Introduction

In the last hundred years the Church of Rome has formulated two great projects defining the Christian presence in society: those of Popes Leo XIII (1878-1903) and John XXIII (1958-63). The former was determined by the need to come to terms with the new situation created by the French Revolution; the latter was provoked by the need to adjust to the momentous changes which had taken place since the Second World War. Both projects represented major changes in the orientation of an institution that has always preferred to claim continuity rather than admit change, that 'sees restoration where others see revolution'. The projects focused, in the first case, on establishing the bases for a Christian reconquest of a hostile world; and, in the second case, on changing the Church's approach to an outside world no longer conceived as fundamentally hostile, hence one with which it could enter into dialogue.

The significance of these projects for Italian Catholic culture is obvious in view of the authority of papal pronouncements in the production and propagation of Catholic doctrine. It is well known that the Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci discussed the Catholic Church as an ideological apparatus with its own institutional grassroots structure (parishes and dioceses) and cadres (clergy) whose task was to guide and instruct the faithful about their place in the world. This was traditionally achieved, first, in a largely didactic manner through liturgical activity (sermons, cathechism) to ensure that the simple verities of the faith were continually reaffirmed; and, second, by controlling the orthodoxy of intellectual expression through disciplinary measures such as excommunication.

1860–1900

In the years immediately following the unification of Italy, serious musical activity throughout the peninsula was still overwhelmingly dominated by opera, as it had been during the Risorgimento period. In all the major cities, and many smaller ones too, the operatic public was large and various, and was still at least as interested in new operas as in established 'classics'. At this time, one senior living Italian opera composer towered above all others, dwarfing them so drastically that most of them are nowadays hardly remembered even in their own country: Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) is now regarded everywhere as the only really lastingly important Italian composer who was active across the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and indeed as one of the greatest opera composers who ever lived. Although Verdi became markedly less prolific in his later years, many (perhaps most) of his finest works date from after 1860, and Aida (1871), Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) have long been rated among the highest achievements of Italian genius in any field. However, by the time the two last-mentioned operas were written, the semi-retired Verdi had come to occupy a less unquestionably central place in Italian musical life, and new creative developments were emerging which in various ways showed signs of transforming the character of the new music being written at the time.

Some of the strongest claims for the political importance of popular music have been made by its greatest enemies. Its most radical effects have been identified by those who most despise the pleasures of rock and pop. From the earliest days of rock'n'roll, priests, parents and politicians have warned of the dangers inherent in the rhythms, the voices, the words and the images of the music. And each new wave in pop history has been greeted by the outcry of those who fear for its consequences. In the West, the political right has been terrified that it will undermine capitalism, family life and traditional values. Racists have seen it as a threat to ‘white purity’. Communists have seen it as subverting the socialist dream. These enemies have warned of its extraordinary power to influence the way people think and act. Their fears have not just prompted outbursts of indignation, but have actually resulted in policies and practices that directly affect the production and consumption of pop. Censorship has been a constant feature of the music's history. Under communism and capitalism, in the name of apartheid and Islam, pop music has been banned and musicians punished.

In 1995, Bob Dole led a campaign in the United States Senate against the conglomerate Time-Warner. He attacked the company for its promotion of rap artists like Snoop Doggy Dogg, who were signed to a Time- Warner subsidiary and who, said Dole, were promoting attitudes and behaviour that were an affront to the American people. Dole’s campaign succeeded, and Time-Warner severed its links with its subsidiary. At the same time in Britain, the government introduced the Criminal Justice Act which, among other things, outlawed particular forms of musical performance. A decade earlier, the Parents’Music Resource Centre, led by the so-called ‘Washington Wives’ (including Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore), persuaded record companies to introduce a system of labelling to identify music that might cause offence.

