Made in Italy

Studies in Popular Music

Franco Fabbri, Goffredo Plastino, Franco Fabbri, Goffredo Plastino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136585531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Made in Italy serves as a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Italian popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Italian music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Italy and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Italian popular music. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Themes; Singer-Songwriters; and Stories.

PART I

Themes

Almost three centuries ago, French philosopher Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), disguised himself as a visitor from Persia—or, to be more precise, as two—to describe the mores of Parisian society, understanding that only an alien eye could reveal the strangeness of behaviors and conventions that in eighteenth-century France were considered normal (and it is telling that the status of Persia, today’s Iran, hasn’t changed much as a stereotypical paradigm of alien-ness with respect to Western civilization). Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721) became a model for many other authors, in various literary genres and disciplines, including science fiction and anthropology. It goes without saying that such a narrative device implies both pretending to be an alien and actually being an insider: one has to be acquainted with local conventions, and at the same time observe them “from outside.”

The chapters in the following section, in various ways, deal with conventions and stereotypes that have contributed to the creation of an identity for Italian popular music and popular music studies. They explore topics that have a definite Italian specificity and that might seem less understandable to a foreign reader (compared to straight pop, singer-songwriters or progressive rock, for example), but at the same time they set such a national specificity in an international context, offering hooks and handles that help understand the unfamiliar against a familiar backdrop. What is more specifically Italian than opera, Neapolitan Song, the Sanremo Festival, bitt, Naples Power, or even Italian music economy?¹ Indeed, it would be very hard to understand not only Italian popular music, but Italian music as a whole, without considering the weight of a number of gravitational centers, interacting with the socio-musical field that surrounds them: tradition (classical or folk), politics (Fascism and the Cold War, but also the troubled path that led to the country’s unification in the nineteenth century), media (and the way they were shaped by politics), law (performing rights, and the discipline of media monopolies), and industrial practices. This is not to say that what has become a kind of common practice in international popular music studies, which are based on sociology, cultural and postcolonial studies, media and communication studies, anthropology, psychoanalysis, lyrical analysis, and some musical analysis (just a little), cannot be applied successfully to Italian popular music: it certainly can, but it wouldn’t be enough. On the other hand, such Italian specificities have been looming over the nation’s cultural debate for so long that challenging the conventional explanations provided by critics and scholars has become a sort of moral obligation: one might just think of the Sanremo Festival, which has been monopolizing public attention for at least a couple of weeks every year since the early 1950s, contributing to the production of millions of columns of commentaries. An outsider’s view à la Montesquieu is therefore required, and the authors of the following chapters conform to this bivalent identity—being simultaneously inside and outside—in various ways, whether in terms of discipline studied, profession, or background.

Marcello Sorce Keller is an internationally renowned music anthropologist, but he describes himself (on his website) as a musicus. The son of an Italian father and a German-Swiss mother, he lives in Lugano, Switzerland (near the Italian border). His chapter on Italy’s “problematic identity” focuses on issues that can be located (in the multidimensional space of music culture) at the intersection of disciplines such as historiography, historical linguistics, history of music, and ethnomusicology, and in fact his essay abounds in references to important studies in these disciplines. However, it can be easily grasped that none of these perspectives are closer to the subject than the result of Sorce Keller’s detached view, which assembles them and gives them a broader meaning. From this original approach we learn the origins of one of Italy’s musical specificities, compared to other European countries that share with Italy important aspects of their musical history: the absence of a stable, generalized connection, especially during the nineteenth century, between traditional music and art music. Sorce Keller also argues that the historical roots of the various oral musical traditions that can be found in Italy are quite heterogeneous, and at the same time—on a parallel level—that Italian opera showed such a degree of unity across the Italian territory that it became the metaphor and the banner of the country’s political unity for the local bourgeoisie. So, while elsewhere in Europe an idealized “folk” became the privileged source of both popular music and the national classical music “schools,” opera was at the origin of Italian (namely, Neapolitan) popular song, and remained for long a paradigm for it.

In the official presentation of the first Festival della Canzone Italiana (Sanremo, 1951) the following statements (reminiscent of pre-war Fascist rhetoric and bureaucratic style) can be found:

The influence of African-American and Hispanic-American popular music—whose main streams, jazz, Cuban and Brazilian music, branch into an infinity of filiations … and become muddied, gaining in strength as they pass through Broadway and Hollywood, providing material for the great international popular music market—this influence has become increasingly prominent, and in recent years has imprinted an exotic physiognomy on the songs of various European countries, weakening their original character and making them less consistent with the ethnic and emotional substrate of the peoples from whom they spring.

Italian song, deriving from Neapolitan Songs and romanzas, and connected to an operatic tradition of great distinction albeit devoid of recent evolutions, has been particularly prone to such an influence, and in recent years has lost its original, lively nature. RAI wishes to promote, by means of a series of initiatives, the rebirth of a truly active spirit in Italian song, and the acquisition of a notable individuality, directing authors and music publishers toward such aims.

