Rockin' Out book summary, Sintesi del corso di Musica

Scarica Rockin' Out book summary e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Musica solo su Docsity! CAP 1. CONSTRUCTING TIN PAN ALLEY: FROM MINSTRELSY TO MASS CULTURE Minstrelsy: The Making of Mainstream U.S. Culture  The institution of slavery has been a defining feature of U.S. history that it is hardly surprising to find the roots of our popular music embedded in this legacy . The first indigenous U.S. popular music was blackface minstrelsy, a cultural form involving Northern whites in blackened faces, parodying their perceptions of African American culture.  As the class hierarchy in the United States became more clearly delineated, opera came to be identified with the cultural elite, while those lower down the socioeconomic scale gravitated toward ethnic Scottish and Irish melodies, Italian bel canto, and homegrown songs of minstrelsy. As the complexity of U.S. society increased, it led to greater segregation of audiences—not only by class, but by race and gender as well. Accordingly, the initial audiences for blackface minstrelsy was white, working class, and male.  Thomas Dartmouth Rice is most often credited with institutionalizing the racial impersonation through blackface performance. Rice took the characteristic clothing and bodily movements that became associated with his character “Jim Crow” from an impoverished black man. The shifting location in which the story was told is an indication that the tale is as much myth as history, but the encounter established that minstrelsy involved a symbolic exchange between white and black men, in which white performers appropriated qualities of blackness for their own economic and cultural gain, and for the amusement of white onlookers. The character “Jim Crow” typified the contradictions that ran through minstrelsy: a slow-witted, lackadaisical plantation slave with great physical charisma and hidden wit.  As early minstrelsy developed, it was dominated by two equally demeaning characters. Jim Crow evolved into the Sambo, an archetype of the happy, obedient slave. At the other end of the spectrum was the urban dandy , he was fashionably dressed, streetwise, and at times given to violence. At this time, minstrel performance was a solo art that might take place in the street, or someone’s kitchen, legitimate theater to circus acts.  It wasn’t until the appearance of Dan Emmett and the Virginia Minstrels in the early 1840s that the genre began to take shape as a performance of its own.  In its standard form, the minstrel show included ensemble singing, dances and marches, stump speeches, and comic sketches. Instrumentation consisted of strings such as violin and banjo for melody, and a rhythm section comprising the two “endmen”— on tambourine and on bones or castanets. The banjo, an instrument derived from West African string instruments and strongly associated with black slave musicians from the early eighteenth century forward, carried symbolic weight as a primary icon of minstrel’s African tendencies, even as its use among white performers made it a more fully Americanized medium. As minstrelsy matured, the show was divided into three parts: the opening segment was devoted to the Northern dandy, while the closing centered on the Southern slave. The middle section included mock lectures and speeches. Over time, the endmen gained importance, Mr. Interlocutor who provided a target for their witty repartee  Although racial oppression and slavery persisted after emancipation, minstrelsy generally moved toward a more sympathetic treatment of African Americans. No one was identified with this treatment than Stephen Foster. Foster humanized minstrelsy, but without directly challenging black stereotypes or the institution of slavery. One of his first and most popular songs, “oh! Susanna” portrayed African Americans as good natured but simple minded, and it is still taught in primary schools as an innocent novelty song. The term nigger was liberally used throughout “old Uncle Ned,” but by the song’s end the slave master genuinely mourns Ned’s passing. Foster began to downplay the exaggerated black dialect and achieved a lament for lost home, friends, and youth, cutting across racial and ethnic lines. Sheet Music, Sound Recording, and the Sounds of Music  Minstrelsy was gradually supplanted by vaudeville, because popular songs were a staple of vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley publishers were regular visitors to the gala shows produced in New York . Their “persuasion tactics include “out-and-out payment by the publisher—a flat fee, or in some cases a promise of a percentage of profits from sales of sheet music.” The practice of “paying for play” eventually came to be known as “payola “. For the publishers, such investments in vaudeville stars were often returned many times in sheet music sales.  Because middle-class home entertainment at this time centered on the piano, sheet music was the main vehicle for the mass dissemination of music . With potential sales music, publishers were not particularly interested in Thomas Edison’s cylinder phonograph Thomas Edison’s phonograph & Emile Berliner’s gramophone  When Edison first conceived of sound recording, he felt greatest potential in reproducing speech and hailed his invention as a “talking machine . Still, he decided to introduce it to the public by exploiting its musical properties. The poor sound quality of early cylinders severely hampered their commercial value. Edison momentarily dismissed his phonograph and turned his attention to the invention of the electric light  The next steps in recording were undertaken by Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell who produced better sound quality than Edison’s machine. Because at this time recording was a mechanical process rather than an electromechanical one, it was called acoustic recording and it would soon be devoted exclusively to music.  In 1889, Louis Glass pointed the way to the future of the phonograph. Glass had equipped some of his dictating machines with a coin-activated mechanism and four sets of listening tubes. For a nickel per listener per play, patrons could avail themselves of the sounds of a prerecorded cylinder. The enterprise won for Glass the title of Father of the Juke Box. Pay phonographs proved to be very popular in a wide range of venues  As the number of locations for coin-operated phonographs increased, so did the demand for prerecorded cylinders. However, three factors stood in the way of a alliance between Tin Pan Alley and the cylinder-recording companies: because of their limited sound quality, cylinders tended to favor spoken-word and instrumental selections; publishers did not receive royalties from the use of recorded music; and the demand for prerecorded cylinders could not compete with the demand for sheet music.  Meanwhile, new developments in recording technology had rekindled Edison’s interest. During the early 1890s, Edison had introduced affordable phonographs, leading to the home entertainment market for prerecorded cylinders.  Emile Berliner, a German immigrant, developed the flat recording disc that became the industry standard. In 1888, Berliner introduced his gramophone and anticipated the ability to make an unlimited number of copies from a single master, the use of discs for home entertainment on a mass scale, and a system of royalty payments to artists derived from the sale of discs. Berliner made negative discs, called “stampers,” which were then pressed into ebonite rubber biscuits to produce an exact duplicate of the master. A later improvement replaced the rubber discs with shellac-based, 78 revolutions per minute (rpm) pressings, which became the industry standard until the late 1940s. Berliner began to manufacture the gramophones, turning out machines by the hundreds. From this point until the advent of commercial radio following World War I, acoustic recording enjoyed its golden era. Tin Pan Alley Creates Musical Tradition  Popular culture insinuated itself between folk culture, and high culture as a third cultural category, distinguishable from both but borrowed freely from each. Historically, folk culture has been associated with the poor and those lacking formal education. It was a collective culture, shared by a particular community of people. The music arising from it was comparatively simple in form and structure, performed by nonprofessionals, and passed along in oral tradition. High culture was associated with the ruling classes—the aristocracy, the capitalist bourgeoisie. Its music was more complicated in form and structure and was composed by paid professionals who were commissioned through a system of patronage  Tin Pan Alley centralized the U.S. popular music business at a time when European opera was still the hallmark of taste . Songwriters in the United States soon came to realize that the key to profitability lay in catering to popular tastes.  In attempting to do so, Tin Pan Alley writers sought to construct an alternative to the dominance of European art music. These writers incorporated influences from a wide range of sources, including African American genres. At the same time, they often took their cues from classical music. In leaning heavily on upper-middle-class themes and images Tin Pan Alley writers allied themselves with the high culture. As the products of Tin Pan Alley became more ubiquitous, they were often condemned as noise, a corruption of more refined musical sensibilities  Typical of early Tin Pan Alley were graceful waltzes and spirited marches. Familiar waltzes included Harry Von Tilzer’s “Bird in a gilded Cage”, George Evans’ “In the good old Summer Time”  Ironically, for its definitive Americanness, Jewish Americans dominated Tin Pan Alley. If one had to choose a single artist who epitomized the Tin Pan Alley ethos, it would be Irving Berlin. Berlin was four years old when he and his family came to the United States after escaping Russian pogroms. Like many Jewish immigrants they settled in New York’s lower east Side, where they lived in poverty. Berlin landed his a job at Tin Pan Alley and wrote classics such as “A Pretty girl Is like a Melody, “Putting’ on the ritz”, and “god Bless America” which captured the hearts and minds of generations and made Berlin a household name. Until he was unseated by Paul McCartney, Berlin was easily the most successful songwriter in history. The range of his songs, in content and mood, in form is enormous. . . . Some take on a bit of the flavor of ragtime, of the blues, of country-western, Latin-American, or jazz. Incorporating Ragtime, Blues, and Jazz  The rise of Tin Pan Alley paralleled the emergence of ragtime, and the connections between the two reveal the inequitable pattern of cultural borrowing and economic reward between black and white artists that has characterized much of the history of popular music in this country.  Ragtime began as a syncopated, African American music with structural ties to European marches. It began in conjunction with a dance called the cakewalk, which involved blacks imitating the grand entrance of whites to society balls.  For Tin Pan Alley, ragtime was a craze to be incorporated into popular song. Irving Berlin turned out dozens of ragtime songs, including “Play Some ragtime”, “Stop That rag,” “Alexander’s ragtime Band”. Although this last song did not marry syncopation and the march tradition, the catchy, well-crafted tune, which balanced “dash and energy” with a “bow to negro music,” proved to be so popular that Berlin was referred as the Father of ragtime.  A similar but far more complicated pattern characterized Tin Pan Alley’s use of blues and jazz. Unlike ragtime, the blues were improvised and were more successful in preserving the original and melodic patterns of African music. Using three-line verse form springs African retentions, such as the call-and-response style and the “blue notes” that typify the singing of many West African tribes, the blues are clearly part of the African American musical tradition.  W. C. Handy was one of the first songwriters to bring a feel for the blues into popular composition. Handy was a trained composer who was conversant with African American folkloric idioms that he published some of his most memorable compositions, including “St. Louis Blues”, “Joe Turner Blues”  Early appropriations of jazz created the impression that jazz was the product of polite society white dance bands like that of Paul Whiteman, whom the media crowned the king of Jazz  There is an important distinction between the oral tradition of improvisational, “hot” jazz and the written tradition of “sweet” dance music that defined white society like Paul Whiteman’s orchestras. Because high-society whites and middle-class blacks tended to shun the rough, hard-driving styles, the jazz showcased in upscale venues aspired to a smoothness and cosmopolitanism. As a result, most mainstream listeners associated jazz with sweet dance music, even though, by the time of Whiteman’s success, most jazz musicians, including African Americans, were playing arrangements that combined sweet and hot styles  The Tin Pan Alley songwriter who had the closest association with jazz was George Gershwin sought to bridge the gap between art music and popular music. One result of this interest his Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s sensitivity to the subtle nuances of African American music led to the acceptance of his work among black as well as white audiences . “Summertime”, “I got rhythm” quickly passed into the realm of a jazz classic and became foundational to the subsequent evolution of jazz harmony. Dance Crazes, Latin Influences, Musical Theater, and Records  In 1909, records were a force to be reckoned with. The resulting Copyright Act of 1909 mandated a royalty of two cents for each cylinder, record, or piano roll manufactured, in addition to the royalties from live performances. Shortly after, the recording industry and Tin Pan Alley began to cross paths regularly, beginning with the dance fever that swept the country from 1910 to World War I and continuing with the growth of musical theater.  Tin Pan Alley hits such as Irving Berlin’s “everybody’s Doin’ It” and “Alexander’s ragtime Band” and Gilbert and Muir’s “Waiting for the robert e. Lee” were suited to new social dances like the one-step, two- step, and turkey trot, and records made it easier for couples to practice at home.  The public followed in the footsteps of the husband-and-wife dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle. The Castles pushed the trend further after returning from Paris with the Argentine tango, which marked the beginnings of the “latin tinge” in mainstream popular music. This being the ragtime era, Tin Pan Alley was quick to issue a number of ragtime tangos like “Tango rag” and “everybody Tango.” In addition to their success and lucrative public appearances, the Castles had a deal with Victor to produce a series of dance records. Europe supervised the project, providing opportunities for dozens of African American musicians to participate in mainstream culture, and also contributing to the latin tinge by adding Puerto rican musicians to the mix.  Europe had organized the Clef Club in New York as a black musicians’ union that could furnish dance orchestras of almost any size. He assembled for a 1912 Carnegie Hall concert, which was a first for a black orchestra. Because of his association with the Castles, Europe’s Society orchestra was signed to Victor.They produced eight dance records for Victor that remained profitable for years.  In addition to dance music, musical theater became another force linking Tin Pan Alley and the record companies; its value became apparent during World War I, when British gramophone made successful recordings of the songs of Irving Berlin’s shows, Watch Your Step and Cheep. Afterward, Victor—followed by Columbia and Edison—emulated the success by recording the best-known stage entertainers in the United States. The singer who created the strongest bridge between Tin Pan Alley and the world of records was Al Jolson. His 1919 Columbia recording “Swanee,” sold over 2 million records, followed by hits like Victor recordings of “Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman,” two Tin Pan Alley favorites performed by the Paul Whiteman orchestra  The Tin Pan Alley songsters organized the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) to recover royalties on performances of their copyrighted music. This is done by issuing a blanket license for the use of any selection in the catalogue to live performance venues such as hotels and nightclubs and then distributing these royalties to writers and publishers. Of the society’s 170 charter members, only six were black. While some black composers who were schooled in musical notation were able to gain entrance to ASCAP, the vast majority of black artists were excluded from the society and thereby denied the full benefit of copyright protection Tin Pan Alley Goes Hollywood . . . And Latin  Talking films held out the promise of even more potential market for Tin Pan Alley composers. Warner’s classic, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, often remembered as the first talkie, was in fact a silent film with songs. This was made able based on a process for photographing sound onto film.  The success of (mgm’s) Broadway Melody, made it clear that mainstream popular music would play a major role in talking films. Record companies rushed to record dance and vocal versions of the film’s hit songs. The major motion picture companies—Warner, United Artists, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and mgm—all planned musicals.  Jimmie Rodgers was the first real star of country music. He joined a minstrel troupe as a blackface entertainer. After his recording debut, he recorded the first of his twelve blue yodels. Rodgers featured a broad range of instruments in his recordings, including ukuleles and pianos, as well as the steel guitar. Rodgers’s blue yodels showcased the cultural diversity that informed his music and influenced generations of musicians. Like some of his blues contemporaries, Rodgers was inducted as an early influence into the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame.  With the rise of Texas hillbillies such as Lefty Frizzell, and Bob Wills, all inspired by Rodgers, country music took a turn to the west. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys popularized a brand of music called western swing, which became a formative influence on early rock ‘n’ roll. The Long Road Back for Records  The Great Depression destroyed a number of small independent blues, jazz, and country music labels, and also the majors. Paramount had acquired the Black Swan, and Columbia had absorbed Okeh, only to be bought by the American record Company. Edison ceased production, Warner Brothers acquired Brunswick to promote its film stars.  For the record industry, the road back to prosperity began again with the jukebox. The 1908 coin-activated phonograph had quickly fallen into disuse when phonographs and records moved into homes. A new incarnation of the coin-operated record player appeared in 1927, when the Automatic Musical instrument Company introduced its Selective Phonograph. Reopened bars and cocktail lounges, looking for low-cost entertainment and additional sources of revenue, were happy to consider the jukebox. By 1935 jukeboxes operated in the united States accounted for 40 percent of the record trade. Jukeboxes included a much broader range of music than most radio stations. The jukebox enabled the mass audience to play a powerful role in determining public taste. Following the dramatic growth of jukeboxes, Billboard and Variety, the major entertainment industry magazines, began charting jukebox hits. Once this happened, radio producers used the charts to shape live programming, and song-pluggers paid more attention to records. CAP 3. THE RISE OF RHYTHM AND BLUES  The military buildup that preceded the United States’ entry into World War II enhanced the country’s prospects for a economic recovery from the Great Depression. As the military buildup began, thousands of Southern blacks and whites abandoned the oppressive conditions. Naturally, they took their music with them. At the same time, countless Eastern and Midwestern soldiers were put through training on Southern military bases, where they heard music that had not achieved mainstream popularity in the North. In this way, blues and country music received unprecedented exposure.  