Abstract
As a ‘timeless icon’, ‘sophisticated performer’ and ‘the most versatile singer in Italian pop music’, Mina is perhaps the most famous and successful proponent of the canzone italiana, Italian mainstream pop music. Her meteoric rise to fame in the early 1960s was mediated by television and the popular press, which both presented Mina as a quintessential Italian star. Her popularity also extended abroad: in the same period, and at the climax of her rise to fame, Mina embarked on television and concert tours of Spain, West Germany, Venezuela, France and Japan. Singles released in these countries during this period performed extremely well, with ‘Heisser Sand’ in West Germany and ‘Suna ni kieta namida’ in Japan charting at number one in each country’s singles chart in 1962 and 1964 respectively. Such success illustrates how, in the period 1960–5, the singer became a transnational popular music star, who was able ‘to produce cultural meaning in relation to (but not dictated by) the existing power structures of nations and states, to remain mobile, flexible, and open to multiple avenues of meaning and pleasure in different contexts of politics, social relations, and cultural assumptions’ (Meeuf and Raphael 2). Through this lens of transnationality, the article explores Mina’s status as star as it was established during the early 1960s in the Italian context before focusing specifically on Mina’s presence on the global market during the same period. It takes as case studies Mina’s star image in Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as the singles released on the Japanese and West German markets, as a means of interrogating the extent to which Mina is transnational, with the potential to generate new cultural and social meanings, both in Italy and beyond.
Highlights
Article As a ‘timeless icon’, ‘sophisticated performer’ and ‘the most versatile singer in Italian pop music’ (Prato, ‘Virtuosity and Populism’ 163–9), Mina is perhaps the most famous and successful proponent of the canzone italiana, Italian mainstream pop music. Her meteoric rise to fame in the early 1960s was mediated by television and the popular press, which both presented Mina as a quintessential Italian star
As a result of the starification process to which they are subjected, Italian stars can arguably be seen to embody a set of meanings and connotations which reveal something about the systems of cultural value, and the wider established ideologies and ways of behaving at work in Italian society
There is the question of what happens when stars move beyond their national boundaries. Do they continue to represent ideas and ways of behaving that are Italian once they move outside of the nation? Or do they come to represent new ideas and symbolize new meanings and values? This article explores these questions in the case of Mina and her fame within and outside of Italy in the early 1960s. It builds on work on Mina as star, who ‘con la sua voce mitica e le sue parole che etichettano un’intera ampia zona della nostra storia sociale, emotive, sentimentale, culturale, è più mito degli altri [cantanti italiani]’ (Favaro 73), and on the notion of cross-cultural exchanges in Italian popular music through cover records (Prato, ‘Selling Italy’), by focusing on a specific period in Mina’s career and the cross-cultural exchange that her songs and appearances abroad represent
Summary
Article As a ‘timeless icon’, ‘sophisticated performer’ and ‘the most versatile singer in Italian pop music’ (Prato, ‘Virtuosity and Populism’ 163–9), Mina is perhaps the most famous and successful proponent of the canzone italiana, Italian mainstream pop music. Art. 25, page 7 of 16 and national identity’ (Gundle 263), are transformed in these different national contexts, where new cultural meanings of Mina and of Italian popular music are generated.
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