An essay by Giorgio De Maria
Translated by Ramon Glazov
[Translator’s Note: The term “screamer” in this piece is a literal rendering of the Italian urlatore—pl. urlatori—a wave of energetic pop-rock singers who emerged in Northern Italy at the start of the 1960s and have rough cousins in French yé-yé, the early Beatles and certain Jacques Brel tunes such as “Mathilde.”
Though 1960s jukebox hits seem mild compared to the rock genres that would succeed them, De Maria’s extraordinarily visceral analysis of the “screamer” phenomenon gives an early taste of the subjects that would obsess him in the darker period when he conceived The Twenty Days of Turin.]
In an interview with the singer Tony Dallara reproduced below,* we find certain statements that might provide an inroad to understanding the near-magical allure of the “screamer” ballad—an allure that has proven especially strong for the younger generations.
Dallara, in short, doesn’t believe there’s anything new or surprising about the genre he is said to have “invented.” Youngsters like him were fed up with soppy tunes where they kept stumbling across the word “love” and the tears of rejected crooners. They demanded something else, something that agreed better with their youthful impulses. Dallara being, by his own definition, a “truthful” singer, incapable of affectation, did nothing more than listen to his instincts and take charge. The result was that his songs, almost by magic, seemed revolutionary: capable, that is, of quenching his unruly desires and those of his audience.
The conviction with which our singer-songwriter spoke about “sincerity,” with regards to his own way of doing things and to screamers in general, implied that this much-vaunted sincerity perhaps held the secret of the matter. And that his “taking charge” was little more than a better way to reveal and expose whatever still lay unexposed and unrevealed. Compared to his fellow screamers, then, the old crooners would seem like individuals trapped in a kind of melodious prudery. They were close to being hypocrites, never daring to express in plain words all the things that their songs implied.
From analyzing literary texts, we have seen how forcefully the element of narcissism appears in Italian popular music, blossoming from a state of near-endless frustration. So, to examine the screamers as the spiritual renovators of the Italian pop song, we need to consider the “scream factor” itself, endowed with powers that are unique in their own right, which the devotees of crooning had perhaps lacked. But it’s precisely this “scream factor” that leads us to suppose that if something new has happened in the music world, it’s not a case of evolution, but a regression to a psychological state that had already existed.
A scream, on its own—when it doesn’t indicate a genuine discovery of the world, full of childlike wonder—seldom means anything joyful. The voices within the song, high-pitched and strident, are often a musical emblem of pain. The musicologist Alan Lomax noted this studying the voices of Mediterranean folksingers from Spain and Southern Italy†—regions saddled with strong sexual repression. While the songs of northern peoples (referring, of course, to traditional works and not commercial pop) lean toward deep voices and relaxed melodies, in southern cultures the anguish of repression manifests itself in songs that are strident with frequent wailing. If the cause for our own screamers’ anguish is found in the lifestyle imposed by Northern Italy’s industrialized society, rather than in the moral traditions of the peasant south, we still can’t deny that a similar agitation exists deep within them. And perhaps the following passage from Lomax could be said just as well for the disciples of Adriano Celentano and Tony Dallara:
The day we fully learn the relationship between the vocal means essential to the expression of the emotions and how these connect to styles of singing, another big step will have been made in the field of scientific musicology. But in this particular case—regarding vocalists in Southern Italy—a few preliminary observations can be shared with the reader. When a human being lapses into an outburst of intense pain, it emits a series of sustained, doleful notes in an extremely shrill voice.
Grown adults too, just like children, scream in pain. To do this, the head is cast back and the jaw thrust forward; the soft palate draws near to the throat; the uvula tightens so that a small stream of air bursts out at high pressure to the top, vibrating the hard palate and the sinus. An easy try-at-home experiment ought to convince anyone that this is the best way to scream or moan. If, in the midst of it, you should open your eyes slightly (because if you’ve tried following my instructions they will be closed automatically) you will see your brow furrowed, your face and neck reddened, the facial muscles under your eyes pinched tight and your throat stretched by the effort.