Unlike country music, the blues, as a rule, had been excluded from radio in earlier years, but the war-era exodus of 1 million African Americans from the South helped to loosen these restrictive programming policies. Wartime prosperity made them a desirable consumer group. Gradually, in areas with high concentrations of African Americans, some black-oriented programs, usually slotted late at night, appeared on a few stations. Such programming began to tear down the walls of the so-called race market toward the end of the decade . The widespread commercialization of music that came along with the developmentof recording and broadcasting opened up opportunities for financial gain that were unimaginable before the rise of mass culture. The Publishers and the Broadcasters: Ascap Versus BMI  Publishers and broadcasters had been at odds ever since the ASCAP made their demand for a $5-a-day royalty fee in 1922, and escalating demand of blanket license that had led the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in reaction.  NAB, decided to challenge ASCAP’s monopoly by forming a performing rights organization of its own. More than 200 stations raised to capitalize Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI). Blues and country music songwriters and publishers found in BMI an inviting home for their work.  By the end of the decade, the Tin Pan Alley/Broadway/Hollywood monopoly on public taste was challenged by BMI writers like Huddie Ledbetter, Hank Williams, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino Enter the Deejay: The Broadcasters Versus the AFM  NAB found itself involved in another controversy, with American Federation of Musicians (AFM)  As a rule, the music heard on radio was performed live. Searching desperately for less expensive programming during the Great Depression, some radio stations had begun to use records as an alternative. Records, however, directly challenged the employment of working musicians on the air.  Records were played by a new figure in broadcasting, the disc jockey. Until the advent of the deejay, radio had simply been a vehicle for transmitting the substance of other media—newspapers, religious pulpits, concert halls, vaudeville, and theater. The deejay show was unique in its combination of live announcing and prerecorded music. As deejays became more common, the practice of programming only live music on radio became harder to maintain.  It fell to James c. Petrillo president of the AFM in 1940 to declare war on canned music. He unsuccessfully lobbied the Roosevelt administration to ban records on radio, and then forced Chicago radio stations to employ union musicians to operate turntables. Petrillo turned his wrath on the record companies. He warned the record companies that unless they could prevent radio stations and jukebox operators from playing records, his organization would strike the recording studios.  Anticipating the strike, the record companies had stockpiled unreleased masters but the musicians lost millions of dollars. As the demand for new releases grew, however, the musicians began to prevail. The strike ended when the record companies agreed to pay a royalty on record sales From Big Bands to Singers  Initially, dance music was primarily an instrumental music. As swing (a danceable amalgam of blues, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley pop) grew in popularity in the mid-1930s, nearly all the big bands had begun to perform with vocalists. Vocalists were often limited to one chorus. However, audiences enjoyed the vocal increased and singers eventually became popular enough to begin solo careers. Female singers who worked with big bands were some of the first to break out. Ella Fitzgerald started her career with Chick Webb; “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” made her a pop star. Bing Crosby, of course, was the most successful vocalist of the era, totaling more than 300 hits between 1931 and 1954.  The first pop vocalist to cause hysteria among fans was an Italian American - Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was also unique among the pop vocalists of the day because he was socially engaged. He supported Roosevelt and spoke out against racial and religious intolerance. Sinatra’s early success is perhaps the strongest indicator of the rise of the solo vocalist. His buyout of his contract with Tommy Dorsey marked the transition from big bands fronted by singers to vocalists backed up by big bands. With the rise of the vocalists, the pop market was taken over by figures such as Bing Crosby (“Swingin’ on a Star”), Dinah Shore (“I’ll Walk Alone) and Vaughn Monroe (“Rum and coca cola,” “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”).  Although a number of pop black vocals scored major hits in the pop market in the postwar era—Nat “King” Cole (“For Sentimental Reasons”), Ella Fitzgerald (“My happiness”), the Mills Brothers (“Across the Valley from the Alamo”), the period was dominated by Italian American men Perry Como (“Long Ago and Far Away”), Frankie Laine (“That’s My Desire). The heart-wrenching emotionality that had long been part of Italian popular song seemed quite well suited to American popular styles in the 1940s and 1950s. The Major Labels Reclaim Country Music  After WWII war, the major labels, concerned about their declining bottom lines, were intrigued by the possibility of nationwide markets for regional musics. In the postwar context, the categories race and hillbilly seemed inappropriate. A range of categories started to displace the term hillbilly, the most prominent being folk and country. Folk appeared likely to emerge as the new designation for the genre until it became tainted through its association with “communist sympathizers” such as the popular folk group the Weavers. With folk temporarily discredited, country or the country and western became the chosen industry term after 1950.  The entry of two new major companies into the music industry during this period contributed to the majors’ hold on country music. The first was MGM Records which picked up Hank Williams, The second entry was Mercury which signed Frankie Laine.  Hank Williams continued along the path pioneered by Jimmie Rodgers. His honky-tonk swagger brought country music one step closer to rockabilly. His songs were perfectly crafted, simple in structure but deep in feeling, intensely personal, and universally accessible. “Hey Good Lookin’” is one of his up-tempo, honky-tonk songs with backbeat and tasty steel guitar licks. The structure of the song is fairly straightforward: Each verse has an aaba form (verse-verse-refrain-verse), where “a” is one melody that repeats several times with different lyrics and “b” is a contrasting melody. The Independents Promote Rhythm and Blues  While the major labels were able to bring country and western music firmly into their fold, and new developments in African American music seemed less desirable to them. During the big band era, the majors had contented themselves with connections to the most prominent black innovators of the big band and had lost touch with other developments in the rich and constantly evolving African American music culture.  A number of African American musicians were now developing styles closer to the blues. As the swing era declined, rhythm and blues (R&B) came to the fore in working-class black communities. Because of its insistent rhythms, uncontrolled energy, and suggestive content, the majors viewed R&B as unsuitable for mainstream consumption, so they decided to pass on the sound  If there was one artist who signified the transition from the controlled energy and smooth delivery of the big bands to the unbridled emotion of rhythm and blues, it was Louis Jordan. He and his group, the Tympani Five, brought African American working-class sensibilities into the mainstream with polish and humor. Like Jordan, whose music was described as “Jumpin’ The Blues,” most R&B artists of the late 1940s achieved success such as Wynonie Harris (“Good Rockin’ Tonight”), John Lee Hooker (“Boogie chillen”), Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson (“I’m Weak but I’m Willing”)  Critics, have written at length about class differences between jazz and blues. While jazz was an immensely popular and influential crossover music that introduced elements of the African American tradition into the mainstream, in some ways it was also a product of the black middle class. By the 1930s, jazz had moved away from the older lowdown forms of blues and had begun to utilize greater amounts of popular American music as well as certain formal European traditions.  R&B artists of the 1940s were more attuned to working-class black sensibilities. Because of the demand for R&B, several hundred independent labels were able to enter the business. Aladdin, Modern in Los Angeles; Atlantic in New York; King in Cincinnati, Vee Jay in Chicago, and Sun in Memphis—produced R&B first for the black community and, with the aid of jukeboxes and independent deejays that brought the music to the attention of a national audience. The best indication of their success in popularizing R&B can be seen in Billboard’s decision to drop the term race music in favor of the more descriptive rhythm and blues.  King Records was distinguished by its ability to produce R&B and country and western music with equal success. King was perhaps the only independent record company that had equally strong rosters of R&B and C&W artists. Henry Glover - King's producer said the label already had an established policy of having country singers cover R&B songs and R&B singers cover country songs by the time he started his work for King. Under Glover’s direction, the King empire not only maintained a foothold in country music but became one of the premiere R&B labels as well.  Perhaps the most important among the new independent labels was Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler, a reviewer for Billboard said to have coined the term rhythm and blues, joined the company and went on to become head of artist. By the early 1950s, Atlantic was the most important R&B label in the country, with a number of talent rosters: Ruth Brown's "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, Chords’ “Sh’Boom,” Baker’s “Tra La La” made an unmistakable imprint on rock ‘n’ roll. Independent Radio: Deejays in Your Face  With the devastation of network radio by television, local radio became the primary vehicle for popularizing the music produced by independent record companies and licensed to BMI  And as national programming gave way to hundreds of locally programmed stations, each appealing to its own audience, the flawless, even-toned, accent-free radio voice of the typical announcer was no long suitable. Fast-talking deejays took over, and provided their own eccentricity.  Replacing the live entertainment personalities who had dominated national radio, these independent deejays became pivotal figures in the music industry. Record companies routinely supplied them with free new releases with the hope they could turn them into hits  Relying on their own inventiveness for popularity, independent deejays often experimented with specialty music and, in most cases, it turned out to be R&B.  In R&B radio, black deejays and white deejays existed from the start. Black jockeys tended to take over the manners and mannerisms of black preachers. They were showmen rather than announcers. Their job was to entertain, not just to introduce records.  Unlike dance halls, record stores, and jukeboxes, the airwaves could not be segregated. If white teenagers wanted to turn their radio dials to the local R&B station, they were free to do so. A change in popular music tastes was emerging as listeners across racial lines began calling into radio stations to request Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man”; Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”; Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”   Like many doo wop songs, the structure of “Sh’Boom” is loosely based on the template of verse- verse-bridge-verse: two initial verses, sung to the same melody, are followed by a bridge with a new melody, then leads back into another verse with the original melody. However, the Chords vary it somewhat, adding short verses in which singer scats, or sings nonsense syllables leading into a repetition of the “Life could be a dream” lyric. There is also an instrumental break over the chords of the verse, with a sax solo in the gritty R&B style sometimes called dirty sax.  This pattern “one it wonder” was more a reflection of how the record companies treated these artists than of the groups’ talent. Even more successful groups like the Harptones “Sunday kind of Love”, “Life Is but a Dream” bounced from label to label before fading Rockabilly: The Country Strain  As rock ‘n’ roll developed, it was only a matter of time until some entrepreneur figured out that white artists who could merge R&B and C&W with credibility would have enormous sales potential. The person usually credited with this discovery is Sam Phillips, who founded Sun Records in Memphis. So it was that Elvis Presley, the supposed fulfillment of Phillips’ wish, would be crowned the king of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  In fact, Bill Haley and His Comets, not Presley, were the first major white rock ‘n’ roll act to reach the mainstream market with a fusion of R&B and C&W. The music that Presley and the Sun artists who followed him played was called “rockabilly,” amalgam of rocking African American and hillbilly styles. Rockabilly differs from Haley’s fusion because it has “much looser rhythms, no saxophones, nor any chorus singing.” Haley’s music, in contrast, sounds more arranged, more calculated. The differences between Haley’s public persona and that of the rockabilly artists are even more significant. In the mythology of rockabilly, there has always been something appealing about youthful white southern performers who recorded with pronounced regional accents for independent labels. Presley was the archetype of this image. Bill Haley’s celebrity was quite different. Balding and looking somewhat middle-aged by the time his career took off, he was a most unlikely candidate to become a rock ‘n’ roll sensation. After Haley signed with Decca, he enjoyed his biggest hits, including “Dim, Dim the Lights” and “See You Later, Alligator”, his version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” became a classic rock ‘n’ roll recording.  His star was soon supplanted by younger rockabilly artists from Memphis—Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and, of course, Elvis Presley.  Sam Phillips had a definite strategy when he launched the careers of these younger artists. While Syd Nathan at king Records encouraged his C&W artists to record country versions of R&B hits, and vice versa, he was simply trying to maximize his publishing income, not break down racial barriers. Similarly motivated, Phillips deliberately sought to filter the black experience through white performers to make it more accessible to the mainstream audience. Elvis Presley  Phillips launched his own label—Sun Records in 1952. The following year, a young truck driver Elvis Presley stopped in to cut two songs for his mother’s birthday. Though Presley’s first release combined R&B and C&W, he was marketed as country. Still, even when he sang country songs, he transformed them. The professional reaction to Presley’s unorthodox style was mixed. Invariably, his live performances were electrifying.  Presley recorded a total of ten sides for Sun, these recordings helped shape the Presley legend, and in their unique blend of cultural influences, they contributed to the definition of the rockabilly style. Presley never reached a mass popular music audience through them. It was not until the heavy-handed Colonel Tom Parker replaced deejay Bob Neal as Presley’s manager that his career was transformed.  Parker engineered the sale of Presley’s contract to RCA-Victor, His first RCA release, “Heartbreak Hotel” was number one on the pop charts, followed was the success of “Hound Dog”/“Don’t Be Cruel,”. From then on, Presley had multiple Top Forty pop hits every year until the day he died.  1956 also saw Presley make an eventful series of television appearances that further broadened his impact and generated no small amount of scandal. He caused his biggest stir on the show of Milton Berle, where he did a version of “Hound Dog” on which his swiveling hips generated excitement from the studio audience and a wave of public outcry in the national media. However, nothing could contain the sex appeal of Elvis. Presley used one of his Sullivan appearances to debut the title song from his first film, Love Me Tender. The song became a number one pop hit, and the film paved way for Presley to stardom in another medium.  Presley recorded some quality material before going in the army: “Hound Dog”, “Don’t”, “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t Be Cruel” , “All Shook up” . Following military service, he reentered popular music, His inclination toward pop conventions was evident in “Love Me Tender.” It emerged full-blown in a number of releases, such as “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “Surrender,” “It’s Now or Never,” a pop-oriented, Latin-flavored, based loosely on “O Sole Mio” by Mario Lanza  In 1956, Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” climbed to number two on the pop charts, making it Sun’s best-selling record to date. Just as Perkins was about to take off commercially after the such success, he was nearly killed in a car crash. Still, his influence on rock ‘n’ roll is undeniable  Another notable artist, yet uncontrollable of Sun Records was Jerry Lee Lewis. With his boogie-powered pumping piano, Lewis turned out three Top Ten pop hits in a row for Sun—“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, “Great Balls of Fire”, and “Breathless”  Johnny Cash started at Sun. After a few country hits including “Folsom Prison Blues”, his “I Walk the Line” went into Top Twenty. Cash then switched to Columbia and embarked on a career that included gold and platinum albums, films, and even his own television show.  The sound Sam Phillips had created—soulful white singers from the grassroots, embellished by tape-delay echo and backed by instrumentation (slap bass, electric guitar, pumping piano) that straddled C&W and R&B perfectly defined one of the major strands of rock ‘n’ roll. CAP 5. THE REACTION TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL  By the late 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll had changed the popular music and social landscape. Socially, the music had threatened to upset the separation of races and classes that had guided not just the operations of the music industry but the dynamics of all social interaction. Depending on how one felt about these issues, rock ‘n’ roll was either celebrated as a democratization of culture or decried as the destruction of Western civilization.  Postwar prosperity made teenagers an identifiable consumer group, and manufacturers began to produce products specifically for a youth market . Having full entrance into adulthood and financial independence, teens sought escape from school and parents, leisure became their alternative world and rock ‘n’ roll had its major port of entry. For many adults, the message of “rocking around the clock, undermined the values of work, and represented everything that white, middle-class parents feared: It was urban, it was sexual, and most of it was black.  When countless independent labels sprang up demand for rhythm and blues (R&B), ideological blinders prevented the mainstream music industry from operating in its own economic interest. After it was clear that rock ‘n’ roll was enduring, the industry giants responded with strategies that ranged from unpleasant stances to talent buying, from the widespread practice of cover records to promoting alternative styles of music. When these efforts failed, the established industry powers—artists, labels, and ASCAP—joined forces with the U.S. government to suppress the music in a campaign “War on Rock.” Covering the Bases  Recording multiple versions of a song by various artists in different styles was nothing new in the 1950s, but using this strategy to sanitize a particular style of music was new. In most cases, white artists on major labels covered black artists recording for independent labels  Bill Haley’s cover of Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” for example, cleaned up the original version by replacing sexual phrases with fashion statements and moving the action from the bedroom to the kitchen.  