“I only dated gays. When it got dark in the room, they didn’t try to touch you, ”he told Corriere della Sera in 2017, recalling his youthful years. Talking about homosexuality in such a frank and light way was unusual in a Catholic, repressed and puritanical country like Italy, and it is not surprising that Carrà has become an international gay icon, enough to receive the 2017 World pride award in Madrid. Twelve days after the first episode of But what an evening, on March 16, 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped and then killed the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Carrà tried to suspend the broadcast, but his request was not accepted because the program had more than twenty million viewers. The following year, in 1979, he left Italy. “I was so ashamed that I didn’t come back for a long time,” he explained in 1999.

She became a pop star and actress in South America, before returning to Europe, where since the 1980s she has taken on a more sedate role as a talk show host, which she continues to do at 77. “More applauded than Pertini, more expensive than Michel Platini, more miraculous than Padre Pio”, the weekly L’Espresso described it in 1984.

Today we are surrounded by sexually explicit songs and soliciting the pleasure of sex seems quite obvious. But Carrà was a pioneer who helped people live more fulfilling lives, using rhythms that no person with blood in their veins can resist.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)