Propiedad Prohibida
by Franco Battiato
“There was a time between the 60s and the early 90s when Italian music was very exciting. Italy was famous for Prog-Rock bands like PFM, Le Orme and Area, the Italian Disco of Giorgio Moroder, and for ”
“I cantautori” (songwriters) like Fabrizio De Andrè, Lucio Dalla or Battisti. Then, the 90s arrived with bands like Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti, Casino Royale and Subsonica becoming pretty popular, even for a mainstream audience.
I'm Italian, and thinking about those good old days full of inspiring musicians makes me feel nostalgic in a period of musical and artistic decline like the one we are experiencing now. There's a lot of great music in Italy still today, but I'm afraid, very distant from the glory of the past.
“We recently lost one of our finest artists: Franco Battiato.”
Battiato is one of those musical figures that transcend the mere concept of music. He was many things: an electronic music pioneer, a poet, a singer-songwriter, composer, filmmaker, even a painter, and, in my opinion, he was a philosopher too.
“When he passed away in 2021, all of Italy stopped to remember his career, life, and music.”
He brought his sophisticated music and concepts to substantial commercial success, especially in the early 80s when he started composing pop music.
He was born in Sicily in 1945, and after a period as a songwriter, his music became increasingly experimental. From 1971, Battiato dedicated much of his energy to experimental electronic music, producing a series of LPs that remained almost wholly undiscovered back then but are now celebrated by collectors worldwide. Fetus (1971), Pollution (1972), Sulle Corde di Aries (1973) weren't really understood at the time. They gained a new relevance more recently as seminal works, inspiring generations of musicians.
In 1974, he released his fourth album Clic. Dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, the album shows stylistic similarities with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Tangerine Dream, but it's more lyrical, a fundamental aspect of Battiato's production. The vast majority of his songs (if not all of them) contain esoteric, philosophical, and religious themes.
Propiedad Prohibida is the track I chose to talk about and, in my opinion, stands out the most in the album. The track starts with a drone synth sound, soon joined by a VCS3 arpeggiator with looped melodies and a Saxophone that reminds me of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. Battiato sang and played piano, keyboards, VCS3, mandola, crystals, and metals. This was another characteristic element of Battiato's personality and production, as he was brilliant and sarcastic.
His strong personality led him to participate in the overwhelming complexity of Italian politics when, in 2012, he accepted an offer from a newly elected Sicilian regional president to become the new Regional Minister for Tourism and Culture, proclaiming he would not take any compensation for the job.
The experience, though, didn't last long.
Battiato was fired soon after his controversial claim that there were "troie in Parlamento" (whores within Parliament). He wasn't exactly a typical Italian politician.
Because of its style and the electronic music scene exploding in the early 70s worldwide, it isn't a surprise to find Propiedad Prohibida as the opening track for the English version of the album that Island Records published in 1974. In the original tracklist, the song is part of Side B.
The English version apparently didn't have a booklet because it consisted of a statement Battiato wrote about the album: "First of all let's start saying that we all are composers and that it is now forbidden the acoustic ownership in the strict sense of the term.
If, for example, I write a piece of music and I play it to you since we are a lot different (we have different interests, education, brains, etc), my music inside of yourself changes completely. At this stage, you are the composer, I just provided you the sound material, more or less inspiring, but your elaborations (at least for now) are different from mine".
