Voices of Dissent

Figures

Figure 1: Italian chronology

Figure 2: Chronology of the releases of singer-songwriters’ albums

Figure 3: Consensus tree of the singer-songwriters corpus

Figure 4: Chronology of the releases of left-wing bands’ albums

Figure 5: Consensus tree of the left-wing bands corpus

Figure 6: Chronology of the releases of right-wing bands’ albums

Figure 7: Consensus tree of the right-wing bands corpus

Figure 8: Album releases by decade

Figure 9: Album releases by year

Figure 10: Cluster analysis of the entire corpus

Figure 11: Percentage of type/token ratios by decade

Figure 12: Percentage of past tense verbs by decade

Figure 13: Percentages of subjunctive mood usage by decade

Figure 14: Most frequent words in corpus of left-wing popular music

Figure 15: Resistance words in the singer-songwriters and left-wing bands

Figure 16: Culture of class words in the singer-songwriters and left-wings bands

Figure 17: Most frequent words in the fascist popular music corpus

Figure 18: Most frequent words in the right-wing corpus

Figure 19: Collocations of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the left-wing popular music corpus

Figure 20: Collocations of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the singer-songwriters and left-wing bands corpora

Figure 21: Collocations of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the right-wing bands corpus

Figure 22: Geographical origins of the artists of the corpus

Figure 23: Geographical representation of the artists of the corpus by region

Figure 24: Network of the toponyms of the corpus

Figure 25: Timeline of the singer-songwriters of the corpus

Figure 26: Timeline of the left-wing bands of the corpus

Figure 27: Timeline of the right-wing bands of the corpus←x | xi→

Tables

Table 1: Adaptation of Hjelmslev’s theory applied to the lyrics

Table 2: Adaptation of Hjelmslev’s theory applied to the music

Table 3: Percentage of type/token ratios by decade

Table 4: Percentage of parts-of-speech by decade

Table 5: List of the most frequent toponyms←xi | xii→←xii | xiii→

Foreword

Musicians throughout the world have often attempted to express political opinions or convey messages in their work and to use their status and fame as a platform to intervene in public debate. At the time of writing, American musicians are voicing criticism of President Donald Trump. The field of popular music studies has seen a number of academic analyses of the relationship between music and politics in various countries. Regarding the English-speaking world, they include work on the counterculture of the late 1960s in the United States and the struggle against racism in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s or against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The political thrust of particular genres such as punk and reggae has also been frequently examined. However, with a few notable exceptions, there is a relative paucity of work in English on Italian popular music and its interaction with politics. The non-specialist may be tempted to assume that there is little of interest beyond the annual Festa de l’Unità, which is often referenced. Giovanni Pietro Vitali’s groundbreaking work on New Italian Popular and Political Music (NPP) is therefore an important and welcome addition to the literature.

Vitali situates musicians’ political commitments clearly in the context of developments in Italian society since the 1920s. He thus takes into account the particularities of Italy, such as the rise of fascism, the role of partisans in the liberation of the country during the Second World War, the significance of anti-fascism in post-war Italian culture, the preponderant position of the Communist Party (PCI) on the left, the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 and its consequences, the ‘Years of Lead’, the demise of the Communist Party, the rise of right-wing populism with Berlusconi and the struggles against neo-liberalism. However, Vitali does not simply link musicians and their work to Italian politics. He also examines the impact of Italian culture and history on the language used in political songs. This is particularly apparent in his fascinating analysis of the use of dialects and local forms of the Italian language.←xiii | xiv→

Dr Jeremy Tranmer←xiv | xv→

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a study that began in 2015 when I started to collect information. In the past three years, I have had the good fortune of being able to share my ideas with colleagues and friends who always found time to help and advise me.

First of all, I am especially indebted to the Research Unit MIMMOC at the University of Poitiers and its team of scholars and researchers. Since my arrival in Poitiers, they have shown their support by endorsing this research.

I would especially like to thank the author of the foreword of this book, Dr Jeremy Tranmer. He read the draft of this work and gave me advice on how to improve the quality of my research; his passion and expertise added considerable value to this finished product.

Very special thanks too to Professors Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino who kindly offered me their precious advice.

I am also grateful to Peter Lang and, especially, to Dr Laurel Plapp, for this invaluable opportunity and for their constant availability.

This work would not have been possible without the support of a special friend who followed this research from its first step, Annette Feeney. She offered her time and her friendship throughout every stage of this journey.

I also wish to thank Claire-Lucie Polès, Jodie Jones and Patience Haggin for their unconditional help, and Marino Severini (Gang), Massimo Ghiacci (Modena City Ramblers), Marco di Domenico and Alessia Autuori who accepted to be interviewed for the purposes of this research.

I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to share the content of my research and who have offered help or suggestions. Above all, I wish to thank especially Anita for her constant help, love, and immense patience.←xv | xvi→

Introduction

This book consists of a linguistic, thematic and cultural analysis of Italian politically committed music. The point of view of this study is comparative and it aims to analyse the Italian political approach to music as a part of the international popular musical scenario. The idea behind this work is not to apply a musicological analysis but to interpret a music phenomenon as the result of cultural, political, literary and linguistic tendencies across the years.

