Questions of style: notes on Italian hip hop

Abstract

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)