Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy

Politics, Languages, and Multiple Marginalities

Susanna Scarparo, Mathias Sutherland Stevenson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319965055
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

This book explores the significance of reggae and hip hop in Southern Italy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present. Focusing on groups and solo artists located predominantly in the Southern Italian regions of Apulia and Sardinia, it examines the production and distribution of their music, lyrics and video clips. To this end, Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy emphasizes the linguistic aspects of cultural marginalization as well as marginalities linked to geographical location, gender, and to social and political identification. The authors put forward three key arguments, namely: that the Southern Italian transcultural and multilingual musical productions defy the cultural stereotype of the South; that the musicians discussed are creating new alliances and transcultural exchanges that engage critically with the challenges and opportunities offered by globalization; and that these musical productions represent one of Italy's most significant forms of creative political expression since the 1970s. Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy brings to light the distinctive characteristics of Italy's independent and marginal musical contexts of reggae and reggae-inflected hip hop. It will serve as an invaluable resource for academics and students of Italian cultural studies, global studies, and the politics of non-hegemonic cultural production. It also provides an engaging reference for those with an interest in southern Italy, Apulia, Sardinia, the southern question and independent and popular music more generally.

© The Author(s) 2018

Susanna Scarparo and Mathias Sutherland StevensonReggae and Hip Hop in Southern ItalyPop Music, Culture and Identityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96505-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Susanna Scarparo¹ and Mathias Sutherland Stevenson²

(1)

The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

(2)

Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Susanna Scarparo (Corresponding author)

Mathias Sutherland Stevenson

End Abstract

A connection between music and politics in Italy has been evident since Giuseppe Verdi’s popular chorus “Va Pensiero,” known in English as “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” from his 1842 opera Nabucco , became known as the anthem for the Italian unification. From that point onwards, this connection between music and politics was to be seen in anarchist ballads , such as “Addio Lugano bella” (Pietro Gori, 1894); socialist hymns, such as “Bandiera rossa”; and songs of emigration, such as “Mamma mia dammi cento lire” (Carrera 2001, p. 352). Whereas the Fascist regime used propaganda songs very effectively (Carrera 2001, p. 353), political songs in post-war Italy became closely linked with the intellectual singer-songwriters that emerged during the social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, providing the musical background to the youth movements of the time. Despite the continuing prevalence of singer-songwriters, the 1980s ushered in the closely related styles of reggae and hip hop as new forms of rebel and protest music that were opposed to racism, committed to pacifism, and open to multilingual experimentation, in particular the use of dialects and local languages.

Adopting a cultural studies approach, and combining analysis of personal recollections, interviews, lyrics, and video clips, this book explores the cultural politics of these musical forms in Italy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present. Specifically, we examine ways in which imported musical forms, such as reggae and hip hop, have been synthesized within locally distinctive Italian contexts, emphasizing a transcultural process that foregrounds non-institutional politics and marginal subjectivities. In line with our understanding of the transcultural qualities of music, at various stages, our discussion also moves beyond the confines of reggae and hip hop to explore other interconnected southern Italian musical syntheses created out of this dialogue between the local and the global.

Focusing on groups and solo artists located predominantly in the southern Italian regions of Apulia and Sardinia, we discuss the modes of production and distribution of their music alongside their lyrics and video clips, paying particular attention to the ways in which these artists use and mix dominant and minor languages through music. To this end, we emphasize the linguistic aspects of cultural marginalization as well as marginalities linked to geographical location, gender, and social and political identification. Furthermore, we maintain that the ubiquitous youth connection assumes a particular resonance in Italy due to the historical lack of “official” power that Italian youth have held within social, political, and economic spheres, as well as Italy’s various and sustained manifestations of cultural and political youth opposition since the late 1960s.

