“As Long as the Boat Goes”: Singing by Metaphor in the Years of Lead

Abstract

“There is everything in the Sixties ... it is a phase of magmatic confrontation” (Colombo 1998, p. 248). Those that in Italy will be called “years of lead”, marked by the well known dramatic social and cultural changes, claim the tension of real “worlds” and “point of view of worlds” alternative, a new and an old no longer reconcilable, but forced to cohabitate. The Italian song of those years is a photograph of this situation: in it, old aspirations, imaginary, values face each other with new ones, without getting to definitively eliminate the antagonists. If it is true that the text of the most famous “ditty” of the Italian singer Orietta Berti is able to make people talk about its hidden meaning even today, it must be admitted that the musical creation of those years is a forge of “polysemic” production. “Where there is metaphor, there is conflict” (Goodman 1968, p. 67). Even in its narrative function, the metaphor presents conflict: it can have, in fact, a “selective” function or, on the contrary, an “explanatory” function, aimed at favoring the understanding of obscure things, those not easily communicable through the usual narrative practices. Keywords: metaphor, Masscult, sense and meaning, multichannel, polysemy