The label that really worked the cover market was Dot Records. Two of Dot’s female acts were quite successful covering a wide variety of rock ‘n’ roll. The Fontane Sisters hit pop number one with “Hearts of Stone,” outselling a version by the Charms; Gale Storm had Top Ten hits with Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” Smiley Lewis’s “I hear You Knocking,” and the Charms’ “Ivory Tower”  The company also had on its roster the singer, Pat Boone with antiseptic versions of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally”, Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” became his first number one pop single  In terms of musical structure, tempo, and length, Boone’s cover of “Tutti Frutti” is almost an exact copy of Little Richard’s, but the vocal style are different from Richard’s growling, high-tenor, powerhouse style. Some of the lyrics have also been changed. Whereas Little Richard’s version ends with Richard singing the line by himself, it was the sax’s part on Boone’s version, punctuating the last line with one final note. Pop Diversions: Calypso And Popularized Folk  For a brief time, it appeared that they might have other strategies for dealing with the new music market, an attempt to divert popular tastes away from rock ‘n’ roll by promoting calypso and popularized folk music  Like jazz and rhythm and blues before it, calypso was black music, but the Latin beat gave it another sort of appeal. The “novelty” character of many calypso songs, and accompanying lack of overt sensuality, allowed record companies to escape having to deal with the disturbing content of rhythm and blues.  In its original form, calypso had long been a highly politicized music based on topical social commentary and often lewd depictions of male–female relations. The task of representing West Indian culture fell primarily to Harry Belafonte. His Two hit singles “Jamaica Farewell” and “Banana Boat” established the tone and content of U.S. calypso: The sexual innuendo and social commentary of Caribbean calypso was discarded and the novelty value was emphasized. The result was well-crafted pop arrangements with a Latin rhythmic flavor.  As it turned out, U.S. calypso, not rock ‘n’ roll, was the fad. Within two years, the sound had developed into popular folk music. When Kingston Trio unleashed their repertoire of popular folk sounds, the music industry realized the potential power of such material. Perhaps their clean-cut image, brightly colored matching shirts, and upscale college humor made it difficult to think of them as politically subversive. No other folk artists had ever matched their success. “Schlock Rock”: Enter the White Middle Class  From 1959 on, however, bland white vocalists like Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Rydell were marketed as rock ‘n’ rollers. They ushered in a style of music referred as “schlock rock.” The major hub for this commercial activity was Philadelphia, home of three pivotal independent labels—Chancellor, Cameo/Parkway, and Swan. These three labels transformed local teenage singers into archetypal teen idols. The unsophisticated white southern singers, and the unfashionable black ones, were supplanted by kids who could be the boy-next-door, whose visual appeal was more important than their musical ability.  By the 1960s, a second generation of heartthrobs and teen queens across white ethnic lines with varying degrees of talent had come to the fore . Gradually, but decisively, strong regional accents gave way to neutral, unlocalized voices. Raucous improvised riffs and solos on sax, guitar, or piano were overtaken by lavish strings and orchestral arrangements. The sexual innuendo was replaced by a highly romanticized vision of teenage love and/or angst.  While the second generation of schlock was overwhelmingly white, one black superstar emerged—Chubby Checker. his recording of “The Twist” launched the first of a series of dance crazes that swept the country in the early 1960s The War on Rock ‘n’ Roll  By mid-1950s, though rock ‘n’ roll had become the focal point for society’s fears of sexuality, violence, juvenile delinquency, and general moral decline , the opening stream of opposition began even before the term rock ‘n’ roll had come into widespread usage. Entertainment journals urged the business to regulate itself lest other forces do it for them, arguing that the sexual innuendo entering the mainstream, particularly through R&B crossovers, were offensive. Record labels and radio stations launched attempts to remove provocative songs due to the fear of reprisal. In order to evaluate new releases, municipalities formed up review boards. Jukeboxes and offensive records were seized by police.  ASCAP, major record labels and some of their biggest singers, and the U.S government fought a long public campaign for a return to "good music." Since BMI authors were responsible for the majority of rock 'n' roll compositions, thus ASCAP gladly joined the fight. The attack against rock 'n' roll was just an expansion of ASCAP's efforts to put BMI out of business.  Rock ‘n’ roll’s opponents came closer to hitting the nerve center when ASCAP convinced the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee to open a new investigation into payola. The opponents of rock 'n' roll reasoned that restricting deejay freedom may significantly slow down the spread of rock 'n' roll.  Ignoring all previous evidence of the music’s popularity, the payola hearings proceeded on the assumption that no deejay would play music as inferior as rock ‘n’ roll unless he was rewarded for it. The strongest indictment in the payola hearings was that against Alan Freed. Freed was the most visible symbol of everything that many found threatening about the music. He had played a major role in popularizing R&B among white teenagers and had continued to push original black recordings during the cover-record period. He had also refused to sign a statement saying that he had never received money or gifts to promote records. He was arrested for accepting $30,000 in payola and given a suspended sentence.  The committee estimated a paltry amount in payola to deejays, but there was no concrete proof to back up this estimate. However, there are still those deejays who felt compelled to come forward and admit their faults. Ultimately, a measure was enacted that made payola illegal. It had the effect of imposing a more rigid, hierarchical structure on radio, making it simpler to manage popular music. Rock-oriented radio started to be cautious about playing too many black performers. Nevertheless, fans continued to want the music, so in response, these stations played as few black musicians as they could without losing their audience. Surf’s Up!  Surf music emerged with vocal and instrumental variants, essentially rising and falling from 1962 to 1964.  While surf music was part of the continuing trend to make rock ‘n’ roll both white and middle class, it was also a more complex phenomenon. Surfing became the central metaphor for an easygoing lifestyle based on the celebration of consumption. Nowhere was the image of white, middle-class America more on display than in surf music, which also marked the rise of Southern California and the West Coast more as locations in the era’s youth culture. Its themes dealt primarily with affluence—fast cars, attractive women and men at leisure on the beach, and, of course, the sport itself. It offered a vibrant, driving sound worthy of the name rock ‘n’ roll, rather, it was an important precursor to the psychedelic and “underground” styles that would evolve later in the decade. Many of surf music’s musicians, such as the Beach Boys and producer Lou Adler would exert a lingering influence on the decade’s music.  The Beach Boys became the definitive surf group. Their images, like surf music in general, were bound to a kind of affluence available only to a narrow segment of the population. Appearing unaware of their own privilege or the social currents around them, such as the growing civil rights movement, the Beach Boys were hardly apologetic for their music. Their sophisticated close harmonies and elegant counterpoint created a sound that was unique among white U.S. rock groups with “Surfin’ U.S.A.”/“Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl” Blues on Acid: Psychedelic Rock  The path from psychedelic drugs to psychedelic rock led through a revitalized interest in blues-based forms, culminating in the advent of what became known as acid rock.  It was the British group Cream that most effectively married the simplicity of the blues to the extravagance of the new rock aesthetic. In live performance, they soloed extensively at deafening volumes, displaying impeccable musicianship. The layers of overdubs were found on the group’s first LP  Another scene that attracted white blues enthusiasts developed in San Francisco and San Francisco’s most notable white blues artist was Janis Joplin. Her intensity in concert and on record marked a decisive shift from the soft-spoken styles of the girl group era. Joplin projected a mix of power and vulnerability that embodied her contradictory standing as a rare female rock star in a milieu dominated by men  San Francisco was also the site of a drug culture, which encouraged experimentation with mind-altering drugs—particularly (LSD, or acid). The music that emerged from these psychedelic experiences came to be known as acid rock. Efforts to reproduce these experiences naturally led to swirling poster and album cover art and the lighting, the colorful pulsating images became an integral part of the live performance.  The Grateful Dead most embodied the sense of community and spirit of experimentation that defined the counterculture. Taking an open-ended approach to improvisation, and treating the audience as an equal part of the show, the Grateful Dead went on to become one of the most experimental and improvisatory bands in rock. Commercializing the Counterculture: Sgt. Pepper and Monterey Pop  The Beatles's Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monterey Pop Festival were two landmark events ushered in the call to celebrate peace, love, and good vibes that came to be known as the Summer of Love.  Sgt. Pepper epitomized all the creativity of the counterculture. As the first concept LP (an album designed as a coherent whole, with each song segueing seamlessly into the next), Sgt. Pepper established a new plateau in record production. It required hundreds of hours of studio time and utilized special effects so sophisticated the music could not be performed live.  The connection between music and psychedelics came to full fruition in Sgt. Pepper. It was not just transparent drug reference or the cannabis plants on the album cover art; it was in the integrated sonic presentation of the entire album—from the hurdy-gurdy organ effects on “Mr. Kite” to the infinitive decay of the final mesmerizing chord on “A Day in the Life”—that Sgt. Pepper offered an artful and engaging foray into new musical terrain and represented for many an alternative way of life.  “A Day in the Life” is the grand finale of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. It turns a narration on the morning paper, a recently viewed film, and a morning’s work commute into a surreal vision of the nature of daily life. “A Day in the Life” features multiple-track recording and tape manipulation, orchestra as a key part of the composition, and diverse sections of simple musical forms combined into more complex structures. It begins as a simple rock ballad, written by John Lennon, with acoustic guitar and piano, drums, and Lennon’s vocal. At the end of the third verse, we hear the refrain “I’d love to turn you on,” the orchestra enters, and a huge crescendo begins. In fact, the orchestra had been recorded separately, and this tape was played backward and overlaid on multiple tracks. At the climax of crescendo, the orchestra abruptly ends, and Lennon’s lyrics are replaced by an up-tempo bridge. The bridge shows McCartney’s music-hall influence and sounds more like a show tune than a rock ballad. When he arrives at the words “And I went into a dream,” a transitional dream sequence occurs, featuring a heavily processed reverberant vocal and orchestral accompaniment. Taking advantage of the new technology of stereo recording, producer George Martin also pans the voice from one speaker to another, creating the illusion of movement. This section ends abruptly, transitioning into a reprise of the opening musical texture and melody and Lennon’s fourth verse. At the end of the final verse and the refrain “I’d love to turn you on,” the backward orchestra begins again, increasing in volume until it ends abruptly, followed by the enormous crash of a full-orchestra chord, which fades very slowly to the end of the song.  Monterey Pop began as a commercial concert until John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, and his manager Lou Adler, convinced the organizers to turn it into an artist-run, nonprofit . With a decided West Coast orientation, it featured a wide range of artists: the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane; the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Animals and the Who  The Monterey Pop Festival was a landmark event. It was patronized by the “hip-eoisie” of the counterculture and by the elite of the recording industry. Perhaps most important, Monterey Pop made Jimi Hendrix an icon. Jimi Hendrix and his group, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, elevated rock to new highs, as they married the blues to the psychedelic experience. His guitar style made unprecedented use of the full, electronic potential of amplification, taking common blues elements and adding unpredictable bursts of noise and dissonance through his deployment of volume, distortion, and feedback.  Monterey Pop both confirmed the counterculture’s creeping commercialization and provided a platform for its anti-establishment views, both political and cultural. The festival was, in fact, joined by artists who had taken anti-establishment stances for some time. Byrds’ “He Was a Friend of Mine,” a song about the Kennedy assassination; Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” song protesting the brutal police treatment of peaceful demonstrators. The Animals’ “We Gotta Get out of This Place” became an anthem protesting the constraints of urban life. The Who’s “My Generation” emphasized the generation gap. Riding the Storm: Radicals, Riots, and Revolutions  For many observers, the storm had begun several years earlier. The 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam had shattered all hopes of a short war . President Johnson to abandon his reelection. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was murdered. Artists of all styles and personal backgrounds responded to race-related tensions in their own ways.  In 1971, the movement’s entropy was reflected in popular music. John Lennon’s exhortation “Power to the People” and the Chi-Lites’ “(For God’s Sake) Give More Power to the People” recalled the heyday of the Black Panthers, while Bob Dylan’s “George Jackson” made clear that the radical elements in the black liberation struggle had already been neutralized. The disillusionment of the period was best expressed in Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ on” and “Inner City Blues.” At the same time, Aretha Franklin’s stirring recording “Young, Gifted, and Black” captured the spirit of a community that had weathered a torrent of urban violence and provided the musical capstone for a decade of civil rights struggle.  Meanwhile, the new social and political consciousness found its way into an increasingly broad range of concerns, from sexual liberation to fundamental social change. CAP 7. MUSIC VERSUS MARKETS: THE FRAGMENTATION OF POP  To understand the trajectory of popular music in the 1970s, it is necessary to explore the commercial (and technological) developments that began in the music industry in the late 1960s.  As popular music in the late 1960s began to incorporate blues, jazz, classical, East Indian, and electronic sounds, the boundaries separating audiences became somewhat murky. The development of FM rock radio led to short-lived experiments in free-form programming, in which it was common to hear the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and the Grateful Dead on the same radio program or to find them in the same record collection. All these artists were included in the umbrella category of progressive rock. A few years later, however, as the industry tried to rationalize production, artists would be spread over a number of more discrete, less overlapping audiences.  The 1970s was a time when rock became diffuse, scattered and unfocused, fragmenting into little genres whose fans paid less attention to other little genres.  Reflecting its capitalistic roots, the music industry moved to a strategy of targeting fans with the most disposable income. Thus, the art of marketing became tied to the science of demographics. The Music Industry Merger Mania  By the 1970s, the music industry soon came to be viewed as a sound investment, and a period of unprecedented merger activity ensued. Phillips, acquired Mercury and MGM. Gulf and Western bought Paramount. Omega Equities bought Roulette. By far the most interesting merger was the one that created the Warner communications empire. The label bought Frank Sinatra’s reprise label, only to be acquired by Seven Arts film which included Atlantic records. Now reorganized as Warner communications, the corporation and its affiliated labels represented the Grateful Dead, Aretha Franklin, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple  By 1974, structural realignments had produced a level of concentration in the music industry. The top four record corporations accounted for over 50 percent of all records and tapes sold; CBS and Warner communications alone took in about 40 percent of the total.  Because of the dominance of electronics businesses in the industry, there was an unexpected relationship between music and the military that seemed particularly opposed to the ideology of popular music at the time. Ever since the invention of the wireless, electronic communication had developed according to its military applications. In particular, the connection between music and the military was driven home dramatically to Keith Richards (guitarist of Rolling Stones) when he discovered that Decca, the Stones’ label, had diverted the profits from Rolling Stones’ records to make little black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb North Vietnam.  This was the time when rock became art, when it became progressive, indeed, revolutionary. The industry rose willingly to the challenge of accommodating the new aesthetic. Expanding the Infrastructure: Counterculture as Commodity  Developments in recording technology had a dramatic impact on the production of music. By the late 1960s, high-fidelity stereo records had become the industry standard and had increased the public’s desire for high- quality sound. Multitrack recording had immediate consequences. No longer was it necessary for musicians to perform together to make a record. Indeed, a single musician could now play all the instruments. Overdubbing, layering, mixing, and the addition of special effects elevated producers to an equal artistic status to musicians. By the early 1970s, the major record labels had narrowed their focus to the manufacture and sale of records. Almost all of the creative aspects of music making were contracted out . Record companies were involved primarily in talent acquisition, marketing, and promotion. The appearance of a whole new infrastructure greatly enhanced the promotional power of the record companies.  Once experimentation with psychedelic drugs introduced a new visual dimension to live rock performances, a touring circuit of ballrooms and small clubs opened up to showcase the new progressive rock acts. As the progressive rock market had outgrown such small venues, stablished promoters moved into arena or stadium-size venues and huge outdoor festivals; advances in sound reinforcement technology had opened up the possibility of mass audience events.  An emerging rock press and the advent of FM rock radio completed the picture of the music industry’s growing infrastructure. The format AM Top Forty did not readily lend itself to the new lyric substance that the folk revival of the early 1960s had brought to popular music, or to extended singles or concept LPs like Sgt. Pepper.  