Unification and the questione della lingua

Before the political unification of Italy, Italian was a language used, outside Tuscany and Rome, only by the literate few. Even by these, it was reserved chiefly for writing: in everyday conversation, the great majority of Italians either had to or chose to use one of the dialects of Italy or, in certain areas, a minority language such as French. By the end of the twentieth century, well over 90 per cent of Italians could speak the national language, but most still chose to use dialect or a minority language as well. The process of the diffusion of Italian against a background of continuing linguistic diversity has been a long and difficult one, and it has led to discussions on important cultural and social issues, such as whether the national language should be allowed to develop naturally or should be based on a particular model; how conservative and selective, or tolerant of innovation and variety, it should be; how it was to be disseminated and taught; and, on the other hand, what status should be accorded to languages other than the standard.

In some respects, these discussions have continued the questione della lingua which first came to a head in the sixteenth century. In that period a consensus was reached that the literary language of the Italian states should be based on the Tuscan used in the fourteenth century by the indisputably most elegant writers, Petrarch and Boccaccio. This solution was apparently backward-looking, but it proved the most viable and attractive, given the political fragmentation and vulnerability of Italy and the waning cultural prestige of contemporary Tuscany.

The music industry question is straightforward: how to make money out of music? But the answer is ‘with difficulty’, and pop music as we know it now has been shaped by the problems of making music a commodity and the challenges of adapting money-making practices to changing technologies.

The underlying issue is metaphysical. Music is, by its nature, non-material. It can be heard but not held. It lasts only as long as it plays. It is not something that can, in any direct way, be owned. How to turn this intangible, time-bound aural experience into something that can be bought and sold is thus the question that has driven popular music history since the first wandering performers sang for their supper, and I will examine the changing solutions to this problem shortly. But there's another issue here that needs noting. Music is a universal human practice, like talking or tool making. All of us can do it; all of us do do it: sing to ourselves or our children, hum and chant, dance and tap out a rhythm. To make money out of music, then, means differentiating one set of musical practices (for which we'll pay) from another (for which we don't). The very ubiquity of music in everyday life means that the line between music we make for ourselves and the music for which we go to market is rather more blurred than the music industry would like.

The novel is indeed the modern artistic form of the bourgeoisie, but there is no law prohibiting aristocrats from writing in another class's style; so, almost exactly a century after the unification of Italy, a Sicilian prince, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), wrote a very successful and revealing novel, Il Gattopardo ('The Leopard', 1958) about the events that led to the decline and eventual demise of the aristocracy. Modelled on the author's grandfather, the protagonist of the book, Prince Fabrizio Salina, witnesses those events with the wisdom and detachment of his age and with a historical and sociological insight that makes him support his nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, when the latter joins the Garibaldini - 'If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change' (p. 24), he tells his worried uncle - and when he wants to marry the beautiful bourgeois Angelica Sedara instead of Concetta, the prince's own daughter.

Introduction

No word occurs more frequently in any discussion of Italian affairs than 'anomalous'. Italy is conventionally held to be anomalous in many spheres: in the nature of its party system; in the democratic but oneparty government which held power throughout the life of the First Republic; in its inability to suppress the systematic use of violence in its territory and to secure for the state what Durkheim termed a 'monopoly of violence'; in its incapacity to construct trusted and efficient institutions; in the mixture of covert and public forces by which the country has been governed; and, underlying all of these, in its idiosyncratic attribution of legitimacy. The process of gaining and conceding legitimacy was, for Max Weber, fundamental to the acceptance of the operation of power in any body politic. Legitimacy is the validation and normalization in a given time and culture of the right to rule. Since it exists at the level of perceptions, ideas, ethics and culture, legitimacy is a relative notion subject to change, not an objective standard to be weighed empirically. Nor is it an absolute, transcendent concept which remains unaltered in time. The self-image of individuals or groups in society alters, and with it the limits of their willingness to underwrite the legitimacy of a particular system of governance. It is a mere cliché to assert that women in the 1990s do not see their social role in the same terms as did their forebears and that, as a consequence, the nature of the polity which they are prepared to view as legitimate has inevitably undergone change. The same is true, if in less dramatic form, of other constituent parts of the Italian body politic.

