This is one of my favorite composers. Ennio Morricone
When I first discovered him, I had no idea what spaghetti western meant. All my life I had not had much direct contact with Clint Eastwood’s’ career and found no reason to go and find out what all the talk was about.
It wasn’t until my 24th year that I came to know a man who admired Eastwood beyond just a normal human being. This man is 20 years my senior and had been inculcated as a child with visions of Eastwood as a strong virulent male, a cultural icon of masculinity. His own father appeared to him as a spineless sap in comparison to the theatrical masculinity of Eastwood. Masculinity is the characteristics or attributes that are typical or appropriate for a man, and since typicalness and appropriateness are in constant flux we look to a few sources to find out how to become what we will. Our fathers can provide an example or counter example, the movies and other media can give us other ideas about what is appropriate and typical, if our fathers are absent in our lives we are forced to look further into other male role models, and in other cases we are to learn masculinity extraneously through a female role model.
Whatever the influence, if a human being is not careful they might find themselves losing touch with what “masculinity” was describing in the first place. What if its typical/appropriate for a man to be more like a young boy and treat his wife more like his mother than his wife?
To end this thread, and get back to the term spaghetti western.
All those movie scenes that created such a strong (distorted) vision of masculinity also created a strong vision of what the old American west was like. Spaghetti western is named as such because they were generally created by Italians and shot in Italy.
Anyway, check out this song. called Chi Mai.
I had the idea to make a full set of beats based on the soundtracks from Spaghetti westerns and got started with a few. So, deeper I delved into the concept of the peoples view of the American west being shaped by images of Italy, men and women’s views of masculinity being shaped through figures like “the man with no name” .
This is the one I constructed using Chi Mai