Station owners promptly decided to use FM to explore new styles of music. Progressive FM rock began simultaneously on the East and West coasts around 1967. Born of the counterculture, progressive FM rock radio exhibited a unique blend of culture and politics in its formative stages. Within a few years, the FM stations even rivaled some AM outlets in commercial success, but they soon fell victim to the same corporate pressures toward homogenization that affected AM radio. As ratings climbed, the audience began to be viewed as “numbers,” and advertisers began to have more influence on programming decisions. Over time, free programming would give way to more rigidly determined playlists dictated by programming managers.  The rock press followed much the same trajectory. The existing trade magazines— Billboard, Cash Box, Record World—shared AM radio’s inability to incorporate new developments in music.  The earliest and most influential rock fanzines were Who Put the Bomp or Detroit-based Creem. Jann Wenner then launched Rolling Stone in response to the mood of the moment. Although he had little tolerance for countercultural inefficiencies or movement politics, he really aspired to build serious journalism for the music he loved. Wenner had to accomplish his vision, and the magazine had to be constructed on a strong commercial foundation, even if it meant separating itself from the political upheaval that provided its context. Rock as Art  As social movements and the counterculture deteriorated in the early 1970s, rock found refuge in its new standing as art. Critics began to construct their own versions of auteur theory in popular music.  This led to a split in critical evaluations of rock. Some tended to carry rock in the direction of European art music, drawing on classical influences, exploring the possibilities of orchestration. Others, reacting against these efforts to “elevate” rock, would foster the authenticity of rock aesthetic, according to which the music was not based on some outside system like classical music, but rather on its own terms.  In the context of race relations in the United States, rock's artistic explorations were not simply neutral journeys into a larger musical territory; they paralleled racial segregation. Progressive rockers took new musical directions, viewing black music as a historical touchstone rather than a continual source of artistic inspiration.  British art schools, which had long been a haven for bohemian students who went on to become rock stars, provided a more methodical incentive for integrating artistic  components. As a result, the schools pushed students to bring attitudes into music-making that could never have been fostered under the pressures of professional entertainment. Alongside fine arts courses, classes in industrial and fashion design and photography allowed students to investigate image and style within modern mass media.  The Who were the first pop art band. From Union Jack jackets to the use of real radio ads and jingles on record, they pioneered the use of popular signs and symbols as an artistic statement in rock. Pete Townshend, for example, applied what he had learned about theater, poetry, and film to the Who’s stage act, treating it as performance art, the Who experimented with noise and destroyed instruments and sound systems. The guitar smashing that became a semiregular feature of Townshend’s stage act was influenced by the Austrian artist Gustave Metzke’s “auto-destructive” technique.  Andy Warhol, perhaps pop art’s most famous practitioner, became directly involved in rock through his tutelage of the Velvet underground, an influential group in punk. He saw “commercial art as real art and real art as commercial art. He addressed the needs of the music industry by stating that LP sleeves, posters and group photos, which appear to be the most evident indicator of a high art in rock at first glance, were, in reality, created to sell the product.  Art or progressive rock was identified with large musical structures, layers of overdubbed sound, experimentation with instrumentation and electronic effects, and compositional techniques borrowed from classical music. These musical elements were often paired with poetic, philosophical, weighty, or somewhat surreal lyrics.  It became incredibly successful commercially. For example, Emerson, Lake & Palmer; they were among the groups who felt that there was no incompatibility between rock and serious art. Among their defining characteristics were the use of synthesizers and the incorporation of classical influences in their music.  The English group Yes was another notable example, a team of expert players and production wizard Eddie Offord, was a classic English “prog” rock band, and “Roundabout” is a classic example of the style. One of the hallmarks of their style lay in collaborative compositional method, which accounts for the “sectional” sound of their music. another “secret ingredient” was the use of tone and timbre to create vivid sonic effects. This is illustrated in “Roundabout” when different sections marked by changes in tone and timbre as well as rhythm. Another important aspect of their style is the focus on multiple layers of harmony vocals, as precise in live as on record. Singer/Songwriters, Soft Rock  The singer/songwriters of the 1970s wrote songs that were intensely personal, intimate, at times introspective, at times confessional. This turning inward signaled a retreat from the political engagement of the 1960s.  In the radical movements of the 1960s, personal concerns were often treated as psychological inadequacies that got in the way of revolutionary transformation.  Soft was also not the stuff that rock was about at the turn of the decade. At a time when most rock was rough, this new music was gentle; while rock sought to let it all hang out, the tone of soft rock was reserved. At the time, hard rock was perceived as male in its aggressive tone and phallocentric connection to instruments, Soft rock was the first style since the advent of rock ‘n’ roll that allowed women to sing in their own voices and encouraged men to try on new personas.  Singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell captured the vulnerability that defined soft rock. She devoted much of her considerable talent to exploring the exquisite pain of her amorous ups and downs. On her intensely personal album, Blue, she combined all these elements.  James Taylor was the antithesis of 1960s hard rockers. Critics criticized thta the singer represented an tendency toward “I-rock”—the “I” standing for the self, and the self-centered quality that Taylor brought to the singing of softrock. Taylor became so famous that Sweet Baby James (1970) became one of the defining albums of the soft rock genre and went platinum.  The early 1970s saw a trend away from lyrics that focused on social and political commentary toward the lyrics that expressed the highly individual emotions of the singer/songwriter.  Carole King was neither consumed by politics nor driven to share intimate details of her private life. She never tried to become either “one of the boys” or a sex kitten. She seemed at home with herself. She wrote with a personal touch, sang in a conversational tone, and outsold everyone in the music business. Carole King is a master of the songwriting craft. Her ability to write songs that were simultaneously universal and deeply personal made her one of the era’s most beloved singer/songwriters, and Tapestry was one of the most popular recordings.  The singer/songwriter category included some variation, particularly the critics’ choices for the “next Dylan”-Bruce Springsteen. He exhibited Dylan’s tendency to fill a song with more words than a line could hold. At the same time, Springsteen could evoke images of everyday working-class lives that were as powerful as sympathetic. Springsteen demonstrated that singer/ songwriter were not bound by the constraints of soft rock. Born to Run provided him with the creative and commercial breakthroughs. Followed were “Thunder road,” and “Jungleland” that became instant rock classics. In 1979, he took a step that moved him closer to the activism, headlining two shows for No Nukes, series of concerts protesting the construction of nuclear power plants.  The antinuclear movement tapped the creativity and activism of a number of artists in soft rock and The California Alliance for Survival was even more successful in recruiting musicians to their cause. The connection between songwriting and activist politics was made most forcefully in a concert Amandla: Festival of unity, a benefit concert for the liberation organizations in southern Africa From Country Rock to Southern Boogie  In the late 1960s, country rock became another term in the growing lexicon of hyphenated rock styles. These years brought down-home, traditional Nashville sounds into the rock idiom. The artist who kicked off this trend in late 1967 used clean, unfettered production, laid back and spare accompaniment, and sang in an uncharacteristically throaty voice was Bob Dylan.  Dylan had been on hiatus since Blonde on Blonde. His new album was long awaited. When it came, it was unlike anything anyone had been expecting. At a time when rock was immersed in technological overindulgence, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding was as spartan as his earlier acoustic works. Blonde on Blonde was the culmination of Dylan’s turn to rock. John Wesley Harding marked a substantial change in direction that seemed to embrace country music’s traditional values in the face of the free-spirited counterculture. The album rose to number two on the charts, Dylan’s highest position to date. Latter he released of Nashville Skyline which included the Top Ten hit single “Lay Lady Lay” and a duet with country legend Johnny Cash on “Girl from the North Country.”  Nashville soon became the hot “new” recording center, and country rock became a new trend. Over the next few years, folk and rock musicians Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Byrds, followed Dylan into country, thus putting an end to its association with socially regressive values.  Most prominent among country rock musicians was the Band. The Band’s first two albums—Music from Big Pink and The Band—introduced a number of country rock classics, including Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and Robertson’s “The Weight,” “Up on cripple creek,” “Across the Great Divide”  The Byrds picked up on Dylan’s turn toward country. Members like Parsons left the Byrds and joined Byrds’ alumni Chris Hillman and Gene Clarke to form the Flying Burrito Brothers. On “The Gilded Palace of Sin”, they merged rock and country as no other group had done and they performed in striking sequined Nudie suits embroidered with marijuana leaves instead of the cactus plants and wagon wheels selected by most country artists.  The Eagles was the group that would come to dominate country rock in the 1970s, embodied the paradox of the “Californian Dream". They brought country music out of the backwoods and into the big city. From their signature song, “Take It Easy” about the joys of an unencumbered life on the road, to Hotel California as their seminal statement about the California good life, they used country rock as a vehicle for embracing the hedonism of the 1970s. Heavy Metal  Heavy metal represented an absolute rejection of the peace and love ethos. The music was too intense to be regarded as entertainment, and it was too self-absorbed to worry about making the world a better place. It was the critics’ worst nightmare: hard rock taken to the extreme, with no socially redeeming features.  By the time heavy metal developed into a genre in the early 1970s, it had acquired some distinctive components: the essential sonic element in heavy metal is power, expressed as sheer volume, power chord-drenched in distortion and volume and held to maximum sustain, a riff played at maximum volume by guitar and bass, compounded by powerful drumming. The power of heavy metal was intended to overwhelm its listeners, to flood them in a kind of sonic tidal wave. attention for their disciplined musicianship, strong songwriting, and Sting’s rugged good looks. “Message in a Bottle”,“Walking on the Moon”,“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Spirits in the Material World” rank among the most engaging songs of the era. Disco: The Rhythm without the Blues Up from the Disco Underground  Dance music’s growth in the 1970s reflected significant cultural and political shifts. Especially pivotal was the growth of the gay liberation movement. Dance clubs became central gathering spaces where they could exhibit their public freedom of expression. Disco historians have pointed to the Loft, a private dance party started in 1970 by DJ David Mancuso as an important founding moment. Mancuso established a racially and sexually inclusive environment in which dancing provided an empowering sense of physical release.  The music played by Mancuso and other early disco deejays was mostly by black artists. In this sense, early disco was part of the continuing development of black dance music. But the music industry had not yet taken notice.  Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Good-Bye”—reportedly one of the first records especially mixed for club play—was the first disco hit to chart as disco. In the interim, Donna Summer became disco’s queen. But even as her “Love to Love You Baby” rose to number two on the chart, the recording industry kept ignoring disco.  Without promotion from the major record companies, disco was rarely heard on the airwaves. Forced to remain underground, disco continued its exposure in clubs, popularized only by the creative genius of the disco deejays like David Mancuso as well as Francis Grasso, Steve D’Acquisto, Nicky Siano.  Faced with difficulty of not having enough new records to keep their playlists fresh, the deejays organized themselves into “record pools,” or central distribution points, where new releases could be discussed and new tastes created. This network of record pools and nightclubs became an alternative to the airplay marketing of the music business. Deejays were able to break hits from the dance floor , capable of selling more than of 100,000 copies in New York City alone with no radio play—demonstrating that disco was not just a fleeting culture but a significant record buying public.  In 1976, the year-end pop charts were bursting with disco. Its creative energy by and large came from independent producers and independent labels. Richard Finch and Harry Wayne Casey, made TK records one of the premiere disco labels and produced hits like "Rock Your Baby", “Get Down Tonight,” “That’s the Way (I Like It),” and “Shake Your Booty.”  Casablanca was an another independent label into disco through its association with Donna Summer. In the slick, sophisticated world of disco, the producer took on a role of primary importance. In “Last Dance,” we hear the combination of Eurodisco producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte and the gospel-tinged vocals of Donna Summer. Summer was already enjoying career success in Europe with “Love to Love You Baby” that latter became a huge hit in the United States as well. “Last Dance” was part of the soundtrack to the film Thank God It’s Friday, won both a Grammy and the Academy Award for Best Original Song.  The slow-dance beginning of “Last Dance” gives way after the first verse to the classic sound of disco: synthesized bass and drums, multiple keyboards, string-heavy orchestral textures, and a driving rhythm track with a steady, pounding emphasis on each beat. Summer’s strong, vibrant voice carries over this thick texture, demonstrating disco’s gospel with her vocal improvisations and vocal melismas. In the second repetition of the fast-tempo chorus, we hear an example of a musical technique called modulation, which is “changing key.” The scale, keynote, and harmonies are all shifted up a half-tone to create a sudden change to a “brighter” sound, which in turn gives the illusion of a spike in the energy for the song. Mainstream Disco: The Bee Gees Boogie Down  It was not until a white supergroup—the Bee Gees—came to dominate the scene that disco finally receive some respectability.  Particularly, it was the crossover media plan orchestrated to perfection with Saturday Night Fever. “How Deep Is Your Love,” the soundtrack of the film rose to number one two months before the film’s release. By the time the film broke in theaters, “Stayin’ Alive,” was number one. Two months later, “Night Fever” occupied the number one slot, which kept the film in circulation much longer. This kind of marketing would become the rule in the 1980s, a decade dominated by video clips and movie tie-ins.  After Saturday Night Fever, it became impossible to ignore disco. Artists of all sorts joined disco: Cher’s “Take Me Home”, Dolly Parton’s “Baby I’m Burnin’, The Stones’ “Miss You”  The commercial potential of disco came into full bloom when WKTU, an obscure soft rock station in New York, converted to an all-disco format. Within months, WKTU became the most listened station in the country. The Hard Rock Reaction  The most visceral anti-disco reactions came from the hard rock/heavy metal axis.  Although FM radio’s AOR stations viewed disco as a serious threat to their well-being, they were in no real financial danger. The economic reality for radio was that “disco pulled in an audience that was older or younger than expected, more female or less affluent than desired, while AOR targeted the record-buying habits of the population with the most disposable income that it often excluded black music.  As rock radio reasserted its primacy, black-oriented radio stations were forced to adopt a new format—Urban Contemporary.  Black radio had often had to attract a white listenership just to maintain ratings and by apdopting Urban Contemporary, stations retained black artists in the soul, funk, and jazz—Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, Rick James, Quincy Jones, and George Benson—and added white acts that fit the format—David Bowie or Hall and Oates. As the strategy began to show returns, black listeners wondered why their stations were programming more and more white artists. Though assuring listeners of their commitment to the black artists, stations continued to lean toward the mainstream market.  Urban Contemporary was an interesting concept because it was designed as a multiracial format. It was also quite successful, surpassing even AOR stations in many instances. Still, while Urban Contemporary programmers provided greater access to white musicians on black-oriented stations, black performers did not gain greater access to rock radio. CAP 9. MUSIC VIDEOS, SUPERSTARS, AND MEGA-EVENTS Early Music Television: They Want Their MTV  By the early 1980s, advances in satellite transmission had made possible instant national exposure for recording artists as well as worldwide simultaneous broadcast of performances. At the same time, the global penetration of portable cassette provided for individualized reception anywhere in the world.  The presentation of music in a visual context, dancing or a live concert, has long been an indispensable part of its promotion. The U.S. music industry was fairly slow to warm up to music videos—a high-budget item with an unknown market. Still, Robert Pittman, MTV’s founding father and his colleagues recognized that music videos could promote the music itself and deliver potential consumers to advertisers.  Thus, with an initial investment of $20 million, MTV, the first twenty-four-hour music video cable channel, was launched in 1981. MTV expanded in two years from an initial 2.5 million subscribers to 17 million, becoming the fastest growing cable channel in history. It was the most effective way for a record to get national exposure.  MTV’s development can be identified three periods. The first, was characterized by a twenty-four-hour continuous flow of music was, in essence, a visual radio station with an album-oriented rock (AOR) format, no news, punctuated only by advertisements and the bland patter of veejays. The second period, the channel became available in the New York and Los Angeles markets for the first time. During this period, a number of new music video outlets were created: Video Soul program, the primary outlet for video exposure of black artists; Night Flight showcased the work of some black and Latino while also offering music documentaries; The Nashville Network, offered country music daily. MTV bested its U.S. competition at this time by negotiating exclusive arrangements with a number of major record companies. This period marked the beginning of a major commitment to heavy metal and the ascendancy of the performance clip. The third period saw a broadening of musical scope and a deeper commitment to youth culture and witnessed the departure of Robert Pittman and the abandonment of the continuous flow in favor of discrete programming  In that period, the U.S. music industry was reluctant to enter the video market, forcing MTV to rely on British music videos.  