Svalutation and the end of linguistic borders

There came a moment when Italians started saying that an artist had “droppato” a record, that you need to “switchare” from one job to another, or that something had “triggerato” them - English verbs dressed up with Italian endings. Today this way of speaking sounds natural to us. But someone had already sensed, fifty years ago, that the Italian language would start to merge with English, until it became the portrait of a world ever more connected and ever less willing to recognise itself within the old borders.

That someone was Adriano Celentano.

In 1976 he released Svalutation, an album remembered above all for its irony and its critique of 1970s Italy. Listening to it again today, though, you realise it also tells of the beginning of a cultural and linguistic transformation that has gone on to run right through our present.

Celentano’s critical and poetic portrait of Italy rests on short lyrics and incisive lines that do not try to pile up complexity, but take the universality of the commonplace and turn it into a tool for observing reality.
They speak of the decay of politics, and of economic mismanagement that had driven the country into runaway inflation:

Cambiano i governi niente cambia lassù
c’è un buco nello Stato dove i soldi van giù
svalutation, svalutation.

(Governments change, nothing changes up there / there’s a hole in the State where the money goes down / svalutation, svalutation.)

But there is also property speculation, with the huge housing estates that ruined city skies, filling the horizon with building sites and concrete.

I want to know
Come fa la gente
A concepire
Di poter vivere
Nelle case d’oggi
Inscatolati come le acciughe
Nascono i bimbi che han già le rughe.

(I want to know / how people can / imagine / being able to live / in today’s houses / tinned like anchovies / babies are born already wrinkled.)

And once again it is the language that strikes us.
The fusion of Italian and English running through Svalutation is not a mere stylistic device. It is the intuition of a language that would gradually stop recognising its own borders. A language in which foreign words are not simply imported, but absorbed and reinvented.
Celentano seemed to have already caught its direction.

Senza andare in là
l’America è qua.

(No need to go over there / America is right here.)

You may like this evolution or not. But before judging it, it is worth asking where it comes from. One possible answer lies in the hyperconnection of our time, which has us living in a cultural space increasingly shared with people very far away.

So it makes sense to say that these contaminations are not an impoverishment of Italian, as we often hear. They are rather a spontaneous, imperfect attempt to build a language able to transcend borders we no longer feel are ours. Borders people keep dying for, senselessly.

Nessuno che ci insegni a non uccidere c’è
si vive più di armi che di pane perché
assassination, assassination.

(There’s no one to teach us not to kill / we live more on weapons than on bread because / assassination, assassination.)

Perhaps this is exactly why Svalutation still speaks to the present. Not because it predicted a few words of our vocabulary, but because it sensed that every transformation of language always tells of a transformation of the world. And that the way we choose to speak says, first of all, how we choose to be together.

Il sistema c’è
quando pensi a te
pensa anche un po’ per me.

(The system’s there / when you think of yourself / think a little for me too.)