An idea of Italy

On the face of it, contemporary Italian intellectuals have a more prestigious existence than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Whether as writers, academics, journalists or film-directors, Italian intellectuals are courted by political parties of all persuasions to add lustre to their slates at election time, and wooed by the media as influential opinion makers. The contact Italian intellectuals have with the institutions of civil society comes from a long tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, Italian society has consistently relied on its intellectuals, rather than its political class, to supply the nation's agents for social change. When Dante, for example, in his De vulgari eloquentia examined the panoply of local dialects to find one on which to base a supraregional language for the peninsula, he turned to the literary idiom of his fellow poets, which seemed to him the only noble and unifying element present in an Italy rife with factionalism.

On the threshold of the new millennium, as Italy prepares to play an ever more active part in the European Union, it is not inappropriate that students of Italian culture should ask: 'What is contemporary Italian national identity, and what will the adjective “Italian” mean in the future?' The essays in this volume have primarily looked back over cultural developments in post-unification Italy from the perspective of late twentieth-century contemporaneity. They have also occasionally sought to make conjectures about possible future developments. In this brief epilogue, my focus will be on the present and the future, a prospective stance reflective of some of the collection's general aims, and conditioned of course by current realities. The question of what 'Italian' now signifies, and what the adjective may well encompass in future years implicitly or explicitly informs all that follows.

Italy was belatedly born as a nation under the sign of a constructed political and linguistic unity. Unification has always been more a dream than a reality, however, in spite of the many efforts over the last century to bring about national unity. Historically, Italian society and culture have been fragmented, and today there is an increasing, and new, fragmentation under pressure from both internal and external forces. Among these forces are greatly increased immigration, mainly from socalled developing countries, the revival of regionalism and widespread Americanization.

There should be no argument that the transformations in popular music that we associate with the rise and development of rock were the result of white fascination with black music. During the 1950s, increasing numbers of white teenagers tuned into radio stations that were programming music for black audiences, began to request recordings by black musicians at their local record stores, and tentatively ventured into nightclubs in black neighbourhoods in order to hear black performers. Rhythm and blues music seemed to promise some young white listeners a different relationship between the pleasures of the body and the dominant social formation of modern industrialised America. Whether racist primitivism or liberal cross-cultural identification, this white fascination with black music was nothing new (see McClary and Walser 1994).

In 1828, Thomas D. Rice, an itinerant musician, watched an older African–American with rheumatism perform a strange twisted dance while singing, ‘Weel about and turn about and do jus so; Every time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.’ Rice was an experienced performer who was looking for gimmicks to add to his act. He learned this song and dance, wrote new verses and used burnt cork to make himself up to look like his source for this material. The act created a public sensation and toured major entertainment centres, including New York and London. Not surprisingly, this interpretation of African–American culture was a misinterpretation. The melody to ‘Jim Crow’ had been a familiar English tune and the words – neither unusual nor especially clever – were mostly Rice's creation.

The biggest selling pop single of all time is the version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ Elton John recorded as a tribute to Princess Diana, and his Westminster Abbey performance of the song, during Diana's funeral service in September 1997, can be considered as the ultimate British pop moment. It was controversial. Pop music is still regarded as a vernacular form unsuitable for a religious occasion, a vulgar form unfit for royalty; and Elton John was not an obvious representative of the state (though he was soon to be knighted, joining Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Paul McCartney, and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber in the official pop pantheon). He was chosen to sing because he was an intimate of Diana and, in this respect, simply represented her social circle. But it was precisely because she was an Elton John fan that Princess Diana could be described as ‘the people's princess’: John was an appropriate singer at her service not just as a personal friend but also as the emotional voice of a generation.

