Italian singer Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” hit the #1 pop song spot on the Italian charts in 1972. The lyrics consist of gibberish designed to sound like English. My brain tries to extract meaning from the nonsense words even though it knows there’s nothing there. It’s also a great song!
Italian singer Adriano Celentano wrote the song to mimic the way he thought American English sounded. “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” said Celentano during a 2012 interview with All Things Considered. “I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”
Related: How English sounds to non-English speakers
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