Punk Rock and Riflusso. Youth Cultures and Politics in Italy between 1977-1984 (original) (raw)
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Popular Music and Society, 2020
The punk-rock band Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti (CSI) exemplifies a wider movement of musical memorialization of the World War II antifascist Resistenza in contemporary Italy. Considering music as communicative medium, affective experience and social practice hatched within networks of engaged citizenship, I probe its contribution to public debates about the Resistenza since the 1990s until today. Perspectives from memory studies, art history, critical historiography, and political philosophy assist me in elucidating through CSI's example how antifascist memories are creatively reformulated and reinterpreted in Italian popular music, such that the Resistenza comes to animate an interrogation of present inequalities and emancipatory struggles.
“This Is Our Music”: Italian Teen Pop Press and Genres in the 1960s
Popular music studies rarely consider genres as cultural concepts both historically and socially contingent. From a diachronic perspective, music journalistic discourse can be used to examine how music categories are created, named and negotiated between music industry, musicians, critics and fans, either for practical or aesthetic purposes. Italian teen pop magazines in the mid-1960s provide a valuable case study. This article will focus on two Italian teen publications, Ciao amici and Big, between 1964 and 1967, and will connect the rhetoric they used to the rise of youth community in the same period. The genre of musica nostra (music of our own) was introduced to describe the music teenagers were listening to, and suggested the pride of belonging to a community of peers. In the last section I will outline how such an ideology of youth community was connected to authenticity and to specific aesthetic values.
Enacting Goth in Milan: local appropriations of a trans-national post-punk subculture in the ‘80s.
Paper presented at Disorder : Histoire sociale des mouvements punk/post-punk, Paris, 27-28 March 2015 80s’ Italian Goth subculture (known in Italy as “Dark”) represented the local appropriation, re-interpretation and enactment of an assemblage of symbolic resources (lifestyle models, music, fashion and style, art, literature, cinema) derived principally from the British underground scene, and intercepted mainly through mainstream and independent media. In this process of local appropriation, the canon of the cultural background and basic expressive codes of the subculture were enriched and imbued of new and specific meanings that contributed to shape the actual experience of subcultural belonging. As a consequence, to be fully understood, belonging and participation must be interrogated in the light of their specific contexts: they derive their distinctive character and meanings from the social, cultural and political conditions of their participants’ daily lives. Yet, these are completely uncharted waters for Italian academic research. The proposed paper represents a first attempt to describe the Italian “dark” community, and make sense of its specific ways of belonging. The paper draws on the research materials and on the main findings of a three year-long research project (Tosoni- Zuccalà 2013), addressing the Italian dark subculture in the ‘80s, and in particular the North Italian scene, revolving around the city of Milan . For this effort, twenty-four life histories have been recorded in one or more sessions, with each interview lasting from two to six hours. Informants have been selected through typological variation, balancing gender, place of residence (within the city or in the neighboring districts), role in the scene (cultural animators like DJs and artists or simple participants), and “generations” (participants entering the scene in the first or in the second half of the ‘80s). Pictures and visual materials have been collected from informants to integrate the interview and to be used as visual stimuli in the interviews. The experience of belonging to the Italian “dark” community in Milan has not emerged as univocal and undifferentiated: on the contrary, it has revealed specifies and differences depending on the particular scene that mediated the appropriation of the Goth subculture. Three interconnected, yet distinct scenes emerged as relevant: a first one, gravitating around the Creature Simili collective, active in an autonomous space within the squatted social center Leoncavallo, and directly deriving from the experience of militant punk squat “Virus”; the second one, gravitating around the alternative disco Hysterika and a stable circuit of alternative clubs spread all around North Italy (and Switzerland); and a third one, typical of the small towns around the city of Milan, represented by all those people that lived the experience of subcultural belonging in small, isolated, groups. In particular, the paper addresses the participant’s forms of identity construction and sociality, and their relationships with political involvement, underlining their connections with the Milanese context, and clarifying the similitudes, and the specificities, of each of these scenes in the local enactment of the Goth subculture.
