How The Arts Can Make Understanding from Gibberish

Italian artist Adriano Celentano created the song below which hilariously demonstrates how English sounds to foreign speakers. Using gibberish words, he concocts a consonant heavy, drawn-out and at times grunty language which sounds eerily similar to our speech.


The video, despite its hopefully purposeful kitsch-iness, is quite extraordinary because it gives us a peek at ourselves through the eyes of others. Charles Horton Cooley calls this phenomenon “The looking glass self.” Essentially, we perceive who we are as individuals by the interactions that we have with others. If they treat us like we’re talented and beautiful, we believe ourselves to be, whether we are or not. Likewise, if people treat us like pariahs and failures, we will come to think the same.

So if we are constantly mirroring others’ perceptions of ourselves, how do we form our identity as a city, a community, a country or a continent? We understand a certain amount through news reports and the occasional visit abroad. But what makes this video notable is that art is used, with great efficacy, to tell us more than a thousand words could. Without saying a single sensible thing, Adriano Celentano provided an interesting portrait of our communication style. If you are like me, you might have asked yourself one hundred questions while watching. Things like, “I wonder how different Italian would sound if I learned the language? I wonder if our language makes the whole English-speaking world appear to have a certain type of personality? Does this make English sound brazen and fun or silly and weird?” In six minutes, he opened a window into the soul of how we relate ourselves to the world.

In certain ways, art is a much purer form of understanding than words. When language acts as a barrier, restricting understanding to only those we can speak with, the arts act as an open door. It causes us to relate at an almost primal level, taking into account our similarities as well as our differences. For those of us in education, it is easy to relate art as a way that we can come to understand discrete cultures, languages, neighborhoods and ethnicities that exist within our educational system. As our classrooms become more diverse, the arts can serve not only as a way to spur the mind but to spur understanding. In fact, James Catterall noted in his book “Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art” that schools offering rich dramatic and artistic experiences demonstrate better race relations among students and show that students show greater levels of empathy. By providing artistic exeriences to our youth, we are giving them the ability to succeed in a multi-national, ever-changing world.

How has art or your creative endeavors helped you bridge gaps in your life?