The lyrics of screamer songs, those composed at least when the trend had already made its mark on sales, reveal their emotional origin clearly enough. Such goes for the song “Hate” [“L’odio”], which could well be considered the “Manifesto of Screamerism”:
Hate is all that burns in my heart,
After the love comes the hate!
[. . .]
(FROM “L’ODIO” BY U. BINDI/G. CALABRESE)
And much of that negative tension remains unaltered, even when the language being hurled about is otherwise tender. Such is the case with the Domenico Modugno song “Millions of Sparks” [“Milioni di scintille”], where the lover, having erupted into a flurry of schizoid imagery all because his favorite girl told him yes, overwhelms his song with repetitions of, “She said yes! She said yes! She said yes!” which are gradually lost in a limbo of onanistic desperation.
While in old crooner songs the “smoldering desire” was often veiled in allegory and softened by the melody, the new screamer compositions announce it in more explicit terms. “I want you, I want you, I want only you,” the rumba-rocker sings. “It’s you I want,” and he adds: “The joy, the agony, the fever—my desire for you is burning—because I want you—I want you to be mine.” The singer never happens to reach the object of his yearnings, but the song finally quietens into satiety. The bowstring of desire tenses back almost to the brink of snapping, and that’s where it stays, showing the lover caught in the throes of his spasm, yet perversely happy to display his state to others.
The typical fan of this genre isn’t content to hear it at a normal sound level. Rather, he feels a need to raise the speaker volume to its maximum limits, as if hoping to remove every obstacle between himself and the screamer. His is not the attitude of a person who listens to music and contemplates it, but of someone who immerses himself physically in its element and yearns to form a part of it. The screamer, with his anonymous spasms, is the listener himself with his indiscriminate sexuality; the effrontery of the voices erupting from the jukebox is the same effrontery as the listener’s, who, by virtue of the example he has been given, can finally shed the veils of his modesty. It might be said that screamer songs allow their audiences to strip bare while remaining clothed, to taste all the sordid thrills of carnal exhibitionism without officially crossing the line. It is, indeed, a kind of sanctioned transgression. The fact then that we are dealing not with an open, freely vented sexuality, but a repressed, wishful desire, reveals precisely the vocal style used by the screamers: intense, almost strangled at birth, as if a contradictory force were preventing it from expanding according to its natural cadence. It is here that we find a “sincere” rejection of the non-spontaneous.
And yet the songs scream, which—more than in any other popular music today—prompts the thought of an inward petrification, a coagulating interior, sometimes following the path of a rhythmic scheme that might even carry more than just a vocal or muscular spasm. Examining the lyrics of some of the latest songs in the genre, we could say that there is at least the attempt to exorcise the petrification, to escape it somehow. And here lies an ominously amusing side to the screamers.
Let’s take the example of a successful “cha-cha-cha” song, “When the Moon is Full” (“Quando c’è la luna piena,” A. De Lorenzo/G. Malgoni). We can observe three new features that contrast with tunes from the so-called “melodistic” or crooner repertoire: (1) the abolition of the chorus, (2) the lack of rests or pauses in the melodic pattern, (3) the stream of notes almost hitting back at each other, or at least with minimal space between them.
What should we read from innovations like these? What are the screamers aspiring for in their displays of rhythm? The recurrence of rhythmic sounds, duplicated obsessively and at length, have a noted effect on human beings. In his book The Story of Jazz, critic Marshall Stearns describes how during a visit to Haiti he had the good fortune of attending a primeval ceremony where:
For three or more hours, the housnis, or priestesses, danced and sang a regular response to the houngan’s cries, while the drum trio pounded away hypnotically. In a back room was an oven-like altar. Within the oven was a tank of water containing a snake, sacred to Damballa, and on top of this altar was a second, smaller one, containing a blonde baby doll of the Coney Island variety and a statuette of the Madonna, twin symbols of Ezulie, goddess of fertility and chastity.