The period considered for the investigation of the case study extends from the late 1960s up to today in order to establish how a chosen group of Italian popular musicians have described the changes that occurred in their country in the last sixty years. Due to the comparative approach of the book, the subject of this research will be considered through a historical explanation of the case study in order to be totally understandable even to a public without a background in Italian Studies.

This work proposes a linguistic and thematic analysis of the style of popular music bands and singer-songwriters who use folk elements as political tools. Popular music is a complex phenomenon to analyse as it tends to mix different music styles and subjects. It is also important to consider that defining and classifying popular music itself is still very subjective within the field of music studies. Indeed, as Fabbri and Plastino, two eminent scholars who have dedicated their research to Italian popular music, write, ‘the main inconsistency still lies in the (partial) approach to popular music as an object to be studied, and not as a field of study’.¹ Their theories and works were instrumental in forming the analysis of popular music proposed in this book.² Popular music can be considered a third genre, whose birth is derived from the previous invention of the concepts of ‘classic’ and ←1 | 2→‘folk’,³ which has renewed itself continuously through its combination with new music, according to Furlong.⁴ In contrast to popular music, which is linked with the formation of a music market, folk was an ‘authentic expression of the rural pre-capitalistic communities’.⁵ As Ronald Cohen has explained, folk music has several specific attributes like distinct local and regional origins.⁶ On the other hand, traditional folk music, conventionally passed down through oral transmission, is also often performed by amateur musicians using acoustic instruments, and is therefore characterised by simple compositions with little complexity and the authorship of the songs is often unknown.⁷

Based on these perspectives, it appeared that in order to give a complete interpretation of a musical phenomenon with a cultural, literary and linguistic approach, it was necessary to adopt an interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of the lyrics and the socio-historical context. The methodologies adopted in this work combine linguistics, textual studies, sociology, and political science with the support of digital humanities as a central tool in order to have a better understanding of the lyrics and to add a thematic and linguistic analysis to the musical perspective. This methodological approach was essential in order to give a thorough account of all the aspects of popular music. On this topic, Cook declares that music can only be understood through an approach that takes several elements into account:⁸

For my study of Italian politically committed bands and singer-songwriters, I created a corpus of chosen artists who present some linguistic and thematic characteristics in common such as a similar approach to music. The corpus includes those musicians most linked to the Italian political movements from the late 1960s up to today. In order to create a criterion to harmonise the corpus, the musicians of the first part of the corpus – from the 1970s to the 1980s – were chosen according to the role that they continued to have during the Italian politically committed culture at the beginning of the 2000s. This choice does not include a substantial part of the Italian left-wing popular music of the 1970s, but it allowed me to assemble a corpus where each discography is large enough, in terms of word numbers, to be studied with digital humanities tools. The proposed analysis deals with the use of two corpora of reference. In the first I collected examples from songs written by musicians who displayed a politically committed activity. I define this corpus as ‘illustrative’ because the artists mentioned describe some characteristics of the case study. I cite examples taken from lyrics written by those artists according to each specific topic of the book. Furthermore, I wanted to give some examples of lyrics analysis through the use of digital humanities tools because I thought that a distant reading analysis of these lyrics was essential. Following Moretti’s methodological suggestions,⁹ I pioneered a digital investigation on the writing of those artists because I knew that their lyrics would reveal recurrent linguistic patterns highlighting a proximity with a discourse quite close to a historical political rhetoric.

I then selected forty-two bands for my second corpus, a ‘quantitative’ corpus, which was inquired digitally.¹⁰ For these forty-two artists I collected all the lyrics, often transcribing them while listening to the music. My choice did not aim to declare that these authors were more important or prominent than others. They were selected on the basis of how representative they were of Italian politically committed music for the period between the 1960s and 2010s, and for the kind of artists they represented: bands ←3 | 4→and singer-songwriters. Moreover, I had to be sure that each musician’s group of lyrics was composed of at least 4,000 words, which I consider the minimum number of words for a good linguistic and stylometric analysis. It is undoubtedly possible to add other authors to this corpus, as it is also possible to consider some bands more appropriate than others, but when a study is conducted with digital tools, it is necessary to make precise choices concerning the selection of data from all the datasets available in order to create the right balance. Moreover, it is also important to consider the limits and the advantages of software and computational languages used to conduct a digital investigation on a group of texts. I limited my corpus to forty-two artists because I wanted to create a case study which included a number of artists that was not too high, so that a non-Italian reader would not get lost, but which, at the same time, was culturally representative and linguistically and digitally analysable.

I composed the inventory of musicians, which I have also listed in the appendix of this book, providing some information on their biographies and historical context. To compose the corpus I also aimed to select artists representative of two types, according to their political affilation: left-wing artists, which I distinguish further into two groups (singer-songwriters and left-wing bands), and right-wing musicians, which I called simply right-wing bands. In its final form, the corpus of forty-two bands and singer-songwriters totals 317 albums and 2,841 songs.¹¹

The following elements were essential for inclusion in the corpus: