LA BALLATA DEL MICHE 

I think this is one of my favorite songs that I've ever heard, and I am not sure if I love it more for simply the lyrics (Whcih happens with many songs I love, I re-visit them solely in text) or, because the first time I heard it, it was the artist Fabrizio DeAndre.

 I have of course written about Fabrizio one million times, I have 6 books dedicated to him, none of them are in English, I struggle through them joyously on the regular, I have heard all of his songs, lierally all of them, yet it seems that this one here "La Ballata Del Miche" is the one that comes to me most often. I actually - some readers will be surprised by this, perhaps -- but I actually tend to grab the lyrics and then rap them over a 50 Cent, or maybe a Young Thug, or a Nas, rap instrumental, when I feel my Italian skills are getting dusty and I need some good practice. I also of course just tend to want to re-visit the song because naturally it is a very sad song, which makes it so memorable, and is why I wanted to put my thoughts on it down in English writing (where this song, I assure you, has never lived before).

Where do I begin? The theme sounds like a good place: The song is about a kid named Miche (there is an accent upon the E that this silly US keyboard won't let me put) and he winds up hanging himself in a prison cell, right away in the very first verse of the song, as a result of -- the third verse tells us -- being sentenced to 20 years in prison, upon a murder charge. Who did Miche murder and why? Fabrizio explaisn in the 6th verse: Somebody in the streets somewhere made an attempt - or was at least dreaming up an attempt - of robbing a character called simply "Mari" (she also has the accent mark on the I, like Miche on the E) and ..well... Miche was obviously in love with Mari, and so what did he do when he finds out about this plot to rob her blind? He catches the thief before they can do it and then he murders them! Its beautiful....

Then of course Miche finds himself in some shit, however, because the poor bastardo gets caught, condemned , and sentenced, as before was said, to 20 years in prigione. Very sad. Very traumatizing. And maybe even, now that I am thinking about it, by our English American standards, it is a song thati s a little, who knows, "too serious" for thei nnocent and pious American audiences .

Take the verses in teh end for instance, after Miche has been found dead, hanging from the ceiling of his darkened prison cell: Fabrizio goes on to explain how , though everyone in town wants to give Miche a proper burial and a proper grave, with a Christian crucifix for a marker and all the rest, they cannot do it ... because why? Every Christian ought to know, I am sure: Becase the Church, especially the Catholic Church, "outlaws" suicide, which Miche has undoubtedly and clearly committed, having been alone in his cell, and so .. well, the poor soul is utterly screwed. He will not get a proper burial. The Church will not acknowledge Miche's end. The absolute final verse ends with Fabrizio telling us how "tomorrow someone will find the wet Earth in which Miche's body has been buried, and they'll pstick a little cross with his name on it, into the soil..." But that's all he will get. He won't get anything more. The priest will not say a mmass, "non hanno pieta"...they do not have pity.

I think the thing I find so fascinaing about this song is that , in complete spite of the very tragic story it tells, it has one of the absolute happiest melodies -at least to me - in Fabrizio's ouevre. It is not necessarily a dancing song; but it isn't a funeral dirge either. The melody , which seems to include a flute of some sort, unless I am remmbering it wrong, is unbelievably catchy. And something really tells me again that perhaps a song like this, if it were to even exist in our US catalogue, would probably sound intensely sad if it did exist.

 Unlike Fabrizios version you would, more likely than not, hear the deathand the sadness,  in the American version of the song. You would hear the suicide. The American and/or English artists wouldn't let you miss it. They certainly would not play around with the subject lightly. Yet here in La Ballata Del Miche, that is in fact almost exactly what he does: There is a sort of strange sarcastic undercurrent to the entire song, where you can tell it is sort of meant to make you chuckle, as though it is a comedy rather than a tragedy.

 It isn't to say Fabrizio isn't taking the topic of Miche's unfortunate suicide seriously, because he definitely pities the character, as the final verse makes evident with the crucifix in the grave, and his condemnation of the Church's idealogy on suicide, but he's also sort of seeing the..ahem..humor in it...and every time I listen to it, I feel this humor is especially evident in the chorus, which, the way he sings it with sucha happy melody, sounds absurd. "This night, our Miche..." he sings, in teh chorus, "He hung himself on a doornail,because...well, he wasn't able to stay 20 years in a prison, away from Mari..."

In Italian of course, as it is being sung, it sounds much more bello, and the tone in Fabrizios voice is, again, just sort of comical, as he sings it. To me, it is almost as though Fabrizio is saying, with each chorus,  "He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, what on earth did anyone really expect him to do? Of course he was going to kill himself!"

From an American standpoint, I can assure you, this is odd, and then too keep in mind that this song was written back in the late 60s. The idea in the English/US culture is that one must never walk away from a challenge, one must always endure to the bitter end..even if you are doing life in a dungeon.. (the news, for instance, in Sept. 2001, even tried to deny that the jumpers from the towers were jumping willfully) hence , llke I say, there would be no joking about Miche hanging himself from a doornail, because he would be considered weak, tragic, sad, blah blah, thrown away from the American song ouevre as an unacceptable character to eulogize. Let us look at the chorus for a moment in Italian just for the hell of it:

stanotte Miché 
s'è impiccato a un chiodo perché 
non poteva restare vent'anni in prigione 
lontano da te 

And of course after each chorus bit passes us by, the funny little flute, or maybe accordion (I am sorry, I've no idea what instrument it is) passes us by with these funny little flurries that really just , I know for a fact, would be seen as having absolutely no place in a song such as this, thsi side of the Atlantic .

Yet that is really the intense genius of the piece, and I know it is why the tune has stuck out in my mind for as long as it has, with the story and all. I've literally sat cracking up with this song, but also at other times I have listened to it, and cried, especially when he reaches the part when he explains about how Miche really just did it all for Mari' (but then, later, couldnt' find the nerve to write her, and explain the truth of the incident, instead just opting to take the secret to his grave). In a way, it is almost as though Fabrizio is even celebrating a sort of escape that Miche made, from a horrible situation, before it even truly began: "They condemned him to 20 years, the Courts decided it ought be like that," he sings in a later verse, "however, now that he's been found hanging dead, they're gonna have to open the cell doors..."

 How many other songs can really make one laugh and cry I wonder, all at once, that do not necessarily intend to do that, as it is so obvious this song did? In my opinion not many. Most of the sad songs I know dealing with sad stories just tend to make me weep, and give me a sort of melancholy happiness, instead of an actual sincere laugh.

A lot of US English songs are like that, in my opinion: They really press a severe sadness that they do not want you to miss. It is almost as though there is no in between when it comes to the US mood. And beyodn that as well, humor and sarcasm does not tend to be thought of as having a place, at least in my experience, when one is listening to very serious (or "real adult") music. For instance, I have often tried to explain that, if you look at a Nobel prize winner like Bob Dylan, you'll see that he tried to be funny in the very beginning of his career, but once he was signed, and had respect, the entire humorous part of his act vanishes in the blink of an eye.

This also took place to a lesser extent with someone like Bruce Springsteen, if you look into him, who came later than Bob, but fell under the same cultural expectations: Springsteen was often hilarious in the beginning of his career, but once he was taken up and viewed as someone to examine and so forth, once Rolling Stone magazine sort of tosses him in the same pile as being "...a poet like Bob..", you'll see he spins off into this very dreary and almost permanently gloomy realm of seriousness, and the humor is no more. It can be hard for me to re-visit Springsteen these days, for this exact reason. I love much of his work, but he's often absurdly depressed in the more mature part of hi career. Just for the record, John Mellencamp seems to be as well. In fact, poor Mellencamp has the depressiong thing 50 times worse....

 Fabrizio tends to spray many sorts of topics down wit humor though, straight through his career, until he was an elder in the late 90's, I've noticed, and he does not just  "joke" lightly about suicide, throwing lyrics in regards to it on top of clearly humurous melodies; but also even , say, the subject of beautiful women who decide to become prostitutes and so on. He is always throwing little bits of sarcasm and humor and comedy onto the topics that we would never, here, see as anything but the most serious topics of all time.

 Fabrizio even has a song about a transgendered character, and yes, it is simultaneously serious...but also somehow hilarious. "Fernandino is really just like a daughter," he sings from the point of view of a mother in the transgendered song, "and she used to bring to my bed coffee and tapioca in the mornings like a nice daughter would, and it's simply absurd to think of her as a boy." This was written in the early 1990's, or maybe even in the 1980s!

And again, he isn't trying to be serious but accidentally coming off as funny.No! He is intending, clearly, for both reactions. He does it constantly. I notice now, in fact, as I think it all over, that I did not quite see this all too clearly when I first stared to haer him, but now as I look at it more and more, it starts to pop out: He approaches all of these topics across the board with this mood that I just know the Americn based "respected" songwriters never do.

 Take one of his most famous songs over In italy, far more famous than La Ballata Del Miche, which is one of the first ones I ever heard from Fabrizio ,that a girl from Naples used to sing into the telephone to me, r epeatedly: Bocca di Rosa, or "Mouth of Red". Fabrizio paitns an absolutely hilarious scene of a red lipsticked prostitute in some small Italian village who eventually the whole town decides to go against, and who they kick out, but then, the second they're all there at the train station waving goodbye and good riddance, they already begin to deeply regret their choice, and want her back in the town. They realize at the last moment that Bocca di Rosa was,a fter all, bringing something pleasant to the town, she was bringing a sort of "love"... or "amore".

 The chorus again, just like the Miche song, seems to trivialize a topic that I feel would never be trivialized in the halls of American and English "serious songs":

There are they who make the love because they're bored,
Then there are those who choose it strictly for a profession,
With Bocca di Rosa, it was really neither one or the other
She did it all, and she did it just for the passion 

We then go on to find out how, after Bocca di Rosa's train has departed from the one little village, twice as many people have already gathered at the train station in the *next* village, eagerly her awaiting her arrival, who cannot wait to send her kisses, and who hope she now take up residence there instead et cetera.