(Anonymous 1951)

Roberto Agostini’s chapter on the Sanremo Festival focuses especially on the transition from the Festival’s early years, when RAI’s conservative strategy dominated, to the 1960s, when new trends materialized in Italian popular music and transformed Sanremo’s stage, bringing back those “exotic” influences decried by that anonymous presenter of the Festival in 1951. By analyzing two versions of the winning song of 1960, Agostini shows that a clear-cut distinction between innovative and traditional stylistic elements isn’t always possible in such a transitional phase. Agostini also challenges a stereotypical critical approach, according to which Domenico Modugno’s victory in 1958 represented a dividing line between the old world of melodic tradition and the new world of singer-songwriters. In his own way, as a popular musicologist who chose to examine a repertoire of “oldies” rather than more fashionable and aesthetically legitimated genres, Agostini is also a kind of outsider/insider who fits well in this section of the book.

Bitt, a genre that can be described roughly as the Italian version of British Invasion styles, emerged in the mid 1960s, and found its place even at Sanremo. It was a mass phenomenon, involving thousands of complessi (combos). Many Italian bands covered songs from the UK and the US, with translated lyrics. The accepted view among Italian music critics is that they did so as a way to appropriate a foreign style, whose distinctive traits could only be grasped by copying the original material. In other words, Italian bitt bands weren’t able to create their own songs, which also means that an “Italian way to rock” only opened in the 1970s—earlier by progressive rock groups, later by punk and new wave bands. In his chapter, Franco Fabbri argues that a number of bitt bands actually created their own material, or arranged songs composed for them by sympathetic songwriters. Moreover, Fabbri points out that for decades rock historians have totally ignored one of the main reasons why bitt bands recorded Italian adaptations of Anglophone hits, namely, a rule in Italian performing rights law protecting the work of translators that in the 1960s became a way to cash in from the public performance or airplay of the original versions, making a few lyricists–adapters extremely rich. As a consequence, record executives (who often benefited themselves from such practices) exerted tremendous pressure on bands to record covers rather than their own songs. This represents another Italian specificity, if compared to the trend to self-compose songs that characterized the British scene in the same years. As a scholar who specialized in genre theories, since his early studies in the 1980s Fabbri has explored the function of rules and regulations, and of common economic practices, in the shaping of genres (see Fabbri 1982). However, his chapter in this book also owes much to his activity as a band member and song composer in the 1960s.

Naples Power is the label that identifies a 1970s Neapolitan musical scene. Emerging as an unforeseen, fluid movement of young musicians performing folk music, folk revival, progressive rock, jazz-rock and more, Naples Power established itself throughout Italy as one of the most powerful and innovative urban sounds of that decade. In his chapter, Goffredo Plastino analyzes the scene’s emergence, its early, rather blurry boundaries and perspectives, and the crosscollaborations between musicians and bands (and their sometimes unexpected consequences). While Naples Power was clearly linked to the political and cultural changes that occurred in 1970s Italy, it displayed a local specificity that marked its almost instantaneous success. Yet listeners inside and outside the city also perceived it as a reaction to Neapolitan Song, despite its connections with that repertoire and its experimentations with Anglo-American popular music. Since the late 1990s, Naples Power has gone through a fundamental process of historical reconstruction, one of the consequences of which was the inclusion of this scene in the contemporary Neapolitan Song canon; in the past few years there has also been a Naples Power revival, characterized by tribute albums and band reunions. Rather than providing another canonical history of Naples Power to be added to the many already available, as an ethnomusicologist with a particular interest in popular music and in the cultural meaning of sounds, Plastino focuses on the novel vocal and instrumental practices that young Neapolitan musicians elaborated and successfully proposed both in their live performances and in their albums, and gives voice to some of these musicians, citing rarely heard and seen interviews and public statements dating back to the 1970s. Plastino is not a Neapolitan, and has an outsider’s perspective different from that of current “Neapolitanologists”; however, he clearly is an insider as well—if only for the fact that he worked with one of the leading musicians of Naples Power, and that he believes that Italians are in many ways Neapolitans, musically speaking.

Finally, in the last chapter in this section, Francesco D’Amato (one of a handful of Italian sociologists with a permanent interest in music) offers a detailed overview of Italian music economy, focusing on the current situation. On the one hand, the music sector isn’t a relevant part of the Italian economy, as its overall turnover is comparable to that of individual companies in richer sectors, for example the fashion industry. On the other hand, the music sector’s turnover is higher than that of other traditionally stronger sectors in the cultural industry, such as cinema, or of budding “new” sectors such as videogames. However, if the turnover of industrial sectors whose business is strongly influenced by music—musical instruments and consumer electronics, for example—is added to that strictly related to music, the total turnover of €3.7 billion compares favorably with that of the publishing i...