Music videos had developed earlier in Britain because the paucity of radio stations had caused British record companies to seek exposure for their artists on television programs. MTV, through these videos offered bands entry to the U.S. market that was less expensive, less cumbersome, and chancy than national tours. The videos were conceived as promotional made by producers and directors from advertising and they used marketing aesthetics—fast cuts, ever-changing camera angles, eye-catching visuals, special effects.  Britain, at the time, was swept up in the new Romantic movement, a post-punk phenomenon that combined black R&B, synthesizer pop, and a sense of disco in a strikingly visual that was well suited to televisual presentation  Throughout Pittman’s tenure, MTV devoted a significant airtime to introducing white rock acts from other english-speaking countries that it contributed significantly to what can only be described as a second British Invasion. MTV propelled Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” to number one on the charts. It also rejuvenated the career of David Bowie when it placed “Let’s Dance” in heavy rotation. Other British groups called the new pop including Eurythmics, Culture Club, and Duran Duran also made their U.S. debuts on MTV  MTV’s selection favored British groups at the expense of U.S. artists—especially African American ones. Of nearly 100 videos aired the week of July 16, 1983, none by African American artists were in heavy rotation or medium rotation and no new ones had been added to the playlist. The channel was roundly trashed in the popular press for its racism.  Perhaps the most blatant act of racial exclusion was MTV’s rejection of five Rick James videos at a time when his album Street Songs had sold almost 4 million copies.  It was Michael Jackson and the incredible success of Thriller finally blew MTV’s format argument out of the water. Michael Jackson  The album had something for just about everyone. The first hit was “The girl Is Mine,” an upbeat pop duet with Paul McCartney that was guaranteed to pull in adult rock audience. “Billie Jean” followed, an pulsing rocker with obvious dance floor appeal; “Beat It” is an overture to hard rockers  Jackson appeared on Motown’s twenty-fifth anniversary performing “Billie Jean,” the only non-Motown song. He launched into a dance routine that married the fluidity with the acrobatics of break dancing, unleashing his now famous moonwalk for the first time.  Even sales of Thriller soared beyond all known records, MTV at first refused to air the “Billie Jean” or “Beat It” videos but then MTV finally relented. Both proceeded to become two of the most popular videos ever  One of the many huge hits from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, “Beat It” has a Funk, disco, and metal meet with visceral force. The precision disco beat and catchy “hook,” is further enhanced by a pyrotechnic metal guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. The backbone of the song is provided by a disco-style electronic drum track, synthesizers, and drum set, over which a repetitive and compelling melodic vamp. Adding to the texture are multiple keyboards. Layered over this are Michael Jackson’s multitracked vocals and Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo. The musical structure is straightforward and typical of song forms in rock and disco—verse-verse-chorus— with an improvisatory section (the guitar solo) followed by the repetition of several choruses  Both the LP and the videos were lavish, expensive productions, and the associated musical mini-movies raised the bar for music videos in general. Thriller propelled Jackson through the race barrier of white-dominated AOR radio and 1980s MTV, and broke the field of music video wide open for the next wave of funk-influenced African American artists such as Prince.  While charges of racism provided MTV with its first controversy, the treatment of women and the portrayal of gender roles in music videos have generated the longest running debates. The vast majority of MTV videos in the early years, were aiming for a white male audience; women in these videos were used to hook young male viewers  However, the objectification of women in music videos was not uniform, monolithic, or fixed. For example, Madonna was often taken to task for objectifying herself in her early videos (“Like a Virgin,” “Material girl”). She defended the practice on the basis that she was in control of her image, and critics and her audience have since claimed her as a progressive rock star.  Early music videos sometimes challenged the traditional images of men and women . Annie Lennox and Boy George played with androgyny or Duran Duran drew as much attention for their glamorous, effeminate good looks as their exploitation of women.  MTV debuted at exactly the right time for a music industry battling a recession. The impact of the channel could be attributed to one significant way that it differed from radio. MTV played 80 percent new music, 20 percent old. Radio recognized MTV’s power and often added new artists on the basis of video success. This trend indicated that breaking new artists could be the industry’s way out of the recession. Superstars: The Road to Economic Recovery  Thriller was on its way to becoming the best-selling album of all time. Its success triggered an era of blockbuster LPs featuring a limited number of superstar artists as the solution to the industry’s economic difficulties. Thriller thus highlighted the two most salient aspects of the industry’s recovery: concentration of product and expansion into international markets.  If 1983 belonged to Michael Jackson, 1984 was the year of Prince. With his success, he reinvented a concept which had been long-forgotten: the black rocker, who used music as a vehicle for some very strange notions about sexuality and religion. His first albums were entirely self-written, self-played, and self- produced, and he sang all his own songs. For the double LP 1999, Prince moved closer to the rock mainstream, producing three major hits, including “Little Red Corvette" which became one of the first videos by an African American artist to air on MTV. It was not until Purple Rain that Prince was finally crowned.  Then, there was Bruce Springsteen’s entrance into the top slot with Born in the U.S.A. “Born in the U.S.A.” is considered one of the major rock anthems of the early 1980s.  “Born in the U.S.A.” is written from the point of view of a Vietnam vet, having come home to rejection, hardship, and discrimination in the workplace. The song also underscores the fact that it was largely working-class and minority Americans who fought in Vietnam. However, the irony of this song is the frequency that it has been misinterpreted as a shining example of conservative American values; shortly thereafter, President Reagan made a famous reference to the song in a re-election speech. The song is still sometimes misread as militantly “pro-America"  “Born in the U.S.A.” has an interesting asymmetrical structure. While it’s basically an example of a verse and refrain form, there are instances in which the refrain (“Born in the U.S.A.”) is played but not sung. The band also changes the musical texture at certain points, adding and dropping instruments, which lends expressive color to different parts of the text. The powerful beginning consists of the refrain tune, played on keyboard synthesizer and drums. (This huge, reverberant drum sound was very popular in the early 1980s and can be heard in the recordings of many other artists)  Whitney Houston outsold Springsteen, but she never reached his status as a political icon or culture hero. Houston had Aretha Franklin’s range and power but tended to play it safe as an artist, thus emerging more as pop entertainer than soul diva. “Saving All My Love for You” and “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” were standard pop ballads. “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” were spirited, dance materials.  Lionel Richie was another superstar of this period with hits like Can’t Slow Down, All night Long. Richie’s hits tended to be well within the bounds of pop convention, including those with movie tie-ins and high-tech videos.  Madonna combined good promotion, danceable material, engaging choreography, and visual appeal of superstar package that the industry wanted. Madonna began her career as a disco diva with dance-floor hits and then used music videos to make the transition to rock star with “Like a Virgin” and “Material girl.” In her videos and live performances, she displayed an adult sexuality that inspired lust in teenage boys, emulation in young girls, and outrage in their parents.  The introduction to “Like a Virgin,” with compelling bass-synth pattern, establishes dance beat immediately. The prevailing sonic texture of disco is evident in the instrumentation, heavy on synthesizer and keyboards. The verses of “Like a Virgin” have a two-part structure. We hear eight bars of music and lyrics, followed by another eight bars that feature the same music but with different lyrics, continuing into a chorus, which is also eight bars long. “Like a Virgin” is a good illustration how elements of different African American genres—R&B, soul, Motown, and disco—combined to create the building blocks of 1980s dance music.  In the 1980s, albums were carefully constructed collections of quality material designed as time-release capsules marketed to the public at precise moments. The goal was not to sell the single but to keep the album in circulation and on the pop charts for months on end. As we have seen, music television and cross-media marketing, particularly movie tie-ins, were crucial to this development  Perhaps the most striking fact about the new star system was that a significant number of the superstars—Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston , Lionel Richie, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, were African American. Most of the white artists who achieved superstardom during this period were heavily influenced by black music like Madonna, Phil Collins, Bruce Springsteen.  In the 1980s, record companies came to realize that the products’ longevity was the key to financial well-being. If black artists could demonstrate staying power, then black artists would become superstars. Second in importance to longevity was breadth of audience. The strategy of appealing to as wide an audience as possible led to the release of a number of cross-racial/cross-ethnic duets. For ex, Paul McCartney teamed up with Stevie Wonder in “Ebony and Ivory" was breakthrough for racial harmony. And as mentioned earlier, the collaboration “The girl Is Mine” of McCartney and MJ pulled in adult rock fans.  In their attempts to consolidate cross-racial markets, these efforts brought a new dimension to the term crossover. Crossover projects seemed to have a higher purpose. “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves”, by Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin, included a video portraying women in a broad range of leadership roles; “That’s What Friends Are For” by Dionne Warwick and Friends went to finance AIDS research; and the ultimate crossover recording “We Are the World.” Charity Rock and Mega-Events: Who Is the World?  International superstars and technological wonders like satellite transmission and the portability of cassettes had, by the mid-1980s, made popular music truly global. Best to illustrate this phenomenon was the string of socially conscious mass concerts and all-star performances, known as mega-events Band Aid, Live Aid, and “We Are the World.” These projects, called charity rock, also aided transnational record companies in finding new markets  In the mid-1980s, popular music tended to develop according to two opposing principles that corresponded to the extremes of the commercialism and authenticity continuum. On the commercial end, record companies discovered that their back catalogues were gold to filmmakers and advertisers. Cream’s “I Feel Free” was used to sell cars; the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” to sell tires. The Beatles’ “Revolution” as the soundtrack for a Nike commercial. If commercialism compromised authenticity, it was recovered somewhat by the humanitarian impulse of charity rock.  The story of charity rock begins with Bob Geldof, leader of the Boomtown Rats, an Irish punk group. He wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” He then organized the biggest names in British popular music to record the song as Band Aid, with all proceeds donated to famine victims. Geldof tried to organize a similar project in the United States but was rejected by some artists. After, charity rock was organized by Harry Belafonte and Ken Kragen, manager for Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers. Then “We Are the World” was born, co-written by Michael Jackson and Richie, and produced by Quincy Jones, with Jackson as music director. The all- star ensemble was called U.S.A. (United Support of Artists) for Africa. “We Are the World” was structured around appearances of the biggest names in U.S. popular music—Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross. “We Are the World” became to date the largest single event in human history Mega-Events: The Politics of Mass Culture  Charity rock was a contradictory phenomenon. It provided activist musicians with a platform for political expression on a previously unthinkable scale while enabling the music industry to exploit a gold mine of untapped markets. Such competing tendencies encouraged a new view of mass culture. Many activists now regarded mass culture as “contested terrain”—an ideological cauldron in which new values could be forged.  Band Aid, Live Aid, and U.S.A. for Africa created a climate in which musicians worldwide felt compelled to develop African famine relief projects.  These efforts created the cultural space for progressively bolder projects, including some that targeted issues closer to home. Willie Nelson, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Neil Young organized Farm Aid, the concert brought together a unique alliance of rock and country artists raised $10 million, and became an annual event that has extended into the new millennium.  More politicized ventures followed, including Sun city which assembled more than fifty rock, rap, R&B, jazz, and salsa artists to create the recording “Sun city,” a politically anthem supporting the UN-sponsored cultural boycott of South Africa, which was then under white minority rule  By the end of the 1980s, there was scarcely a social issue that was not associated in a highly visible way with popular music and musicians.  CAP 11. REPACKAGING POP: CHANGING THE MAINSTREAM Meet the New Boss...Bigger than the Old Boss  Starting in early 1970s record companies had been subject to a form of “merger mania”. This pattern continued and even intensified from the mid-1980s forward, enahnced by the increasingly globalized nature of the music industry and the larger media industries. The first significant merge came in 1986, when the German firm Bertelsmann acquired full ownership of the RCA record company. Following quickly was Japanese electronics giant Sony’s acquisition of CBS, then the world’s largest record company. Only one major U.S. record company remained under U.S. ownership—Warner Music—was subject to the larger trend toward conglomeration, becoming subsumed by the Time and Warner communications corporations Major Labels and Monster Contracts  Major labels started to have their strategy of acquiring contracts with biggest star in the industry.  In the 1990s, the artist that the music industry promoted to the greatest economic advantage was Mariah Carey, who combined incredible talent with the best business plan.  With her multi range and good pop/dance/R&B material, Carey was paired with top-notch professionals and approached by Columbia as a major investment from day one. Indeed, every Carey album of the decade was launched with a single that went to number one. Meanwhile, her racial makeup received as much press as her music in her early career, and formed the backdrop to her consistent ability to move between R&B and more straight-ahead pop ballad material. As the new millennium began, Mariah Carey had recorded more number one singles than any other female artist in any genre . Given this kind of success, it is not surprising that the major labels stuck to their superstar marketing strategies, ponying up millions for contracts in the 1990s  However, the superstar strategy came to appear flawed, as many multiplatinum artists turned out products that fell short of record-company expectations. At the same time, Advertising proved to be very lucrative with the Beatles selling sneakers, Elton John crooning for Sasson, and Madonna shilling for Pepsi. By the mid-1990s, record companies operating in a changing media environment thought of themselves more as exploiters of rights than as producers of records. Their new mission was to develop as many revenue streams as possible.  Nonetheless, they were not able to keep growing indefinitely. Growth in the record industry has slowed to a virtual standstill. There were various explanations for the phenomenon: record companies’ pursuit of singles rather than development of long-term careers; the industry’s focus on new technologies rather than on the music; a natural decline in catalogue sales as baby boomers completed the replacement of their LPs; the industry’s failure to recognize the potential of urban music; and the industry’s reliance on a handful of superstars. Although fortunes would revive during the last years of the 1990s, the rate of growth remained lower compared the early part of the decade, and would lose even more once the Internet arose as a primary medium for music consumption and distribution later on. Teen Pop: Boy Bands and Teen Queens  What temporarily revived the industry’s fortunes at the end of the 1990s was teen pop, represented by artists such as the Backstreet Boys, ’n Sync, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera. Built upon a combination of innocence and sexuality that was a throw-back to early-1960s sexuality, teen pop appeared the to be antithesis of the antisocial currents that would run through alternative music or the stories of transgression that drove the commercial rise of rap. At the height of what journalist called the “teen pop bubble” in 1999, industry sales reached record levels.  Teen pop peaked in 1999. That year, three of the four best-selling albums were Millennium (Backstreet Boys) at number one, ...Baby One More Time (Britney Spears) at number two, and ’N Sync in the number four, with Christina Aguilera edging into the Top Forty with her debut. Also in the year 2000, ’n Sync took over the top slot and Spears’s Oops!...I Did It Again and Aguilera’s debut in the Top Ten.  The Backstreet Boys had been major hit-makers in Europe, though it wasn’t until 1997 that they made it in the United States. “Quit Playing Games (with My Heart),” “As Long As You Love Me,” “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”—took the United States by storm, Backstreet Boys and Millennium racked up 60 million copies in worldwide sales.  Britney Spears bursted onto the charts in late 1998 and took the music to new heights over the next two years. Britney Spears combined sexual innuendo, disciplined professionalism, and a strong business plan into one of the most successful careers in teen pop. Britney’s early hits were simple, repetitive, written by others, and essentially conceived as vehicles for staged theater. Whether innocent or salacious, soulful or funky, Britney’s hits reflected the industry’s emphasis on marketing elements over artistic individuality. However, Britney’s powerful, flexible voice still shines through any amount of glitz and hype.  