Okay, my newly-minted law degree begs to differ. The law doesn’t work that way, sir. Your exact concern was settled in Morgan v Odhams Press Ltd [1971] 1 WLR 1239, where the House of Lords held that a man can be defamed by a publication that never names him, never describes him, and contains no pointer to him at all.
The Sun newspaper published an article claiming that a young woman, a key witness in a dog doping scandal, had been kidnapped by the gang to stop her talking. Morgan was not mentioned anywhere in the report. But readers who knew she had been staying with him at the time would put the two together and conclude he was one of the gang. That is the innuendo. The Court of Appeal thought no reasonable reader would make that leap. The House of Lords disagreed, by a majority, and restored the case to the jury.
The judge’s reasoning is the part you should sit with. He said the ordinary reader does not read (or listen) with the analytical care of a lawyer. He reads casually, without expecting precision, and forms a general impression. And even where the wider public sees nothing, readers with special knowledge will connect the words to a particular man. There need be no peg or pointer to him in the text. The general tenor is enough.
An earlier case, Cassidy v Daily Mirror Newspapers Ltd [1929] 2 KB 331, had already settled the other half of your concern. The Daily Mirror newspaper published a photograph of a Mr Cassidy with a woman, captioned as an engagement announcement. His wife, Mrs Cassidy, sued for libel, arguing the caption implied to people who knew them that she was not his lawful wife but a woman living with him as his mistress. Her acquaintances testified that this was exactly how they read it. That is the innuendo, and it was proved by evidence.
The paper’s defence was that Cassidy himself gave permission for the photograph and that it had no idea he was married. The Court of Appeal held that this made no difference. Liability turns on what the words convey to those who receive them, not on what the publisher intended or knew. By a majority, it upheld the verdict for Mrs Cassidy.
So, when you listened to Rarara’s song, what came to your mind? You knew very well whom he was talking about, and so did everyone else who heard it. That is the innuendo, and that is how the law works. You can’t escape liability for defamation where it’s established on the account of innuendoes.
So no, a man does not escape liability by declining to say the name. He escapes only if nobody could reasonably tell who he meant.