A Tribute to Raffaella Carrà (Guest post by Bleimann)
Today’s guest post will set you up nicely for the weekend. Madrid-based party starter Bleimann pays tribute to the great Raffaella Carrà, who died earlier this week. I associate Carrà very strongly with being surrounded by hot, sweaty Spaniards at Madrid Pride, all belting out the words to ‘Hay Que Venir Al Sur’. Enjoy that mental image and read on!
Raffaella Carrà first entered my life before I moved to Madrid, through Youtube videos of her television performances of ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’ alongside Adriano Celentano. Raffaella, blond, in a catsuit, on a pedestal, in a hall of mirrors. A goddess, sexual but also uncontrolled, shaking that hair, flinging her limbs, and contorting her body. I came to Spain, and she would appear at almost every gay night, often in the same form: videos of television performances from here, or Italy, shown on a screen in the corner of the bar. We would shout along the lyrics, whip our heads back, feeling our imaginary blond wigs move to the music.
Today, in 2021, it’s through the vault of Youtube, and not Spotify, that we can best understand what Raffaella meant. She was the uncontested queen of spettacolo in Italy, of espectáculo in Spain. It’s a word which doesn’t quite translate neatly into English: the show, entertainment, showbusiness, spectacle, performance. Raffaella was a kind of icon which could only be produced in mid-20th Century Europe, and only on television: a fixture beamed into every home, a focus of universal attention. Unavoidable, unmissable, and unmistakable. Her voice was never the strongest – in fact, its power comes from the movements between conversational speak-singing and something closer to a shout – and while she was an accomplished dancer, her characteristic movement was wild, on the verge of uncontrolled, improvised. What Raffaella did was occupy space: throwing her limbs to occupy every part of the screen, and her voice to demand undivided attention.
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Raffaella’s divadom was the contrast between this undeniable star quality on the screen, and the almost conversational nature of her lyrics. She was larger-than-life, but spoke like a wise and fabulous older aunt, living her absolute best life, and advising others to follow in her footsteps. The Carrà songbook all seems to take place in the same universe, in which men come and go, invariably disappoint, and exist to be enjoyed but never cried over. Raffaella urged women (and more than a few gays) to hunt down men, to initiate sex when they wanted it, to ditch the ones who weren’t up to scratch, and to cure their pains on the dancefloor. In Italy, she was a rebel in the era of Christian Democrat hegemony; in Spain, one of the first true icons of the social revolution which followed the death of Franco and the transition to democracy.
Even almost 50 years later, it’s still an aspirational message. Perhaps its greatest expression is in ‘Tanti Auguri’/‘Hay Que Venir Al Sur’, her transcendent contribution to the canon of gay anthems:
Each gay anthem fills a particular need, and serves us in a particular moment. Our divas console us, tell us that we’ll make it through, offer fabulous takedowns of deficient lovers, odes to missed connections, and reminders of our independence and self-worth. Raffaella gave us something different: a model of living to aspire to, even as it may be impossible to reach, in which the tribulations of love and disappointment are shrugged off without missing a beat. In which we love and fuck often, well, and passionately, with whoever we want to, without getting hung up on how long it might last. In which all of life, the good and the bad, is to be taken by the horns and danced to.
So, adiós, Raffaella. We’ll probably never have a star of your magnitude again – modern forms of entertainment distribution make your universality impossible to achieve. But in place of watching you on television alongside an entire nation, we have our own new forms of commonality, where gays and women around the world for years will delve into the bottomless archive of your performances, interviews, and videos in digital posterity, find their own entry points into your stardom, and find the same inspiration that others have found for decades. A true diva never dies.