Christina Aguilera drew frequent comparisons to Britney Spears but her vocal range and power were more akin to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. “Genie in a Bottle” whose infectious hook propelled it straight to number one, became the most popular single of the year. It was the perfect metaphor for the state of her career and the bottled-up teenage sexuality that typified so much of the music. As 2000 came to an end, she had three albums in the Billboard 200: Christina Aguilera, My Kind of Christmas, My reflection  At the same time, the teen pop space in popular culture was already being taken over by a generation of somewhat more serious, less overtly sexual female artists ranging from Norah Jones and Vanessa Carlton to Avril Lavigne and Pink. From Indie Scenes to Alternative Nation  By 1990, major labels started paying more attention to artists who had previously gone against the commercial grain. They co-opted the tag alternative as a sales tool and began selling individuality to mainstream fans eager to create identities for themselves.  A notable group of this scene was Nirvana, that established grunge as a popular style with their debut album. Nirvana’s disc Nevermind, chock-full of dark, angry, powerful, and hook-ridden rock anthems, achieved extensive critical acclaim. Kurt Cobain, Nirvana’s leader/songwriter was both brilliant and tormented, and the wave of angst, rage, and despair unleashed in his lyrics earned him a reputation as spokesperson for Generation X.  Nirvana’s instrumentation falls into the category of power trio—guitar (Kurt Cobain), bass (Krist Noveselic), and drums (Dave Grohl). Dave Grohl’s drums are the instrumental power engine driving Nirvana’s guitar riff–based songs.  “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” though perceived at the time as a new alternative musical phenomenon, is in many ways a classic pop single, with a fantastic guitar hook, simple repeated chord progression, and shout-along chorus. The song’s signature succession of chords is in a dark, minor key, and functions somewhat outside the normal harmonic expectations of rock ‘n’ roll.  Structurally, the song has a verse-chorus form, but the verse has two parts: an A section that features new lyrics each time and a B section with the same hypnotic, repetitious “hello” lyric each time. The chorus continues the technique of repetition but moves from hypnotic to a rage and despair. This combination of introspective, atmospheric, soft verse and hard screaming chorus is a stylistic marker of grunge rock. Country into Pop  All the attention devoted to alternative tended to obscure the biggest commercial breakthrough of the 1990s—country music. If the early 1990s belonged to any one artist, it was Garth Brooks. With his roots in the country tradition, he packed his live performances with all the glitz of an arena rock show. Brooks’s crossover triumph and overwhelming popularity opened up unprecedented space on the pop charts for other country artists like Clint Black, Billy Ray Cyrus, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill were among the best-selling pop artists between 1991 and 1996 The Latin Boom  The word Latino has long been connected with the Spanish language, which is especially significant in the United States, since mainstream songs are often solely in English. However, the link between language, musical form, and identity evolves with time. The most prominent youth-oriented Latino publications, such as Hispanic, Urban, and Frontera, aimed to merge forms such as rock and rap into positive Latino identities without tainting them with inauthenticity. In the end, ethnic identity development is a historically fluid process formed in the shifting social connections and ideological imperatives, rather than something related to the unchanging traits of a certain musical heritage or song form.  1999 could be called the Year of the Latin Pop Explosion. It was the year of Ricky Martin's “Shake Your Bon Bon”, Carlos Santana recorded Supernatural, which earned him a eight Grammys. Among the Latino artists who had Top Ten pop hits that year were Christina Aguilera (“Genie in a Bottle,” “What a Girl Wants”), Marc Anthony (“I need to know”), Enrique Iglesias (“Bailamos”), Jennifer Lopez (“If You Had My Love,” “Waiting for Tonight”), and, of course, Martin (“Livin’ La Vida Loca,” “Shake Your Bon Bon”), and Santana (“Smooth,”)  “Livin’ La Vida Loca” instantly establishes its Latin influence with its percussion style, dance rhythms, and brass-heavy instrumentation. Layered over this are Martin’s vocals, Rusty Anderson’s treble-heavy, surf-style guitar solos, and, near the end of the track, a dazzlingly high trumpet part. Structurally, it is a verse-chorus form; the verse has two sections of contrasting melodic content, and the chorus features an extremely catchy hook, a kind of musical phrase that gets stuck in your brain for the rest of the day. With the hook, the dance rhythms, the surf licks, and Martin’s charismatic vocal, “Livin’ La Vida Loca” was a certain formula for a hit single.  Whereas Martin was the flashy young Latino crossover darling, Santana presented himself more like a music elder statesman. The success of Martin and Santana created space for other Latin artists on the pop charts— most notably Jennifer Lopez and later Shakira.  Determined to remove any obstacles to mainstream pop superstardom, Shakira dyed her hair blonde and taught herself English well enough to sing and write in it. Her first (mostly) English album, Laundry Service achieved triple platinum sales, propelled by the infectious Latin/dance/rock groove of “Whenever, Wherever.” Shakira had earned a reputation as a serious rockera and a writer of poetic lyrics. She then wrote about sixty songs in English and Spanish, released two albums six months apart in 2005, divided by language. By 2006, Shakira had become a truly global pop star, incorporating influences ranging from pop, rock, and disco to cumbia, tejano, and reggaeton into a coherent bilingual musical project.  From 2004 to 2005, Billboard reported that Latin music was the only category that had registered growth. The magazine attributed the expansion to Shakira and reggaeton.  Reggaeton is a quintessentially hybrid music that combines elements of hip hop and Jamaican dancehall filtered through Spanish Caribbean sensibilities, became the first genre with Spanish vocals to find mainstream acceptance in the United States.  Daddy Yankee’s Barrio Fino was the best-selling Latin album in the country and the first reggaeton album to debut at number one on the Latin charts. As multiplying numbers of reggaeton artists made way into the U.S. mainstream, among their many accomplishments was the incorporation of Dominican elements of bachata and merengue into reggaeton, can be seen in Luny Tunes's Mas Flow and La Trayectoria.  By the late-2000s, reggaeton could be seen as a case study of how global cultural flows would affect popular culture in the future. Black Music at the Base  From the mid-1990s forward, African American musical styles had powered the pop machine. The industry had long treated rap as an illegitimate form, even it benefited enormously from rap’s sales figures. Nonetheless, at the begining of then new millennium, hip hop—especially rappers—had become the predominant trend on the year-end pop charts. This phenomenon had begun with the explosion of gangsta rap in the early 1990s and the marriage of rap and traditional rhythm and blues Hip Hop with Soul: The New R&B  Prominent among the diverse musical tastes that surfaced in the early 1990s was smooth R&B sound that combined the smooth balladry R&B with the hip hop inflected harmonies  The top-selling smooth R&B group of the decade was Boyz II Men. Their album with two number one singles—“i’ll Make Love to You” and “on Bended knee” established them as the premier R&B harmony group of the new era  Destiny’s child emerged in Houston in 1990. The hit single “Say My name” established them as pop superstars. Their third album, Survivor, sold four times platinum, with “Bootylicious” at number one on pop chart. After that, group members embarked on solo projects, with Beyoncé ascending to superstardom in the new millennium.  One artist who left the biggest imprint on this new sound, it was R. Kelly. Writing and producing music for Toni Braxton, Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men, and Michael Jackson, he released his own platinum solo debut, Born into the 90s. The Best of Both Worlds, a planned collaboration with rapper Jay-Z, was expected to be the crowning achievement of the music that Billboard had officially dubbed R&B/hip hop in 1999, renaming the R&B charts to reflect the music’s evolution.  Usher arose as R&B’s leading man in 2004, when he recorded the most popular album of the year (Confessions) as well as the top two singles (“Yeah!” and “Burn”). The single, “Yeah!” which married Dirty South crunk beats to an R&B sound, occupied the number one position on the Billboard Hot 100  Rap was not simply a buck-wild street culture; it was a major corporate enterprise, with the most successful artists often playing multiple roles of performing artist, writer, producer, and label head. The artist who best exemplified the move from the street to the executive suite was Sean “Puffy” Combs. By 1997, Combs’s Bad Boy Entertainment empire grossed $200 million and employed 300 people. Puffy was considered a lightweight rapper and a sample-heavy producer  Sampling, in which a digitized segment of a preexisting song is used as the basis for a new composition, is a well-known hip hop technique and was particularly associated with Puffy. The practice is not without controversy; while some look at it as a way of remaking or covering a successful pop song, others see it as a kind of culturally sanctioned plagiarism. But borrowing has a time-honored history in Western music, and both sampling and borrowing create multiple semiotic layers that affect the listener’s reception of the piece. Gangsta rap  Gangsta rap was the ruling model for the most publicized rap of the day. Unlike the rappers who had dominated new York, from run-D.M.C. to Public Enemy—all college graduates— the new rap stars had gone to the school of hardships. Their frustrations were often directed toward each other in verbal battle, in which rappers battled over reputation, territory, and claims about who was the most “real.”  Rapper Nas evoked the harsh reality of street life in the Queensbridge projects on his major debut, Illmatic. Jay-Z, from Brooklyn’s Marcy projects, was a promising student who found himself immersed in the seamier side of street life until rap showed him a way out. His debut album, Reasonable Doubt, a classic of the genre, is often compared to Nas’s Illmatic. Nas enjoyed a steady stream of hits by some of the best producers in the industry—“If I ruled the World” (the Trackmasters), “Hate Me now” (Puff Daddy), “You owe Me” (Timbaland) —before his career started to go into decline. Sensing weakness, Jay-Z called Nas out on “Takeover,” to which Nas responded on “Ether”, which then prompted Jay-Z’s “Super Ugly.” Though the release of Stillmatic represented something of a comeback, Nas never regained his prominence in New York rap. Jay-Z, on the other hand, became so successful that his Roc-A-Fella label became a corporate empire with its own talent rosters, stable in-house producers, a clothing line, and a film division  The combined commercial momentum of rap and the new R&B led to a landmark in the history of Billboard charts in 2003. All of the Top Ten pop hits in the country were by black artists, nine of them rappers, with Beyoncé at number one with “Baby Boy”.  Even the hardest rappers were more oriented toward the crossover market and hip hop aesthetics exerted a defining influence on other styles, from teen pop to R&B. In that sense, hip hop had become “the new American music” or a new paradigm that may have surpassed rock in cultural importance.  If any single artist owned 2003, it was 50 cent, whose rise marked the culmination of rap’s embrace of gangster capitalism. He also epitomized the extent to which a rap artist’s credibility derived as much from his backstory as his rapping skills. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ went double platinum in three weeks, largely on the strength of the Dr. Dre–produced party anthem, “In Da club.” Diversifying Hip Hop  One noble woman in hip hop was Lauryn Hill whose work touched on issues from racism and sexism to spirituality and self-confession. The Miseducation, Hill’s solo debut is a extravaganza incorporating soul, rap, reggae, and hip hop. In 1999, it earned her Grammys adwards for Album of the Year and the Best new Artist, R&B Song, R&B Album, and R&B Vocal Performance.  Before breaking away as an artist, Missy Elliott had established herself as a notable writer and producer, owning her own company, and working alongside producer Timbaland to create hits for other artists. As a rapper, she hit platinum on her first outing, Supa Dupa’ Fly Da Real World, which attempted to reclaim the word bitch as a positive term. Elliott’s vocal talents—she is a consummate rapper and an able soul singer—have made her one of the few artists to span the worlds of rap, R&B/hip hop, and electronic dance music. Her artistry creates a rap that is hard, sexy, playful, and danceable, unencumbered by the encroachments of the thug life.  Lauryn Hill and Missy, in their different ways, circumvented the gangster imperative that ruled hip hop in the nineties.  Another rap newcomer, Eminem, took some of the established conventions of the gangster persona—the masculine swagger, uncontrolled violence, and valorization of the “hood”—and pushed them to the point of absurdity. Although white, he was not a child of privilege. His independently released 1997 Slim Shady EP drew the attention of Dr. Dre, the duo worked together on the full-length Slim Shady LP. Slim Shady was the alter ego that allowed Eminem to take revenge on the world. The fact that Eminem achieved both commercial success and critical acclaim with violent, misogynistic rhymes outraged many observers of the cultural scene. Eight years later, he would return to the theme of overcoming adversity on his album Recovery.  A different shift in the prevailing image of hip hop came Kanye West. His College Dropout to Late Registration to Graduation—gave rise to the phenomenon known as backpack rap, a movement known for its lyrical sophistication, concern with social issues in a relatively mild manner.  Gangster themes and imagery did not disappear from the rap world despite the rising popularity of Kanye West and other hip hop artists who presented a softer take on the genre. One prominent rapper was Lil Wayne. He made his reputation on a prolific series of underground “mix tapes” that he used as a testing ground, through which he refined his skills. Lil Wayne was also the top rap empire builder to have emerged in the twenty-first century. He founded his own label, Young Money. Canadian rapper Drake became the first Young Money to have an album reach number one Thank Me Later in 2010. Nicki Minaj, another Young Money artist embodied a spirit of self-reinvention shared with contemporary female artists. The unconventional and provocative Nicki Minaj took the world of hip hop by storm, hitting platinum sales with her first album release Women on the Rise  The persistence of gender inequality is the reason that women's success in the rock and pop industries is considered trend worthy.  A number of things were striking about this trend. One of which was the number of genres represented, including pop/dance (Mariah Carey, Spice Girls), alternative/pop rock (Alanis Morissette), folk rock (Jewel), country (Shania Twain, Leann Rimes), and hip hop (Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott).  Speaking about female artist we can't help but mention Beyoncé. As a pop star, Beyoncé presented a compelling package: powerful vocals that could range easily from balladry to tough R&B; the glamorous good looks and acting talent. Beyoncé’s most ubiquitous female empowerment anthems have gone from featuring independent women to single ladies to the current girls running the world. However, her most significant gesture in the direction of empowerment may have been her decision to assemble a tight, all-female band Suga Mama, which accompanied her on every of her tours.  Alicia Keys took her place among other soul divas but she also helped carve out the cultural space occupied by singer/songwriters like Norah Jones and Vanessa Carlton. Keys identified herself as black and displayed a maturity and self-confidence well beyond her years. With “If I Ain’t Got You”, "You Don’t know My name,” Keys demonstrated the same sophisticated musicality and soulful delivery that made her first album Diary reach the number one and multiplatinum certification  Norah Jones took the music forward into the terrain of pop jazz. Come Away with Me propelled her debut album platinum certification and netted her impressive five Grammy Awards.  Other popular female artists who came to prominence in the first decade of the 2000s: Avril Lavigne presented a punk-inflected alternative to teen pop from her multiplatinum debut Let’s Go to The Best Damn Thing. Pink, with status as a talented risk-taker offered everything from dance/pop (“Get the Party Started”) and mainstream rock (“18 Wheeler”) to deeply personal confessionals (“Family Portrait)  The successes of so many young female artists in the 2000s paved the way for the chart dominance that women achieved during the years 2009–2011. In 2009, Taylor Swift marked the biggest pop success for a country music artist since Shania Twain. During this three-year period, in addition to Swift, Gaga, and Adele, the pop charts were home to an incredible diversity of women . By 2012, there seemed to be more exciting opportunities for female pop stars than male ones. Female pop stars of the era expanded the range of  images associated with women artists, still within certain limits of what was considered culturally appropriate. Lady Gaga went furthest in pushing the envelope of pop femininity, but others—including Adele and Beyoncé—also made significant moves in this direction. CAP 1. ITALY IN MUSIC - A SWEEPING RECONSTRUCTION OF A PROBLEMATIC IDENTITY The political and linguistic Italy  The first chapter by Marcello Sorce Keller notes that one should not refer so much to the “unity of Italy” in the singular, but rather to “Italian unities” in the plural, because there certainly have been at least three Italies: political Italy, the linguistic and the musical Italy.  Italian scholars know that before the unification of the peninsula, the languages spoken were not only Latin dialects. Greek, Albanian, Slovenian, Franco-provençal, Catalan, the Germanic Vernacular spoken by the Walzers, and, after WWI, also the Hi-German of Alto Adige.  It was only as late as the 1960s, with the aid of radio and television, that Italian came to be spoken by the vast majority of the country's inhabitants. It was only then that the linguistic unification of the nation was truly accomplished. Musical Italy: when, where, and how  In this chapter we learn the origins of one of Italy’s musical specificities: the absence of a stable, generalized connection, especially during the nineteenth century, between traditional music and art music. Sorce Keller also argued that the historical origins of the various oral musical traditions found in Italy are quite disparate, and at the same time—on a parallel level—Italian opera demonstrated such a degree of unity across Italy  that it became the metaphor and the banner of the nation's political unity for the local ruling class. So, while elsewhere in Europe an idealized “folk” became the privileged source of both popular music and the national classical music “schools,” opera was at the origin of Italian popular song, and remained for long a paradigm for it.  For quite some time, European culture had already debated over the remarkable phenomenon starting from the seventeenth century defined as “Italian music”, and that progressively had conquered all of Europe. The conquest started with the double streams of instrumental music and opera, and subsequently came to completion with the latter. Opera was what gave the Peninsula an “Italian” identity that initially came more from recognition by other nations rather than from an insider’s consciousness of identity.  While urban middle and lower-middle-class Italy supported and promoted opera and “living room” music, the peasant world continued to practice its stornelli, octaves, narrative songs, lullabies, funeral laments. At the time, those two worlds led parallel lives, almost impermeable to each other.  Diego Carpitella, in the mid-1950s contributed to revealing the diversity and relevance the hidden world that had constituted the musica popolare of the Peninsula’s different regions. With this term, what was meant at the time was the enormous variety of repertoires, compositional techniques, performing practices, and functions of music, cultivated outside the context of written and commercial music. Only in later years, the separation between these two spheres was indicated as colto and popolare.  