Not being well up on Italian hits of the early 70s, I only learned about this today, but I think it’s great.
In 1972, the singer Adriano Celentano released a single called ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’. The words are gibberish, but intended to sound like someone singing in English with an American accent – or at least, how such a song sounds to a non-English speaker.
“Ever since I started singing”, he once said, “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 only 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.”
(Here’s a direct link – your browser may give you a better viewer than the player above.)
According to Wikipedia, the song was very popular, reaching the top 10 in several European countries, and, if you search, you can find a couple of other versions featuring Celentano, and tributes by numerous groups since. But this is my favourite; I certainly found my foot tapping to its beat… and I thought the choreography with mirrors was great!
All of this reminded me of a trip to Indonesia in my youth, where I ended up playing guitar with a group of guys who thought that Eric Clapton sang about “Snog, Snog, Snogging on Seventh Floor”. (I wrote a post about this and about ‘Mondegreens’ a little while ago… let’s see… gosh! – even that post was more than 16 years ago!)
Anyway, today I started down this particular rabbit-hole thanks to Charles Arthur pointing me at a Twitter thread containing some other linguistic gems, including this clip of Sid Caesar’s performance at one of Bob Hope’s birthday parties sometime in the 80s. A five-minute comedic performance with almost no words that can be understood by anybody:
(Link)
Wonderful stuff.
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