 The song is hilarious in my opinion, and certainyl a very 'poignant' portrayal of prostitutes, that, in this English country, I again just cannot imagine being heard in anything except perhaps a rap song ...and yet evn there, a woman like Bocca di Rosa would be portrayed as something filthy and wrong and diseased, or just some object to be used for amusement, rather than as the comical, light hearted, human being that she is here, who we actually almost connect with on a semi-profound level. For the Bocca di Rosa that Fabrizio writes into existence is not interpreted as being at all dirty, and beyond that, she is the absolute star of the song. If it were a film, she would be the main character.

Indeed the entire song is as light hearted as can be, and always fun to run through. The Neapolitan girl who used to sing it into the telephone to me would laugh and laugh about it for hours. I just cannot imagine ..I've never heard of a song like this happening here in English Land...

Take that old song 'Roxanne" by the Police (how strange, the Police) for instance. The song is about Sting singing to the lady Roxanne, a prostitute, telling her "you don't have to turn on the red light" et cetera. In my opinion, the song isn't really at all intended to be funny, and there is absolutely no sarcasm in it either. Sting is a caring charactr in the song, I suppose, he wants to help Roxanne, he's in love wit h her, sure...but at the same time, he isn't really  amusedb y her, he's instead just worried,.... and actually maybe he himself is upset, and angry over it all. The song seems rather desperate to me; it is nothing like the Bocca di Rosa one. You can tell Sting is seriously bothered by what Roxanne is doing, and he quite clearly wants to try to alter her decisions....

 After all, the only thing that sticks out in my mind now as I try to pull up my memory of the song, is Sting screaming "Roxane, you don't have to put on the red light!"  over and over again, in a rather distraught way. To me this speak volumes about the general perspectives our two cultures have in regards to these "vices": One culture wants to try to weed 'em out until they vanish, the other one is rather ashamed, but still somehow able to see that they are a part of life, as well. It is ashame that Miche had to die the way he did, and it is ashame, perhaps, that Bocca di Rosa has to live as she does but ... so too are many other things a shame, and we laugh about thoset hings , too. Humor is certainly not always the best medicine but sometimes it is all that is there....
It is hard to say I guess; but there definitely seems to be some sort of difference here, between the 2 styles of songwriting, and again the most important factor that one must remember is that Fabrizio DeAndre is not seen as a pop singer in Italy, but rather as a serious poet, on the exact same level as our Bob Dylan.

He is seen as somebody you can cherish both on the page and off, as someone who both rich and poor can listen to, who both the unlearned and the learned can appreciate equally. Dylan has enormous flashes of these qualities t o him, but ultimately, and especially now in this modern age I have noticed, post- rap music, he has fallen out with the unlearned not entirely -- but definitely rather seriously. I initially started to examine Bob Dylan through what I thought were unlearned characters here in my town (and I was amazed by their interest) but I then came to discover that there had been a somewhat learned and far, far older brother figur who had introduced them. So, in a sense, as ridiculous as this analyzation might sound, the truth is that Dylan perhaps has actually fallen out entirely with the new young unlearned in this country. Which is a very bad thing, because then the message is lost entirely.

 He is now very much seen as someone belonging to a specific class of people in my opinion, as someone only a certain "sort" of person would listen to.

This is also kind of the case with the Police too, who had the song about the prostitute, but totally opposite: They were granted the right to pen a song about a prostitute, but that band is seen as a joke band, and in fact you might have noticed that Sting has been trying to escape that hole of not being taken seriously for about 20 years now, but still hasn't managed.

DeAndre on the other hand is suffering a little bit from the unlearned in Italy being intimidated by him, it seems, but not nearly as badly as Dylan. The occasional pop star or rapper in Italy will gladly reference him as someone they have heard, and appreciated, even if they do not necessarily perform his style.

 I do find this abililty to liv on further, again in both the halls o the learned and unlearned, fascinating, because  for years, here in the States, I could not fathom how it almost completely evaded Dylan, and I was upset by it,  and one big part of the reason goes back to this lack of comedy, I am now seeing : Bob Dylan looks absolutely miserable and very, very grim, and his songs now, since about 1990, hell 1980, actually, have sounded grim, as well. I appreciate the grimness of many of his numbers of course; but the probelm is that it is a bit overdone . It is literally every latter day song he has written. He never really jokesa round, at all. And I feel the reason for this is because he eventually became the actor of what he interpreted an older American man as being and having to be, which is a rather grim, gloomy, I do not laugh or play aroun with silliness, and I do not associate with "those" people sort of character.  When you look at Fabrizio it simply never happened: he goes on being a goofball and also a serious (if not even more vivid poet and mature poet than Dylan at times) right until the end....

Another thing I find fascinating, but is perhaps off topic, is the very different Father and Son [musical] relationship that exists in the stories of both these characters (Bob Dylan and Jakob Dylan, Fabrizio DeAndre and Cristiano DeAndre) but I suppose a wiser scribbler than I will save that for another essay......

----- /END /THOUGHTS