A key event in reggae’s emergence in Italy can be traced back to Friday, June 27, 1980. On this day, approximately 100,000, predominantly young, Italians from all over the peninsula gathered at Milan’s San Siro Stadium to attend the much-anticipated concert by reggae’s transnational star and global icon, Bob Marley (Buda 1980, p. 8). The event was immortalized in song by the popular Roman singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti in his 1984 reggae-inspired “Piero e Cinzia” (Piero and Cinzia, Heinz Music). Based on the melody to Marley’s international hit, “No Woman No Cry” (Island Records, 1974), Venditti’s lyrics poignantly evoke the event:

E lo stadio era pieno,

E sì che Milano, quel giorno era Giamaica,

E venne la notte da centomila fiammelle,

La musica correva come un filo, su tutta la mia pelle.

(And the stadium was full,

And so that day Milan was Jamaica,

And then came the night of one hundred thousand lighters,

The music ran all over my body like an electric wire.)¹

The label “reggae” denotes the distinct beat that was popular on the Caribbean island from the late 1960s to the early 1980s (Chang and Chen 1998, p. x) but is also used as an umbrella term to describe a range of styles and subgenres, including ska, rocksteady, roots reggae, dub, rub-a-dub, and raggamuffin/dancehall, which have developed and spread throughout the globe since its inception. Crucially, key aspects of the musical culture of Jamaica, such as the use of megawatt sound systems, the foregrounding of drum and bass, the practice of toasting/rapping over rhythm tracks, the technique of the remix, and the concept of the rave party, have become crucial to global hip hop, as well as to dance music and popular music more generally. Of specific importance for this book, we stress that Jamaican sound system culture was fundamental for the development of hip hop and rap, leading to “reggae-inflected global hip-hop confluences” (Marshall and Radano 2013, p. 738). In order to emphasize the specific resonance of these global confluences between reggae and hip hop in Italy, and also to rightfully acknowledge the seminal influence of reggae on hip hop, we will occasionally apply the term “reggae-inflected hip hop” when discussing the Italian context.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emphasize that music “has always sent out lines of flight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities,’ even overturning the very codes that structure” it (1987, pp. 11–12). Therefore, “musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations,” is comparable to a “rhizome” (1987, p. 17). The philosophical concept of the rhizome provides an ideal metaphor for the way in which reggae and reggae-inflected hip hop have transcended geographical and cultural borders to formulate syncretic cultural forms, identities, and languages. Furthermore, the way in which the rhizome “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 7–8) encapsulates both the transnational and intertextual transferal of reggae’s metaphors and meanings together with the broad resonance of their sociopolitical messages and practices.

Although reggae’s popularization across the world is largely due to its commercialization, which might be understood to have undermined its potential for radical protest, its international impact cannot be superficially reduced to commercial exploitation alone (Manuel et al. 1995, p. 144). For all its collusion with commercialism, reggae resonates as a sound of resistance “precisely because it circulates as a black, modern form without an explicit degree of complicity with empire” (Marshall and Radano 2013, p. 738). As such, it galvanizes minority discourse “from West Africa to East Asia without the same taint as American black music” (Marshall and Radano 2013, p. 738).

Indeed, in many countries, reggae has been adopted as a form of opposition to commercial and cultural homogenization and has also provided the soundtrack to many liberation movements (Chang and Chen 1998, p. 3). For example, apartheid-era black South Africans (see Lucky Dube), refugees from Sierra Leone (see Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars), white working-class youth in Britain (see The Clash), Maoris in New Zealand (see Dread Beat and Blood), and Indigenous Australians (see No Fixed Address) have all synthesized reggae in culturally distinctive ways. This multiplicity of (reggae) music, and its capacity to promote transcultural and interlinguistic dialogue, can also be seen in various other examples, such as the British vocalist named Apache Indian, who created a bhangramuffin sound fusing Indian bhangra and the Hindi language with Jamaican raggamuffin and Patois in the early 1990s.

Hence, as a form of popular cultural expression that permeates borders, makes social and emotional connections, and adapts to new local situations, reggae music readily lends itself to processes of transculturation. The anthropologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture, Fernando Ortiz, coined the term transculturat...