Born to Be Abramo

The song starts with a spoken introduction by the band's keyboard player Sergio Conforti (a.k.a. Rocco Tanica), acting out the role of a seminarian talking to a group of people from a small church community, reminding them that subscriptions for an upcoming chestnut-gathering trip to the fictional "Filzetta Valley" (named after a type of cured pork meat from Milan, but located somewhere within Southern Italy in the context of the song, according to Tanica's feigned Southern Italian dialectal accent) are being taken by "Father Egidio" in the parish, and warning "the usual smart alecks" that "no mass, no trip". A strummed acoustic guitar is heard while he finishes talking, but it is immediately interrupted by a four-on-the-floor bass drum and a sampled voice singing "Elio, Elio, E-E-E-E-E Elio (e le Storie Tese)" over a two-note melody. The voice belongs to producer Claudio Dentes's Filipino butler, known as "Tremoto", whose introduction for the band (in his own language) was used on their first album.[lower-alpha 2] The stuttering sample, which was devised by bassist Nicola Fasani (a.k.a. Faso) and reappears throughout the medley, gives way to a disco beat and a synth strings passage by Conforti, paraphrasing the intro to Renato Zero's 1978 disco hit "Triangolo". This is followed by Elio singing, alternately, a line from "Resta cu'mme" (in a disco arrangement originally created in 1976 for, and made famous by, Marcella Bella) followed by a line from "Resta con noi, Signore, la sera" and, in the second verse, quoting more extensively from both songs (namely, two lines from Machetta's song, followed by three lines from Modugno's – the third of which gets interrupted by a Machetta quote – and three more lines from Modugno). The section ends with a reprise of the "E-E-E-Elio" sample melody.

The second half starts with guitarist Davide Civaschi (a.k.a. Cesàreo) playing the guitar intro from "Born to Be Alive", over which Conforti (in the same voice as earlier) says: "Among other things, it is useless to rehearse the choir on Wednesday evening if on Sunday the only people singing are the usual three – sorry for using this word – morons!" Elio then sings (only) the lyrics to "Esci dalla tua terra" over the melody and the arrangement to "Born to Be Alive", thus creating a mashup which also includes the title phrase (obviously absent from Cocquio's song), parodied as "Born to be Abramo". The first two verses of both songs (Cocquio's lyrics over Hernandez's melody) are used in full, before Elio briefly deviates into two lines from "Esci dalla tua terra" using Cocquio's original melody. This is followed by the chorus lyrics to Cocquio's song ["Esci dalla tua terra e va' dove ti porterò" and "Parola di Jahvè", i.e. "Walk out of your land and go where I shall bring you" / "Jehovah's word"] (sung by multi-instrumentalist Paolo Panigada (a.k.a. Feiez) in a falsetto voice, in the style of Sylvester), over the chorus melody of "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)". After this, Panigada ends the song by continuing to sing Sylvester's melody using Cocquio's lyrics and adding some of his own, including a reference to "Bhagwan [i.e. Rajneesh], who's just died" (the Indian guru had indeed passed away less than one month before the band started recording the song). In the 1997 re-recording, the "who's just died" part was omitted and replaced with "or Sai Baba".

As a coda, Conforti talks again with no music (in the same role as above) and says the following: "And one last thing: those little 13/14-year-old ladies who come into the oratory all made-up like cabaret singers should know that this is neither the place nor the occasion to devote themselves to certain activities, because we are here to grow up, to become adults, to build a community and become one another's neighbor. All of us know that today's young people are vulnerable, when..." [fades out]. None of Conforti's spoken parts were included on the 1997 re-recording.

"World Class Player" is a literal English translation (sung by Elio in his usually exaggerated, totally non-English Italian accent) of "Giocatore mondiale", the band's signature tune for Quasi gol ["Almost a goal"], a 1990 radio show by Gialappa's Band (the comedic trio's first recurring show, where they provided their own humorous commentary to football matches in the 1990 FIFA World Cup, complete with sampled voices and comical sound effects). The song is a satire of Italian "football mania" and features an intervention by the wheelchair-bound singer-songwriter Pierangelo Bertoli,[4] who sings three lines (in Italian) parodying his own involvement in an earlier public service announcement about architectural barriers. The Italian version of the song would later feature as a B-side on "Saturday Night Strage" (a house remix of "Born to Be Abramo") and reprinted in the CD release of the band's mini-album The Los Sri Lanka Parakramabahu Brothers Featuring Elio e le Storie Tese; this English version remained unreleased on CD. The lyrics were literally translated by Elio from Italian to English; as a result of this, in several occasions Elio is forced to speed up his delivery of the lyrics in order to stay within the original melody. At one point, he is heard swearing after he misses his cue on a chorus.

The medley segues (without stopping) into the backing instrumental track from "John Holmes (Una vita per il cinema)" ["A life devoted to cinema"], a song from the band's Elio samaga hukapan kariyana turu album about the well-known American pornographic actor, overlaid with a Japanese song, performed by singer Ayako Handa and taken from a Noh play; the song itself is called "Ogi no Mato" (which translates to "The Folding Fan as a Target") and was also featured in the 1982 film Blade Runner as the soundtrack to a mock-Japanese advert – intended as a parody of an actual Japanese ad for a contraceptive pill.[3] According to comments made by the band within their own radio show Cordialmente, on Radio Deejay, the combination was accidentally created in the studio: while producer Dentes and mixing engineer MC Costa were listening to a rough mix of the backing track to "John Holmes", sound engineer Maurizio Camagna loaded a Japanese theatre CD on a player and pressed "Play" without having any idea about what Dentes and Costa were doing. The Japanese song ended up being fed into the console, and the result cracked up Dentes, Costa and the band so much that they decided to release it the way it was, as a bonus track on the album's CD release, titled "John Holmes [Shidzu version]". As a result of the coupling, the copyright notes within YouTube on some videos for "Ogi no Mato" incorrectly list the song title as "John Holmes (Una vita per il cinema)"; the artist credit, in the same notes, is equally misattributed to Elio e le Storie Tese (instead of Ayako Handa / Ensemble Nipponia) and the copyright holder is mistakenly shown as Sony Music.[3]