Almost two decades ago, your article ‘Be My Yoko Ono: At 74, the singer-songwriter-artist is hitting her stride’ was published by The Globe and Mail. Nineteen years later, you sit with us for a short chit-chat. Thank you, Elio, for accepting the invitation and hopefully you’ll tell us more about Yoko’s reaction to Barenaked Ladies’s song.
On Identity and Perspective
Question: How has navigating both Italian and Canadian cultural landscapes shaped the rhythmic and thematic choices in your writing?
Elio
My parents were teenagers when La Dolce Vita—both the film and the codes surrounding it—engulfed Italy. I grew up hearing dinner-table conversations about Marcello Mastroianni’s tailored Brioni suits, Sophia Loren’s intense acting skills and her just-as-stunning eveningwear. Power ballad divas such as Mina and Ornella Vanoni and disco queen Raffaella Carrà were on constant stereo rotation. These figures went beyond Italian borders for influence—Motown, The Beatles, Yves Saint Laurent, Hollywood—all of it was interpolated into their work.
Growing up in Toronto—which is as multicultural as it gets in North America—then working, studying, and/or living in Milan, Montreal, Rome, Los Angeles, and New York, sharpened my understanding of the intersections between so many worlds. I deepened that understanding over two decades, a time I bounced around magazine mastheads as a culture editor, music journalist, arts critic, and fashion reporter. Each role had its own cadence, and I devoured them all: the staccato urgency of deadline-driven reviews, the lush sweep of a think-piece, the obsession of service journalism, and the mix of profound and superficial conversations with cultural icons. Interviewing people with such distinct artistic viewpoints taught me to look for their plurality, which, I found, often stemmed from the influence of countercultural collaborators.
On Craft Across Genres
Q: As someone who moves fluidly between fiction, non-fiction, journalism and poetry, how do you know when an idea or emotion requires the structure of an article versus the intimacy of a poem? Are they separate compartments of your intellect, or do you see them as part of a single continuous conversation?
Elio
Have you ever seen the video for Annie Lennox’s “Little Bird”? She’s onstage—very pregnant—with eight lookalikes in Lennox-drag, each embodying one of her many different personas. They all fight for the microphone while she stands there, bewildered, trying to control the situation. That video resembles my writing life. If I’m at Milan Fashion Week trying to review a Fendi show, I end up writing a poem on the front row or sketching out a short story because of something I hear or see. Then, I’ll set aside a proper day for writing fiction or poetry, only to come across an artist, designer, filmmaker or writer making something that I think a bigger audience needs to know about asap. Or I’ll hop on a news riff—say, Maria Callas’s image being proposed for the €5 banknote—and abandon all my literary-with-a-capital-L ambitions. For the Callas example, I was at the library researching for my first book and phoned one of my editors manically, insisting on doing a deep dive into the selection process, the competing illustrators, and the critical reception connected to Callas. For me, it all feels immediate and intimate. Yet every idea will find itself flung into some kind of Roman arena, surrounded by competing forms, each fighting to be the one that claims victory over it. Inspiration is often talked about as a gentle celestial caress that floats down from the heavens, kisses you on the cheek, and licks your earlobe. Or, as you suggested, as a civilized intellectual conversation. For me, it is neither. It is an unrelenting yet thrilling hostile takeover.
On Cultural Preservation
Q: In 2007, the Canadian daily The Globe and Mail published your article, the title of which echoed the Barenaked Ladies song ‘Be My Yoko Ono’. Do you think Mrs Ono was upset by the band’s lyrics?
Elio
She was amused but didn’t give those dudes much thought. I wish I had a better answer, but she was simply so much cooler than those dudes. People have no idea how prolific she is when it comes to her underground electronic dance remixes, many done with top-tier queer DJs and artists such as Peter Rauhoffer, Danny Tenaglia and The Pet Shop Boys. My best memory of Yoko comes from a previous interview I conducted, years before the Globe and Mail story ran when she turned 69 in 2002. Around 2 a.m., on the precipice of her birthday, she performed a bass-heavy remix of her sex-positive song “Open Your Box” (whose original 1971 version was banned in Britain). This was at a packed crowd of hundreds of chiselled, sweaty, nearly naked men at The Roxy, a Manhattan gay dance club. I could barely move or see her on stage, but I heard her scream, “Take off your shirts! Take off your pants!” (Most had already taken care of the first request.) Then she told us to get ready because she was going to climax all over us.
On Editorial Insights
Q: Your journalistic background puts you in constant conversation with artists, culture-makers and public figures. How has interviewing others influenced the way you approach your own creative voice?
Elio
One of my earliest jobs was as music editor and columnist for Fab, a Canadian gay lifestyle magazine. I got so much reader feedback after I wrote a feature choosing my top 25 divas of all time. Many were vehemently offended that Celine Dion or Barbra Streisand were not on the list. A particularly enflamed reader sent a creepy handwritten letter to the editorial team stating: “Elio Iannacci is a has-been who never was!” I laugh at it now, but those words shook me out and made me doubt myself completely. Then, I realized, after I started conversing with some of history’s greatest vocalists—Aretha Franklin, Eartha Kitt, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga (the list goes on… apologies for sounding so name drop-y)—that even these grand voices were shaken daily by critics, by the public, by their own managers and sometimes by their own inner circle. I noticed that many learned how to recalibrate that insecurity into something of a resource. That combo of pressure and vulnerability became a kind of performance-enhancing drug used to overstate emotionally in baroque or spectacular ways. I don’t always succeed, but I believe some of my better work adopts that same aim for audacity.
On Advice to Emerging Writers
Q: For writers trying to bridge diverse genres or tell stories rooted in personal and cultural lineage, what core principle or practice has been most vital to your own journey?
Elio
A writer giving advice to another writer makes about as much sense as a vegetarian butcher. I’m suspicious of anyone with pithy, self-help-style prescriptions for making art. I just dig into the 24-karat culture that lives in my bones; sometimes it rises directly from my background. I often pull from the constellation of cities I love—Milan, Rome, Toronto, New York, L.A.—and from the writers and artists exploding out of global LGBTQ+ communities (people like Lomo and Brian Rigg). I’m not particularly interested in policing where the writing comes from, what shape it takes, or how it chooses to dress itself up. Words and ideas mutate, and my methods mutate with them; I do feel turning literary taste into hierarchy is vile. This elitist energy loops back to what I said about how the greatest of divas know how to hone denigration into something cunning rather than cutting. I’d rather be impaled by a rabid markhor goat than sit around listening to people in the advanced stages of pretensia. I’m all for critical thinking—it’s vital—but I’m much more interested in writers who messed around with ye old literary systems and customs: Joan Didion, Jean Toomer, Flannery O’Connor, Frank O’Hara, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Langston Hughes and Sandra Bernhard.
A standout professional spotlight featured on the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers’ website: https://aicw.ca/user/elioiannacci/
Elio’s latest articles with The Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/elio-iannacci/