Today, in using the term popolare, one can recognize the ambiguous, ideological (and therefore problematic) meanings it acquired in the course of history. The terminological problem lies in the fact that there exists a music that is popolare because it successfully reaches vast audiences (as in English one speaks of “popular music”: from the songs by Beatles, to Eros Ramazzotti, to U2 and beyond). To the bourgeois public of nineteenth-century Italy, and of a large part of Europe, musica popolare consisted of the operas by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini. However, there was also a music that was called popolare (in English we call it “folk”) because it connects to a cultural layer as “archaic,” “original,” “spontaneous,” “ethnic”  At any rate, however “popular” repertoires might be, one fact remains certain is that in the peninsula, orally circulated music rarely came into contact with the written tradition, and equally rarely was the written tradition able to influence it.  Why then, in the Peninsula, did opera become a strong vehicle for the claims of national unity while the musica popolare (folk music), which had played important role in the nationalistic claims of other countries, did not?  Although it was far from being a nation, beginning in the sixteen hundreds the Peninsula produced a musical genre that was nonetheless recognized as “Italian” everywhere and also practiced by musicians of other countries with the intention of making “Italian” music. This music easily crossed regional borders within the Peninsula itself, unlike the orally transmitted repertoires that remained local. The advocates and supporters of the unity of Italy did not need to search in the realm of folklore materials to constuct the musical identity. Musical material charged with strong symbolic value already existed in opera.  Throughout the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth, it was believed that in Italy, opera had been such a widespread and powerful phenomenon that it had overwhelmed and essentially stifled the folkloric layer.  When considering the written tradition (in other words, opera), it helps to consider two aspects of the identity: the standpoint of “outsider,” and that of the “insider.” What did composers from other nations do when they wanted their music to sound “Italian?” Some simply transcribed or paraphrased works by Italian composers. Others, conscious of the role traditional music played in the definition of the identity of numerous nations did exactly what Italian composers had never done, which is quoting “folk” melodies gathered from various sources. For example, in “Capriccio Italiano”, Tchaikovsky utilized a tune many southern Italians associated with the lyrics “mamma non vuole, papà nemmeno, come faremo a fare l’amor”.  The “problem of form” had never existed in Italian music. Italian composers always had a distinctive way of producing musical ideas that followed and linked to one another, naturally and spontaneously, according to the principle of similarity and contrast. Perhaps one of the most remarkable examples was Vivaldi who never actually produced literal repetition. Such were the features that really made “Italian” music incomparable.  The issue of how such characteristics of musical Italian-ness developed over time clearly cannot be addressed, but some most apparent quality can be briefly mentioned. Unlike France, the peninsula had not had an ars antiqua, which means acient art to compare with; in the peninsula there had been scarcity of theorization of music; and the “non-problem” of form had already become manifest.  There was the time when musical Italy had reached the highest degree of self-consciousness, and thought of itself as il paese della melodia, after which a downhill trend began. Italy began to see itself again to some degree as an internationally strong musical force only much later, after WWII but after this brief respite the downhill journey went on again. In recent years, with the emergence of groups such as Renzo Arbore’s orchestra italiana (whose repertoire relies on Neapolitan songs), the image of Italy that comes across is essentially southern-Italian.  Finally, there is another aspect of musical Italy that bears remembering. After the renaissance, Italy ceased to be productive in the realm of music theory. Italian composers were instinctively good and felt no need for theoretical guidelines. The past of music theory in Italy—from Marchettus of Pavoda to Zarlino—had been glorious but, just as Italy began to really see itself as “the land of music,” its fondness for music theory withered and practice dominated.  Italy’s last truly valuable contribution to music theory came out in 1791, when Francesco Galeazzi, violinist and composer produced his study on “sonata form”; and his description is one of the first to explain thematic development, in addition to in-depth observations about overall structure. Yet after Galeazzi there was only musical practice rather than theory. The Austro-german world, on the contrary, not only produced the idea of “classical (German) music,” but was able to consolidate and sell it to the world with many impressive theorizations. The intellectual work of such scholars helped separate completely and definitively the world of Austro- german music and Italian music. CAP 2: SANREMO EFFECTS - THE FESTIVAL AND THE ITALIAN CANZONE (1950S–1960S) How it all started  The Festival della canzone Italiana di Sanremo is the oldest and most important contest still in existence dedicated to the Italian song. Since 1951 it has been held annually in the town of Sanremo, on the north-western coast of Liguria. The first two decades of the festival represent a very important period, and can be split into five phases: 1951–57: establishing the idea of a model Italian canzone tradition 1958–59: emergence of the performer 1960–63: emergence of the modern Italian canzone 1964–67: internationalization of the festival 1968–71: end of the central role of the festival in the world of Italian popular music.  In the chapter, the author focuses on the first three phases and in particular on the period 1958–60, during which the Festival and the Italian canzone in general underwent radical changes.  Initially broadcasted live on radio, the format of the competition was so effective that the event won immediate popularity and became central to the entertainment industry. In 1955 the newly born Italian television decided to broadcast the event. In fact, the first seven editions of Sanremo were organized jointly by the casino and RAI (radio audizioni Italiane). For RAI, the festival represented an opportunity to strengthen its alliance with music publishers, encouraged to release songs suitable for radio broadcasts.  At that time the management model of broadcasting services in Italy was that of a single monopolistic company that was granted a concession to manage a public service, which opened a door to the influence of political power in the choices made by the company. And it was no mere chance that this set-up had first been established with the birth of URI (renamed EIAR) during the heyday of the fascist regime. In 1944 EIAR was replaced by RAI, but the continuity remained strong. Particularly significant was the figure of Giulio Razzi, director of programming at EIAR, who was re-employed by RAI in the same position and was artistic director of the initial editions of the Sanremo festival. Such decision took the form of an underhanded invitation to the publishers to supervise the “artistic quality” of the songs. In this way RAI was able to constrain publishers to make choices in line with its prescriptions based on the idea of a kind of light music that was easily accessible, moralizing and decent, and that sought a balance between the national-popular tradition and the modern pro- American trend. This notion of music entertainment, previously endorsed by the fascist party, seems to have enjoyed the favor of the leading political party in post-war Italy: the Christian democrats.  The period 1958–60 can be considered the turning point that marked the end of popular music's forced survival from the first half of the 20th century and the beginning of a new, more cosmopolitan outlook based on the recording industry and the idolization of the performer. However, certain elements of EIAR were bound to persist up to the present day, for example the close link between politics, RAI and the festival, the controversies between conservatives and modernists, and the idea of a model song that represented the Italian tradition. The Sanremo formula  At first the competition rewarded songwriters, who worked mostly in pairs: composer and lyricist. Publishers shortlisted songs for selection: once accepted, these were passed on to a conductor who was responsible for their arrangement and preparing them for performance, with his own orchestra and singers. The format prescribed the involvement of a sole conductor, Cinico Angelini, with his orchestra and singers. During the first two evenings, songs were performed for the audience at the casino (which formed the jury). Each evening five songs were selected as finalists. The ten finalists were performed again on the third evening, when the winning song was chosen.  The festival has changed its format many times since then. An important turning point was in 1953, when a second conductor was appointed to lend variety to the arrangements. Each song was performed twice, with different orchestras and singers: one was closer to “tradition,” the other to “modernity.”  A notable change took place around 1958–60, when the emerging importance of performers and record companies helped accelerate the process of modernization. The power of the recording industry outstripped that of publishers, and the presence of foreign guests rendered the limited number of conductors outdated. Sanremo and the Italian canzone Sanremo songs of the 1950s can be divided into two categories:  Melodramatic songs, or slow songs mainly in lyric form derived from nineteenth-century Italian opera. The songs, often closely related to the AABA Tin Pan Alley popular ballad form, were sung in a light-opera vocal style. Their lyrics, orchestration, melody, and harmonic progressions were derived from nineteenth-century Italian opera and the Neapolitan song tradition. No real rhythm section was involved. A prototype of this category was the the first festival winner “Grazie dei fiori” performed by Nilla Pizzi.  Cheerful and carefree songs, with a bright and positive feel, sometimes witty and playful, and sometimes satirical. In these songs the voice had a more natural tone. Lyric form was widespread and very often followed the AABA pattern, but there were also verse/chorus forms. Harmony was reduced to the primary chords and the melody had none of the lyrical elaboration of the melodramatic songs. The rhythm was closer to folk dances or popular marches. Examples were the winner of 1956 edition “Aprite le finestre”, performed by Franca Raimondi, or the “Papaveri e Papere” performed by Nilla Pizzi in 1952.  Since Sanremo intended to appeal to the broadest and most diverse audience possible, it come as no surprise that regional songs tended to be reduced to pieces inspired by a generic folk tradition, sung in Italian.  Finally, it is worth pointing out that from the very beginning of the festival there was an evident jazz-ballad influence inspired by crooners’ songs. Teddy Reno and Flo Sandon’s, both well-known as crooners with a fondness for jazz ballads, made their festival débuts in 1953, while in 1954 it was the turn of Natalino Otto, an established performer of Italian swing, followed in 1955 by the youthful Jula de Palma.  The songs from Sanremo in the 1950s recalled the bel canto tradition while also evoking other urban local traditions and giving the Neapolitan school primacy. Only echoes of the "Italian swing," which was so popular in the decade before, and American dance-hall music now reshaped to suit the tastes of the middle-class. The strange reference to Latin American genres completed the picture. This air of “restoration” was also apparent in the lyrics, infused and hinted at a consoling traditionalism that still placed a high importance on family, religion, and country. These songs served as a reassurance and comfort for the middle class, reflecting their own tastes and values  This formula quickly established Sanremo's position as the “authentic tradition of the Italian melodic song,”   and turned it into a subject of frequent criticism and heated debate, but it was still praised and followed  by the general public and the critics. During the 1950s and 1960s composers and singers did not shy away from the challenge, and for some years Italian popular music struggled to establish a balance between “tradition,” and the new foreign trends that were having an impact in Italy. The period of greatest interest in this sense is from 1958 to 1960. The Modugno effect  The 1958 festival saw the appearance of Domenico Modugno, who won with “Nel blu dipinto di blu”. He was hardly typical of the Sanremo environment of the time, not only because he sang in dialect, but also because of his morally questionable persona. CAP 4: NAPLES POWER - NEAPOLITAN SOUNDS OF THE 1970s  Naples Power is the name of the music scene that flourished during the 1970s in Naples. Probably invented by some music critics, and also known in different variants—such as Napule’s power, Neapolisound and Neapolitanwave. It has proven to be a successful label for a network of interrelated, frequently converging folk revival and popular music activities.  It is not clear when exactly the term was coined. The label “Naples Power” was likely used already in the mid 1970s, but not by all Neapolitan performers or listeners. Equally problematic is what kind of genres, bands and performers were associated at the time with Naples Power.  Understanding Naples Power is, then, a difficult task. Two features seem to be confirmed by both concurrent and historical accounts: it was a heterogeneous scene—including rock, pop, progressive, folk revival, singer- songwriters, avant-garde composers, etc.—with continual exchanges, cross-musical influences and collaborations; and it brought about a new set of sounds, whose effects extended well beyond Naples and the 1970s. With novel performing attitudes, different compositional approaches and revolutionary sonic productions, this music shocked Neapolitan and Italian audiences at that time  Two contextual elements also need to be considered. First, Naples Power was truly a 1970s movement, the child of a decade of great experiments and profound innovations in Italy. Those were years of intense linguistic, political, and musical reconfigurations, of juvenile passions, of major transformations in habits and consumption. The lively intellectual life of Italy between the mid-1960s and late 1970s was marked by a strong (musical) participation in the public and cultural spheres of youth movements that often highlighted self-representation traits. Addressing directly the new Neapolitan scene, critic Goffredo Fofi stressed that it was the result of an important social development: a new urban working class, politically and economically marginalized, finally able to express itself through a musical “cultural revolution”  A second contextual element is the relationship between Naples Power and Neapolitan song. Naples Power was an indispensable move away from the “reactionary” Neapolitan songs of the 1960s, against an older and powerful musical hegemony; indeed, R&B band Showmen’s posters stated that they came from “the most musically conservative city in Italy” and all the young musicians in the town had a “huge weight on their shoulders that of Neapolitan culture and melody.” This kind of opposition seems to be a locally articulated freedom of expression set against an “authority principle,” in order to question the dominant musical order. However, the relationship between Naples Power and Neapolitan song was not always antithetical. Some performers covered Neapolitan songs: the group Showmen released a R&B version of 1892 “Catarì” of Salvatore di Giacomo and Pasquale Mario Costa True voices  One of the major contributions of Naples Power was the redefinition of Neapolitan vocality, mostly thanks to the folk revival group Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. NCCP’s aesthetics was reflected in this group’s activity of researching the means of communications that are genuinely of the people, and later in reorganizing these materials according to rigorous standards of style and expressive truth.  NCCP rose to fame throughout Italy, after the release of their third album, the band is recognized and appreciated for their “exact” vocal rendition of folk music and dance tunes from the Campania region, and their re- creation of Neapolitan vocal and instrumental music from the sixteenth century. The impact of such a mixed repertoire was enormous, was imitated by countless groups in central and southern Italy. NCCP singers did not sing like Neapolitan song singers: their folk vocal textures and vocalizations, their subtle use of pitches and melisma, the alternation between hoarse, harsh and clean, outward projected voices had a terrific impact on audiences. After the successful release of their album “Li sarracini adorano lu sole” , NCCP were even labeled as “the best Italian pop band ever”  However, NCCP’s approach to folk and art music faced some objections that although they recovered lost musical repertoires, but they have also sugarcoated them, they made them palatable to any taste, ‘exoticizing’ them”. However, despite those claims, NCCP’s sway on Naples Power is undeniable, as well as their re-creation of a Neapolitan “folk” vocality, traces of which can be heard in progressive rock and jazz-rock works. From the centre of the town  The sound of overlapping voices emerged as a striking sonic feature in performances and albums of Naples Power. This new trend became evident with the Osanna’s “Palepoli”, and it was promptly flagged by music critics. Palepoli was a turning point in their career, a show that included theatrical as well as musical performances, and the conflicting coexistence of traditional and modern cultural canons in Naples.  Palepoli is valued among the best Italian prog rock albums, a successful mix of diverse influences such as free jazz improvisation, folk music, blues, Led Zeppelin-style rock, avant-garde experimentations. This eclectic mix revealed the Neapolitan cultural penchant to reutilize given materials in different combinations. Palepoli, in fact, might be considered as a Naples Power manifesto, in so far as it summed up what was happening musically in the city in those years. As a depiction of contemporary Naples, the album’s a-side starts and ends with a Neapolitan soundscape—a “folk” tune on flute, guitar, and percussion, mixed with street sounds, with the voice of a folk singer singing, and includes a tarantella-like section, sung in Neapolitan.  The new Neapolitan voice is also central in another fundamental Naples Power album, which is the first LP by Napoli Centrale and achieved an immediate success with “Campagna” as a single. The song, and indeed the whole album, is based on the juxtaposition of a soft machine-like but funkier jazz rock and Senese’s voice. Senese’s vocality goes against any Neapolitan song stylistic feature, and reworks the folk voice by bending it towards a more urban expressiveness. Senese’s voice is the harsh voice of the working class of Naples’ suburbs and as a result represented in music, for the first time, a voiceless social and cultural group. Since their first appearance, Napoli Centrale were considered key figures of Naples Power, and along side with other performers they contributed with to elaborate the new grammar of Neapolitan popular music. The art of playing pans  The musician who, probably more than any other, has embodied Naples Power through a constant pursuit of a Neapolitan popular music aesthetics is Toni Esposito. He amplified an existing musical trend by elaborating an unconventional and idiosyncratic percussion set that could be perceived as representation of Naples’ everyday life. Pans, pots, and other metallic tools were included in his compositions to provide both background and foreground sonic structures, and to destabilize the classic rock and pop drum set  In his 1970s albums Esposito adopted some uk/us and Italian jazz-rock templates, readjusting them to a Neapolitan sensibility. In “Processione sul mare” Esposito expressed the Neapolitan soundscape at his best. The track “Mercato di stracci” is organized in two parts: the first is a Neapolitanized jazz-rock composition, while the second is a studio recreation of the sounds of a street market, in which the pans feature prominently. A new music  In 1976 two of the members of NCCP (Eugenio Nennato and Carlo D’angiò) left the group and released their first album, Garofano D’ammore. This album marked a real shift in Neapolitan folk revival, as it included some Naples Power sounds and pointed towards a different approach to folk music, leaving more space for performers to improvise and not strictly adhering to traditional conventions. The album was a great success and Musicanova became the name of the new band.  