In the 1970s Elton John and his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, perfected the musical form that came to dominate Anglo-American pop music in the last decades of the century: the rock ballad. They took the sentimental song (as commercialised in the late nineteenth century), keeping its easy melodic lines, its use of rising pitch to unleash emotion, its lyrical sense of expansive self-pity, but giving it a new rock-based dynamism (in terms of rhythm and amplification).

In March of 2000, the head of the United States-based MTV Networks outlined, to a journalist, his techniques for understanding the tastes of teenagers. ‘We actually in some cases put people under hypnosis’, said 54-year-old Tom Freston, ‘and we will videotape their lives.’ As he spoke, albums by teen stars Britney Spears and ‘N Sync were breaking all-time records for first-week sales of new titles in the United States. While alarmed rock critics bemoaned the predictability of adolescent tastes, Freston saw teenage culture as an elusive, mysterious world. To understand it, he had recourse to the methods of the psychotherapist and anthropologist.

The consumption of popular music has long been seen as chaotic and incomprehensible, even when it seems to confirm the crudest laws of hype and fashion. While trends seem driven by their own, unstoppable momentum, the popularity of any given recording or musical style is notoriously difficult to predict. Long-term prognoses about the music industry's development have regularly proved wrong, and even the rosiest of cyclical booms will often coincide with predictions of that industry's imminent obsolescence. Alongside the image of millions of consumers rushing to shops to purchase Britney Spears’ ‘Oops! … I Did It Again’, newspapers offered the spectre of thousands of United States college students in their dormitories, busily (and perhaps illegally) down-loading songs from the Internet. As album sales, in the United States and other countries, continued their upward climb in 2000, Internet industry newsletters spoke of a dying industry, deserted by consumers who now demanded music in cheaper, more convenient forms.

The Macchiaioli and the unification of Italy

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term 'Italy' was an abstract concept that intellectuals and artists since Dante had used to describe their imagined homeland rather than a political reality. The first group of artists who presented themselves as linked to the nation were the Tuscan Macchiaioli, whose emergence was made possible by the Prima Esposizione Italiana ('First Italian Exhibition') that was held in Florence in 1861, a matter of months after unification. (The name 'Macchiaioli' was taken from macchia which means 'sketch' or 'sketch technique'.) It was at this exhibition that, for the first time, artists who were living and working in different parts of the Italian peninsula were grouped together. As is well known, the centuries-long fragmentation of the Italian states and the numerous foreign dominations had signifi- cantly contributed to the absence of a 'national' art or culture. Moreover, the divided state of the peninsula did not facilitate exchanges between different regions. Not surprisingly, many nineteenth-century artists who, with unification, wished to expand their boundaries and horizons considered Italian life and art to be marked by cultural provincialism.

Call it soul, call it funk, call it hip-hop; the deep-down core of African–American popular music has been both a centre to which performers and audiences have continually returned, and a centrifuge which has sent its styles and attitudes outwards into the full spectrum of popular music around the world. The pressure – both inward and outward – has often been kept high by an American music industry slow to move beyond the apartheid-like structures of its marketing systems, which, though ostensibly abandoned in the days since the ‘race records’ era (the 1920s through the 1950s), continue to shadow the industry's practices. However much cross-over there has been between black and white audiences, the continual reiteration of racial and generic boundaries in radio formats, retailing and chart-making has again and again forced black artists and producers to navigate between a vernacular aesthetic (often invoked as ‘the street’) and what the rapper Guru calls ‘mass appeal’ – the watering down of style targeted at an supposedly ‘broader’ (read: white) audience. So it has been that, within black communities, there has been an ongoing need to name and claim a music whose strategic inward turns refused what was often seen as a ‘sell-out’ appeal to white listeners, a music that set up shop right in the neighbourhood, via black (later ‘urban contemporary’) radio, charts, and retailers, and in the untallied vernacular traffic in dubbed tapes, deejay mixes, and bootlegs.