Punk in Italy has largely been overlooked as a research topic in the past, focussing instead on the scene in other nations. This article examines the Italian punk scene and its transition from classic to post-punk, focussing on its most famous and significant band: CCCP – Fedeli alla linea.1 After a short introduction to the historical and cultural background, the results of a qualitative textual analysis of CCCP lyrics using algirdas Greimas’ methodology for narrative semiotics (1983) will be presented. as the results show, CCCP’s artistic production can be interpreted as a subversive and ironic parody of the collectivist traditions that were dominant in Italian politics and culture at the time (communism and Catholicism), and as a creative critical reaction to neoliberalism. The conclusion briefly discusses certain theoretical issues such as the relationship between punk and authenticity, and compares Italian punk with british and Portuguese punk.
American Behavioral Scientist, 2019
Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating space, free time, and access to leisure, mainly by means of mutualistic practices. Based on data from qualitative semistructured interviews with key informants and activists, this article sheds light on recreational activism, adopted as a political practice by the Italian youth active in counter-cultural spaces, nowadays at the forefront of the struggle to oppose the commodification of free time and leisure.
Fedeli alla linea: CCCP and the Italian Way to Punk
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 2016
Punk in Italy has largely been overlooked as a research topic in the past, focussing instead on the scene in other nations. This article examines the Italian punk scene and its transition from classic to post-punk, focussing on its most famous and significant band: CCCP-Fedeli alla linea. 1 After a short introduction to the historical and cultural background, the results of a qualitative textual analysis of CCCP lyrics using Algirdas Greimas' methodology for narrative semiotics (1983) will be presented. As the results show, CCCP's artistic production can be interpreted as a subversive and ironic parody of the collectivist traditions that were dominant in Italian politics and culture at the time (communism and Catholicism), and as a creative critical reaction to neoliberalism. The conclusion briefly discusses certain theoretical issues such as the relationship between punk and authenticity, and compares Italian punk with British and Portuguese punk.
Hip Pop Italian Style The Postcolonial Imagination of Second-Generation Authors in Italy
Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity. Ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan., 2012
This essay focuses on the literature of second-generation postcolonial writers collected in the anthologies Pecore Nere (Black Sheep; 2005) and Italiani per vocazione (Italians by Vocation; 2005), as well as on the creative work of the network Rete G2. While illuminating the impact and flaws of the current immigration and citizenship legislation, these authors offer an alternative, multiethnic, and multifaceted representation of Italy through astute aesthetic choices rooted in hip hop and popular culture. They are “experts” who transfigure their “street knowledge” into literature and art and are perhaps the best suited to critique the legal system because, unlike Italian (white) citizens, they have a first-hand knowledge of its workings and material consequences. Their analysis of Italian culture is particularly insightful because they access it from the vantage point of a diasporic sensitivity, one that is simultaneously Italian and international. Also published in Italian as Clarissa Clò. “Hip Pop all’italiana. L’immaginazione postcoloniale delle seconde generazioni.” L’Italia Postcoloniale. Ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo. Firenze: Le Monnier-Mondadori Accademica. 2014. 249-264.
Keeping it in the family: the absence of young Italians from the public piazza
Società Mutamento Politica, 2015
The author analysed autobiographies written by university students, comparing his impressions with the results of studies on young people carried out by Italian sociologists. The picture that he pieced together of this generation “without fathers or teachers”, and of the related responsibilities of the previous generation, is far from encouraging. The modern generation of young Italians nurtures values pivoting on the family and on self-fulfilment, and acts within spheres of friendship and sentiment at short radius. The rest of the social world is mediated, experienced through films, internet and holidays. The universalist attitude has been supplanted by a widespread and rooted particularism. The collective dimension that transcends the experience of the individual and his reference group has lost relevance.