Rock music and politics in Italy

Popular Music ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 261-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umberto Fiori
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Red Flags ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Music And Politics ◽  
Traditional Songs

One afternoon in September 1982, at Tirrenia, in the province of Pisa, hundreds of Communist party-workers prepared for the opening concert of an Italian tour by the rock band Genesis. The work took place under the red flags of the National Festival of the Communist Party – L'Unità – and to the sound of traditional songs of political struggle coming from the loudspeakers placed all round the area. These were unpaid workers, highly organised, and they had come from all over Italy.

Questions of style: notes on Italian hip hop

Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Slow Process ◽  
Explosive Material ◽  
The Public ◽  
Music And Politics ◽  
The Relationship

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert representedan unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)

Masculinity and skill acquisition in the adolescent rock band

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Clawson
Keyword(s):  
Skill Acquisition ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Music Journalism ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Rolling Stone

In the autumn of 1994, a Rolling Stone special issue on ‘Women in Rock’ proclaimed that ‘A change has come to rock & roll’. This pronouncement – which acknowledged women's traditional under-representation in rock music while consigning it to history – was hardly a new one. The ‘discovery’ that ‘an unprecedented number of female performers were now carving out a substantial place for themselves in the rock world’ has been a recurring staple of music journalism for at least two decades (Garr 1992, p. xi). Yet women's participation in the rock music world continues to be noteworthy, defined by their status as numerical minority and symbolic anomaly. ‘In rock as in life, what is male continues to be perceived as known, normal and natural, whereas what is female is taken to be a mystery in need of explication’ (Udovich 1994, p. 50).

Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia

Notes ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 1283
Author(s):  
Donna A. Buchanan ◽  
Sabrina Petra Ramet
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
The State ◽  
Music And Politics

Fragments of a Queer Feminist Rock and Pop History in Vienna

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Fürnkranz
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Rock N Roll

The historical development of Viennese rock and pop music started with rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, continued with beat music and the “dialect wave” in the late 1960s, punk in the 1980s, the popular Viennese electronic music scene in the 1990s, and is currently enjoying a renaissance of the “dialect wave.” Artists like the Rosée Sisters, Austria’s first all-female rock band founded in 1962, Topsy Girl, A-Gen 53, or SV Damenkraft were active in local music scenes. In retrospect, they are considered as exceptions in the historiography of Austrian popular music. This chapter discusses several feminist and queer artists and collectives in Austria, their position in popular culture, and in historical and geographical contexts. The author concentrates primarily on all-female bands, LGBTIQ+ artists, and queerpop projects to illustrate diverse approaches to music, feminism, and their position within the pop and rock music scenes in Vienna.

German symbolism in rock music: national signification in the imagery and songs of Rammstein

Popular Music ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT G.H. BURNS
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
German Identity ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Textual Content

AbstractIn this article, I discuss aspects of national identity in the performance style of the German rock band Rammstein from the perspectives of imagery, vocal style and the textual content of their songs. Investigation into Rammstein’s music reveals transformations of signifiers from earlier German performance styles and earlier textual themes that the band use as a means of relocating notions of German identity into their own performances. The adoption of national German signifiers enables Rammstein to establish connections between the band and the growth of national awareness among German youth who follow them. In this way, marketing and promotion of notions of a new national German identity to generations unaware of the origins of neo-romantic, national German signifiers in Rammstein’s music supports a successful commercial enterprise that, I argue, runs close to boundaries existing between national and nationalist.

Taming rock music in communist states: Politicisation of Western popular culture in East Europe and mainland China

2021 ◽  
pp. 2336825X2110304
Author(s):  
Rudolf Fürst
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
East Europe ◽  
Music And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
Economic Tools

A comparison of the former Eastern Bloc and China’s ways of dealing with the social implications of rock music as an alien cultural import from the West reveals significant analogies. The paper traces the process of politicisation of rock music and compares the two different cultural spaces by mapping each space’s state ideology, aesthetic traditions and identities, and discriminative political and economic tools used to marginalise rock. Here the term politicisation refers mainly to the polarisation between the communist regimes’ restrictive policies, and the attempts of the rock scenes to sustain their discriminating characteristics and relationship to protest. While in European communist states rock played a relevant subversive role, conversely, in China any ‘rocking’ of the state has largely been averted. The Chinese rock scene as an off-mainstream urban subculture has received less popular support than its counterpart in Europe and has also proved less politically significant. This comparative case study discusses the relationship between popular music and politics by tracing analogies and differences between the former Czechoslovakia, where the ideologisation and politicisation of rock reached the highest point in the Eastern Bloc, and contemporary China.

The Soviet Myth and the Making of Communist Lives in Italy, 1943–56

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110683
Author(s):  
Rosario Forlenza
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
World War ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second World

This article explores the emergence and consolidation of the Soviet myth, and the related myth of Stalin, within Italy's Communist culture, in the period between the upheavals of the Second World War and 1956. Countering the traditional top-down approaches, which have seen political myths as weapons in the political struggle and devices for deceiving ordinary people, it examines the Soviet myth as a narrative that encapsulated the meaning of the experiences of the Italian Communist Party rank and file, as well as its elite, in extraordinary times. Drawing on the social and cultural anthropology of Victor Turner, it examines the establishment and strength of the Soviet myth and argues that it emerged as a new marker of certainty for groups and individuals in response to the liminal conditions of political and existential uncertainty experienced during the Second World War.

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