Wednesday, April 15, 2009

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.

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