Verità Supposte

Caparezza

I love to sing in German. German is, in some ways, as close as you’ll get to turning a drum set into a language, so it seems a bit strange to say that it’s a pleasant language to sing in. That said, I find something immensely satisfying about the precision of the language. All the consonants in German must be pronounced like broken twigs, and all the vowel sounds must be pronounced just so. Dies ist nicht verhandelbar. These are the rules. No deviation.

And that means, when you’re singing, that you don’t have to think about trying to make the sounds sensible, so long as you make the sounds accurately. Which is quite liberating, because it means that you can concentrate on singing the notes and giving the music expression. It’s sort of like playing an instrument at that point. Yes, there’s interpretation and there’s variation in the music, but there’s no confusion about how to make the sound. (This is something we argue about when we’re singing in English, by the way.)

In my experience, the farthest language from that shouty precision of German — at least in my brief exploration of singing in western languages — is Italian.

Italian practically sings itself. It’s such a loose, flowing language, all birds-wings and ripples in wind and water, that simply speaking it feels musical.

And you’d think that it would be a pleasant language to sing in, for that reason.

In my experience, it isn’t.

In my experience, singing in Italian is like swishing jello around my mouth. There’s just…so little shape to it, and its got progressively less integrity, to a point that you feel like you’re clumsy and falling over.

Here’s the irony: It’s a gorgeous language for rapping, Italian. Lord, if you ever wondered whether rap could sound smooth and elegant, listen to some Italian rap. It feels like German should be the better language for rapping, and Italian better for melody. German is like a drum set, and Italian is like a wood wind. And there are probably some good German rappers out there, but today…I am in love with Italian as a language for rapping.

This Caparezza guy is a little like Gogol Bordello and Scroobius Pip collaborated to make a human.

And I like it.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s linguistic exploration. It was…an adventure.

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