Sound Advice: Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol”

Warning: This blog post may contain images and sounds that will cause you or parts of yourself to boogie at your desk. Please refrain from doing so, unless everyone else around you is free to join you in wild, abandoned glee.

Sometimes, pure genius doesn’t have to be deep or profound. Sometimes, genius can manifest itself in nothing more than words and sounds that mean nothing at all.

In the early 1970s, politically charged Italian singer-songwriter Adriano Celentano, having written some scathing and incendiary pop music, decided that he needed to loosen up, or at least for four minutes. The result is his hit single “Prisencolinensinainciusol”.

What does the title mean? Why, nothing, of course.

Celentano stated that after writing densely, thematically-packed music, he wanted to produce something playful. "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is his brainchid. The lyrics are an approximation of what English may sound like to non-Anglophone ears. When presenting the song on Italian national television, Celentano stated that he wrote the song to show how people in modern times cannot communicate effectively with one another. (He succeeds.) The above-noted clip is amalgamated and edited from two separate TV appearances of the song. Here they are:

What makes these four minutes such an absolute joy to behold is the audacious way in which Celentano delightfully, deliberately creates joyful nonsense for the sheer hell of it. His Wikipedia page indicates that two of his biggest influences are none other than Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. Given the way he contorts his face and swivels his hips in the clip, his performance has clearly been informed by both icons.

The performance itself is genius. It is choreographed nonsense combining a perfectly synched dance troupe strutting in supreme precision. There may only be a dozen dancers in the clip, but the use of the mirrors magnifies the experience and by extension the complete and total silliness of it all.