Le dimensioni del mio caos: album outlook

It is the fourth of CapaRezza's albums.
It is somehow revolutionary because of the way it's organized and put together.
The album is in fact a phononovel, a neologism created by CapaRezza himself to describe his work in which every song is tied together as episodes of one single story.
Also, the album is meant to integrate the actual novel published by the artist in his first book, saghe mentali.

The story starts with CapaRezza who, during a concert in which he commemorates the revolutionary period of 1968 (period which is particularly felt in Italy by the part of the population who feels more represented by left wing parties, and more generally by the less conservative parts of the population), he opens a portal in spacetime to 1968, from which arrives Ilaria, a young Roman hippie with whom CapaRezza falls in love shortly afterwards, finding in her the purity and the integrity of conscience that he cannot find in girls nowadays.
Being given by Ilaria a political leaflet, Caparezza finds himself arrested by the police as soon as he puts it in his pocket; carrying pockets is now forbidden!
In jail he's explained by another prisoner that those weird events are happening because of Ilaria: by having travelled in time, she is in fact irreversably modifying the spacetime, therefore she has to go back.
Fact is that Ilaria is getting used pretty quickly to all of those modern customs that Caparezza despises, quicly ruining her integrity in his eyes.
Moreover, she's now engaged to the powerful leader of a political party that wants to be a mock of Berlusconi: he's really powerful, and draws support from a society which is getting more and more uneducated and caring only for superficial things and appearance.
CapaRezza will continue his quest, meeting Luigi delle Bicocche, a hard-working bricklayer that represents the oppressed lower working class with a dignity that opposes the raising regime, and that in the end will give his life to send Ilaria back and to save our world.

The title of the album, le dimensioni del mio caos , meaning the proportions of my chaos, plays on the similarity and partial assonance between the word caos - chaos -, and cazzo - dick, penis -.

Project one: CapaRezza: Le dimensioni del mio caos

I always considered music a great mean to learn a language.
Put together this and the fact that when I listen to music I pay lots of attention to the lyrics, that I love play on words, elaborate use of language and intelligent contents, and you will land straight on Caparezza (1).
The more I listened to his last album, Le dimensioni del mio caos, the more I came closer to do what I am about to start doing.


I'm going to present the lyrics from this album, translate them, and then use them as a starting point to analyze language, use of words, slang expressions, and of course contents that belong to italian culture.

Caparezza uses his music a lot as a way to talk about social problems and politics. Welcome to Italy.
Politics are one of this country's favourite passtimes, as you might already know if you live here or if you peeked your nose a little in this boiling pot that is the boot.

Trying to explain cultural sides of things can be hard. The interesting part of culture is, in my opinion, very often related with sides of everyday life that we take for granted.
So maybe sometimes some explanations will sound obvious and redundant to a, let's say, french reader, that coming from a culture that shares a relatively good amount of elements with the italian one doenst see the point in saying that politics are a big part of italian everyday life, and takes for granted that people talk about politics during family dinners or having an espresso. But it might not be as obvious to somebody else, coming from more different backgrounds as, let's say, a Japanese person or even a US citizen, in some cases.
I'll try to put into words as many cultural aspects that I can. If you want more, write to me.

Whenever possible, to explain things, I will use wikipedia, newspaper articles, and other resources i find online. In case of more than one resource available, I'll link the first or main one to the evoking word and the others to numbers between parenthesis and next to the word, as I did with Caparezza at the beginning of this post.

I intend to make clear since the very beginning that my explanations over the lyrics are ALWAYS and ONLY based on my PERSONAL OPINION and IDEAS.
This is NOT the official interpretation of the author.
Let's dive.

Getting started

This blog wants to be a first practical step into a project over which I have been mulling for quite a while.

To put it into a few words, it intends to offer a point of view and some instruments for those whom, having an interest towards Italy, it's language, and it's culture, find it hard to get beyond the widely available stereotypical offer that includes classic literature, relatively ancient history, classical music, and so on.

The focus here wants to be over culture intended as a weltanschauung, as a way to perceive and organize reality, analysed and offered to "foreign eyes" in a hopefully more understandable form.

It's a continuous work in progress, so hopefully it will grow also thanks to the cooperation of the other side - the readers - to whom it is really supposed to be useful. I hope I'll recieve feedbacks, questions, and suggestions.

I choose english as the mean to do this because I am comfortable expressing myself with this language, and also I hope it will be a mean by which it will be easier to share the contents.

Should anybody feel interested in cooperating, from whatever point of view - from translation in other languages to adding contents - feel free to contact me and let's do it!

I'd like to thank the internet for making this possible.

Let's get started!

Enjoy!