About eleven o’clock the lid blew off. Drinking from a paper-wrapped bottle, the houngan sprayed some liquid out of his mouth in a fine mist and the mambos, or women dancers, became seized with religious hysteria, or “possessed,” much like an epileptic fit. The rest of the group kept the “possessed” ones from hurting themselves. I saw one young and stately priestess, who had earlier impressed me with the poise and dignity of her dancing, bumping across the dirt floor in time with the drums. The spirit of Damballa, the snake god, had entered her.‡
Most likely, the screamers also hope to attain this kind of “possession,” an epileptic seizure that would at last free them from their possibly unbearable emotive tension. Except that their final payoff is nipped in the bud. The screamer indeed follows—if only to a modest extent—a pattern common to certain primordial ceremonies (of which Marshall Stearns’s account might serve as a textbook case). But instead of patiently waiting for the convulsive, liberating phenomenon to display itself, the screamer forestalls it from the first beat, leading to a self-denial of his only remaining outlet. Anyone who has seen Adriano Celentano in performance will recall the muscular spasms that alter his face and persona completely when he sings. He perfectly mimics the early warning signs of a seizure, though the actual attack never arrives, but lasts it out, so to speak, in a dormant cramplike condition. The screamer would like to take a sort of revenge against the industrialized society by regressing, at least in his intentions, to a primitive state. That “noble savage,” however, that he wants to reawaken in himself comes to life with all the neurotic symptoms of modern man—incapable, by his very alienation, of true spontaneity. And out of this comes the tragic fixity of the screamer’s song.
In one guise, even the syncopated works of yesterday offered something like this. A divide, similar to the one between screamers and crooners, already existed in the landscape of Italian popular song in the years between 1939 and 1943. That time saw the escalation of polemics between devotees of Rabagliati, Bonino and Natalino Otto—the exponents of the “American style”—and champions of classic “Italian-style” works by Othello Boccaccini and Oscar Carboni, among others. With its jazzy origins, syncopated music came wrapped in an aura of “primitivism,” even if this was rather domesticated. Yet there as well, despite the rhythmic twitches, the tuneful spasms, the frequent restatements of musical phrases, no “unprompted” event overtook the performance. The “frenzy” was limited to skimming across the syncope within the confines of the beat, where the energy was built up and released whenever the time signature was marked and consequently sidestepped. The gestures best suited to express jazz’s effects on mind and body were the mechanical tapping of feet, the hebephrenic wobbling of the head. All the same, there a certain phenomenon of “internal uplift” occurred, which no longer appears in the songs we are examining, where the “paralysis” is almost absolute. Syncopated music, while breaking up the primordial arc into many short, serial convulsions, still allowed its participants the ersatz feeling of free movement within the boundaries of society’s cage, a certain margin of independence at their disposal. And indeed this explains why jazz caught on so deeply in American culture before becoming a more commercialized form of expression: with its innocuous frenzies, it nicely conveyed the limits put aside for individual freedoms by a society set on making human rights coexist beside a program involving the total leveling of tastes and mores. The consumer of syncopated music appears as the model everyman for a world ready to give every guarantee of personal liberty, so long as he keeps to the rules of communal life; he shows how to have fun while remaining in his assigned place. Whatever his area of work or struggle is in reality, in musical terms it translates to the martial beat in 2/2, a rigid barrier that the Italian scions of “jazz” never tried to cross.
Of course, the champions of jazziness carried a good measure of resignation. No spirit of revolt against their social debasement seeped out of their tunes, which if anything expressed jolly approval. The figure of the U.S. Marine in Korea, who spends his breaks from active combat listening to jazz on his radio while flashing an optimistic smile, has become classic. There could not be a better image to articulate the submission of the individual to the social system into which he is inserted.
“Before the word became a means to communicate,” says Otto Fenichel,§ “the activities of the organs of speech had a purely libidinous discharge.” That axiom measures well against the spirit of those songs, but perhaps even better against the little cries and gestures that typify certain renditions of today’s screamer tunes. The “scream” isn’t always a re-creation of primordial, barbaric desires. Often enough, when the performers are called Mina or Jenny Luna, their persona appears to the listener’s imagination with the accent and demeanor of a child: a counterfeit nurseling whose gluttony isn’t set on candy bars or lollipops, but the sexual morsels of adulthood. The disciples of the scream, prone as if facing the anonymous altar of Sex, and who seem ready to say that they have found a sort of all-purpose panacea in this deity, fall back on all the tricks and cantrips they can muster so they can worship undisturbed. So the voice of childhood, the epitome of innocence, becomes the screen behind which the listener takes refuge without the hassles of his conscience: a voice that corrupts him and all the while absolves him in a climate of Arcadian debauchery.
It’s hard to say whether it’s better to remain the serfs of an organized industrial society rather than fall into an anarchy of instincts. Whatever the case, the screamers’ fan base, instead of resigning themselves to their condition of alienation, as fans of syncopated music did in their own time, seem to present themselves as men in revolt, with their hands waving the banner of Sex like a battle standard of freedom. A curious fantasy indeed, seeing that it reduces all of their emancipatory demands to something that, as long as social mutilation continues and no real effort is made to surmount it, they will never reach: the heights of a satisfied love. Yet it’s likely that anyone keen on the screamer genre is only seeking a kind of analytical pleasure out of sex, a voyeuristic sea change from the visual sphere to the auditory. Incapable, due to his unripe spirit, of reaching a full image of love occurring, the consumer of screamer songs shrinks back, centering his attention on specific, fragmentary descriptions of the reality to which he would aspire; and the screams would be an attempt—certainly in vain—to instill heat into those frigid descriptions. Why else spend so much energy, such peristaltic emphasis, on underlining what’s already too easily clear?
* From a conversation between the author and Tony Dallara, recorded at the Circolo Aurora in Collegno on the seventh of December 1960:
GIORGIO DE MARIA: Do the lyrics of a song feel important to you?
TONY DALLARA: Very important. The music and lyrics have to blend well for a good song to succeed.
GDM: In other words, the lyrics mean something too?
TD: Today, yes. The public pays attention to the words. But once upon a time, no, because the songs back then were all identical, all copies of each other like they came from the same mold. All the songs spoke about love, about kisses, “my treasure”; and the melodies were all identical, tedious, always the same thing; even the crooners had to sing, all of them, in the same style. But today, no—finally! Because these are songs that come straight from the hearts of young people like us. We’ve adapted them and sung them how we wanted. And now, as things are today, we listen to music and words alike, and they are very important.
[. . .]
GDM: What advice would you give to a singer who’s just starting out?
TD: For a singer who’s just starting out, my first word of advice would be not to imitate anyone—if they want to have a personality, if they want to become somebody. They have to first of all sing what they feel; they shouldn’t let themselves be influenced, but instead they should sing differently from other people. If they don’t do that, they’ll never be anything.
GDM: Do they have to believe in what they’re singing? If they deliver a song that’s powerfully sad or dramatic, do they have to be sad themselves or does it make no difference if they don’t give a hoot?
TD: That’s a different case from singer to singer. There’s the singer who wants to make a craft out of singing, and he does it; from the moment he cries or laughs, he does what he has to do. But I, following my own approach, always sing about myself. However I sing, that’s what my feelings are; in other words, I’m not capable of invention. If I have to say something, I sing it. I’m completely sure of what I sing, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t sing it.
† Alan Lomax, “Nuova ipotesi sul canto folkloristico nel quadro della musica popolare mondiale,” in Nuovi Argomenti, pp. 17–18, Rome, November 1955–February 1956.
‡ Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz, Oxford University Press, New York, 1956.
§ Otto Fenichel, Trattato di psicoanalisi delle nevrosi e delle psicosi, Rome: Astrolabio, 1951, p. 355.