If NCCP’s style was used as a template for an entire generation of folk revival performers, Musicanova shifted their focus on improvisation, composition, alternative uses of folk instruments, instrumental tunes, pop song structures, genre crossing—was welcomed in the late 1970s as an urgent and necessary musical revolution, and it was perceived as another example of the enduring ability of the Neapolitan scene to elaborate new trends. Half black  Pino Daniele is a singer-songwriter and guitarist, since the release of his first albums—“Terra mia” and “Pino Daniele”, Daniele established his own sound, by emphasizing rock-blues arrangements and elaborating a vocal style that mediated between Neapolitan stylistic features and anglo-American popular music.  There are some elements in Daniele’s works that do show a link with the 1970s scene. First of all, his reformulation of the Neapolitan “blackness” which was one of the self-definitions of some Naples Power musicians. Daniele’s third album “Nero a metà” is simultaneously: a direct homage to the Showmen’s lead “black” singer Mario Musella and a restatement of the Neapolitan negritude as a sociopolitical condition and a metaphor for his rock-blues attitude. Second, there was his propensity for instrumental dexterity and long instrumental sections, which challenge the usual singer-songwriter composition’s structure and can be seen as a legacy of Naples Power’s musical experimentalism. Finally, there was his willingness to collaborate in the studio and on tour with as many Naples Power musicians as possible. Take the power back  The year 2012 marked a revival of Naples Power. The band ’A67 released Naples Power, a straightforward homage to the music of 1970s. Several well-known Neapolitan guests were invited to sing or play in the album. Interestingly, the track that specifically addressed the Naples Power scene is “I negri del vesuvio”.  It was the end of the 1960s when Naples Power stood out, mixing the Neapolitan tradition with anglo-American sounds, Naples Power got its name from black power, the political movement led by Stokeley Carmichael . Indeed, Neapolitan musicians were called “vesuvius’ niggers.” The album was rather an attempt to retrieve a specific sound, as well as to re-establish a connection between musical expressions and sociopolitical claims.  As a matter of fact, this revival can be traced back to a few years prior. In 2008 Pino Daniele released the single “Anema e core” and brought back his all-star Naples Power band. At the end of 2012 Daniele launched an explicit revival with three live shows in Naples, featuring mostly the same line-up and some other Neapolitan guest musicians, which was a comeback of the best Neapolitan popular music scene  CAP 6: A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR AS AN ARTIST - IDEOLOGY, AUTHENTICITY, AND STYLIZATION IN THE CANZONE D’AUTORE  Cantautori and canzone d’autore play a special role in the history of both Italian music and popular music studies. Historically, they are related to the appearance and success of singer-songwriters on the Italian scene in the late 1950s. They broke a long tradition dominated by professional lyricists and composers and was identified with the renewal of Italian culture that took place during and after WWII in literature, cinema, theatre, visual arts, and modern classical music.  Cantautori (especially Umberto Bindi, Gino Paoli, Gianni Meccia, Pino Donaggio, Luigi Tenco, Fabrizio De André) rose to fame almost immediately, and in the 1960s some of their singles topped the charts. Some cantautori took part in the Sanremo festival, scoring high in the final results. Pino Donaggio with “You don’t have to say you love me” and Domenico Modugno’s win with “Nel blu dipinto di blu,” The author as an artist  Being a cantautore implies a technical matter: writing (totally or partially) his own songs—but hints at an aesthetic one: it’s a matter of authenticity, which is the core concept on which we measure the value of music  An authenticity-based aesthetics must deal with the problem of authorship. Authorship and creativity are associated with high art  authenticity is a matter of interpretation which is made and fought for from within a cultural position: it’s not something within the musical event, but the meanings we attribute to musical events.  An ideology of authorship forces us to conceive music in terms that prevent achieving the real allocation and distribution of the composition process within the social domain. By reducing the domain of copyright to basic elements, namely melody and lyrics, it “ensured a regime of enforced originality” and enabled the singer a lead role in the production chain. S/he became the main issue for the listening subject’s identification.  The higher emphasis placed on the auteur character in Italian popular music may have derived  its strength from the so-called diritto d'autore, an inalienable and permanent “moral right” held by the author . From this viewpoint, the aesthetic primacy of singer-songwriters is easily explained. The first cantautori  In Italy, as well as in the UK and France, the post-war “boom” marked the explosion of an industrial music system; some major record companies opened their Italian branches . Songs had standardized structure and content, were commodified and tended towards pure escapism. New recording companies promoted singer-songwriters as part of a new strategy for subverting such system, which was dominated by music publishers.  Since its introduction, the word cantautore has conveyed a connotative meaning: in 1960 being a cantautore meant writing clever songs opposing the traditional canzone clichés  The term gained wide currency as RCA needed a marketing strategy to launch Gianni Meccia and various other new singers, characterized by witty lyrics and sophisticated arrangement. The word was straightaway used to define the more intimist among Ricordi’s artists as well such as Umberto Bindi, Gino Paoli, Sergio Endrigo. Luigi Tenco and retrospectively, Domenico Modugno,  Cantautori used a brand new lexicon, dealing with everyday language and opposing the solemn verses of traditional songs; their lyrics dealt with everyday life and everyday love ; their voices were private, and radically opposed the operatic vocality of Italian canzone. Songs and music of our own: leftist intellectuals and youth communities in the mid-1960s  Like the way popular music and cultural models from the UK and the United States reframed young people’s musical habits , shared listening practices were linked to new ways of making music together; bands were founded all around the country, the same can be seen in the mid-1960s in Italy.  Mid-1960s teenagers were Italy’s first highly educated generation, having wide access to consumer goods and leisure . Newborn music magazines targeting young readers provided a wide renewal of musical discourse through a groundbreaking colloquial style. A field of so-called musica nostra was defined as a set of musical events and practices linked to the reframing of a youth interpretive community.  Cantautori were part of this. There was a widespread awareness of the existence of two kinds of songs: those aimed at entertainment and dance opposed to songs that required “to be listened to.” The latter were often linked to an auteur ideology. Nevertheless, between 1964 and 1965, beat bands and teen idols overshadowed cantautori  Ever since the frame of young people’s musical tastes was set, a contradiction in listening practices broke out among young leftists, who had based their sentimental education on songs that were ideologically incompatible with their political training. Here was a risk of creating a division between songs people like for ideological fulfillment and those they listen to in private. The death of the author  The division between commercial popular songs and singer-songwriters who aimed at making their own “different” songs became apparent in 1967, when Luigi Tenco, one of the most respected cantautori, chose Sanremo as the platform that could enable him to spread his “message”. His choice was based on the assumption that the same had happened in the USA, with Bob Dylan and other protest singer-songwriters being brought to fame by big media, by “the system” itself  His goal was to innovate the subjectivism of cantautori by translating young people’s “musica nostra - Music Of Our Own” into a new kind of song. “Ciao Amore Ciao” composed for the 1967 Sanremo festival, was a clear attempt to deal with a serious theme (the song is about emigration) using a popular musical language.  Tenco didn’t consider that CBS (a major marketing-oriented record company) and RAI (the radio and television broadcasting corporation, strictly controlled by conservative politicians) were quite different institutions; his song was rejected and not admitted to the final, and he committed suicide “as an act of protest,” . Tenco’s death is the watershed of Italian canzone.  Three interpretive frames were set after Tenco’s death. The first one—the individual fragility frame—was an attempt to dismiss the act as Tenco’s private failure as a man. The second frame considered Tenco’s suicide as an example of youth anomie. As a right-wing newspaper stated, “this is what happens when you demand love, not war: you end up dying for a song. On the other side, the left-wing press and the youth magazines gave the suicide a sociological dimension: Tenco became a victim of the system who immolated himself in protest . Tenco’s sacrifice confirmed the opinions of many young people regarding the seriousness with the music they loved. Different spaces for a different canzone  After Tenco’s suicide a new genre label, canzone d’autore slowly emerged between 1969 and 1974, catalyzing a wider and more consistent aesthetic and ideological background for the genre.  Most of the “new” cantautori of the 1970s began their career as underground artists, sometimes presenting themselves as musical amateurs . They positioned themselves within the field of “cultural goods production”. Cantautori were forced into a continuous mediation within these two extremes: the compulsion to succeed within the market system, versus the dismissal of any ambition of success in order to be credited as authentic by their audience.  The rise of alternative spaces for music in the early 1970s : free radios, alternative press, small clubs were the conditions for the nuova canzone to develop far from the industrial production system.  Tenco’s interpretive frame as a “victim of the system” was widely compatible with both leftist and social Catholic ideologies with the latter being a major cornerstone in Italian popular culture.  Within such process of “sacralization” of song culture, the club Tenco of venice was born, offered a different place for young people to meet, under a different vision of the world, and of music that Luigi had fought for. Following a similar inspiration with a more concrete goal, club Tenco in Sanremo, which has organized the Premio Tenco and the rassegna (festival) of canzone d’autore. Rambaldi and his collaborators conceived the  In “Una Vita Inutile” , the dramatis persona not only asks the fundamental question about the sense of his own life, which underpins his autobiographic reflections, but also shows he is aware of his non-conformism and of his skepticism regarding the chance of ever finding a key to understanding the world.  Finally, in another Tenco's strophic song “E Se Ci Diranno” in the style of Italian beat, the dramatis persona affirms that his identity is built on the rejection of militarism, fanaticism, and racism  From 1961 to 1966 Tenco was the only Italian songwriter who delved into diaristic songs, which then became quite common after his death, mostly as canzoni d’autore of the 1970s Open letter songs  Only one track on Tenco’s first album is neither a love song nor a diaristic one: “Cara Maestra”. It manifests a simpler musical style and its dramatis persona ironically asks public figures (a teacher, a priest, and a mayor) the reason for certain incongruities between what they preached and what they practiced. In subsequent years, Tenco released tracks in which the dramatis persona addresses a subject who is not his present or past sentimental partner. The author calls these “open letter songs.” These are namely Ragazzo Mio, “Ma Dove Vai”, “Io Lo So Già”, “Ognuno È Libero”  In “Ragazzo Mio,” the dramatis persona advocates rejecting the two approaches criticized in Tenco’s love and diaristic songs: being a conformist “man without ideas” and being a “cloud-chaser who dreams of achieving success.”  In the last 2 tracks, the dramatis persona criticized two attitudes: the egoistic attitude of the social climber, and the authoritarianism of the man who thinks that young people “for good or for bad, must do whatever he wants.”  In these “open letter songs,” the dramatis persona addresses a figure that is positively or negatively significant for contemporary young listeners, while the sound share some of the same stylistic elements of songs that had conquered the same audience of other topics.  These tracks maintained a new engagement of the canzone diversa but also responded to three demands of the young Italian audience, which until then had been satisfied only by canzoni gastronomiche. These were: the need to listen to lyrics dealing with their “feelings and problems”; the desire for musical patterns alternative to those appreciated by previous generations, and thus exploitable as “generational flag”; and the need to release some of their tensions CAP 8: EMOTIONS THE (UN)ORTHODOX SONGS OF LUCIO BATTISTI  Lucio Battisti was a young guitarist wanted to be a songwriter, not just a performer and a singer.  He considered himself different from the first wave of cantautori, but he wasn’t good at writing song texts, so he ended up working with a lyricist. That author was Mogol. Mogol had already written several successful songs for some of the most famous Italian singers, and was the renowned author of many Italian covers of American and British songs.  The two wrote more than seventy songs for well-known singers and bands. Twenty-six of those songs reached the top 20 and many of them became part of the Italian songbook, for example “29 Settembre” and “Nel Cuore, Nell’anima” (Equipe 84); “Il Paradiso” by Patty Pravo; “Insieme” by Mina  Success came to Battisti as a singer with the third release, with the song “Balla Linda”. In 1973, two most sold album in Italy were both Battisti’s.  But Battisti’s success, which continues today, is not just a matter of record sales.  Some of Battisti’s songs have become part of the amateur guitarist’s repertoire. Still today, on school trips and in parishes, some of the most commonly performed songs are Battisti’s. Battisti and Mogol, with their many easy-to-play songs and easy-to-remember lyrics, stepped into the intimate lives of millions of Italians The irregular songwriter  Battisti contributed in the development of irregularly structured songs in Italy. One example is “Emozioni” considered one of his masterpiece; it’s divided in two sung parts without verse–chorus or chorus–bridge subdivision. It’s an aa structure. Every a can be divided into smaller parts, the second of which can be called a “refrain” qualcosa che/è dentro me/ma nella mente tua non c’è//capire tu non puoi/tu chiamale se vuoi/emozioni (something that/is within me/but doesn’t exist in your mind//you just can’t understand/you can call them, if you like/emotions). The smooth sound of the nylon strings, the very slow tempo, and the contrasts between the surrounding silence and Battisti’s whispered voice make the performance a representation of intimacy.  There are two other reasons why Battisti complicates the concept of cantautore. First, he was not interested in politics in a time when, between the sixties and the seventies, a cantautore had to have an openly political leftist orientation, which was an implicit part of the definition of cantautore. Battisti’s songs were not political, and always sentimentally oriented. Second, in the seventies the cantautore had the allure of a “poet,” that is, of someone who writes his own lyrics. Battisti instead was a music composer, while Mogol wrote the lyrics for his songs: and Mogol was associated with the context of record companies, being part of the un-artistic, capitalist system challenged by young protesters. More than once, they were accused of sexism and conservatism (sometimes even of fascism). Singers don’t need a voice  Record managers and critics were doubtful of Battisti’s skills as a singer. He didn’t have a classically trained voice, so it was impossible to place him in the Italian tenor or Italian crooners or the first cantautori. Battisti’s songs were not appropriate for those kinds of voices. His influences as a songwriter were mid-sixties rock, beat and rhythm ’n’ blues, and his voice too was part of that tradition—basically an untrained head voice, a bit rough, without any vibrato, with a high propensity for falsetto.  Tired of the claims that he was not a real singer, in 1970 Battisti stated that singers don’t need a voice. It was an attack on the tenor-like voice, then still considered as the only acceptable way of singing. In fact, his interest in the use of the voice was prominent, represent his standpoint on the singer’s actorial role. He considered himself the perfect emotional interpreter for his songs.  Lucio Battisti and Giulio Rapetti in 1970 they created their own label, called Numero Uno in order to be free to release whatever they wanted on their terms. Their music undoubtedly reached a huge audience, and despite the fact that many young people between the sixties and seventies were strongly political and publicly pointed at them as a bad model, it is reasonable to claim that those young people’s “sentimental education” probably came from the songs of Mogol and Battisti So Many Sounds  Battisti’s music can be generally defined as “pop,” but it’s full of different influences. First of all, he worked in the recording studio on both sides of the mixing board. Unlike many singers and songwriters in those days couldn’t control their records; Battisti was, most of all, a musician.  The first strong influences we can detect in Battisti’s records are soul and rhythm ’n’ blues: “Luisa Rossi”, “Un’avventura”, “Dieci ragazze”, “Dio mio no”  Rock also plays a prominent role in Battisti’s early songs. He wrote for important beat bands, including two of the most famous Italian beat songs, “29 settembre” and “Nel cuore, nell’anima” (Equipe 84). Nevertheless, Battisti wrote very few riffs; one of those is in “Il tempo di morire”, based on a typical rock-blues guitar accompaniment.  Some elements of his early repertoire, such as the sudden changes time and atmosphere, can be related to the new-born progressive rock. In “Balla Linda” the chorus is in 4/4, while verse-intros are in a heavily marked 6/8; “Mi ritorni in mente” accelerates abruptly in the bridge and the change between verse and chorus is almost like a collage of two different songs.  In the late 1970s Battisti experimented with funk, as in “Ancora tu” and with disco “Sì viaggiare”, “Amarsi un po’”  Battisti’s last five records, with lyricist Pasquale Panella are considered as his enigmatic period, with experiments with nonsense, puns, philosophical-referenced lyrics, like “Non penso quindi tu sei” - the first line of “Don Giovanni,”. He viewed Don Giovanni as his masterpiece with its delicate balance between synthesizers and acoustic instruments, sophisticated harmony and recognizable forms. The other four records—full of electronic sound and drum machines with no apparent structure, were defined as streams of consciousness CAP 9: SAVED SOULS - LOCATING STYLE IN FABRIZIO DE ANDRÉ’S AND IVANO FOSSATI’S RECORD PRODUCTION  Fabrizio De André and Ivano Fossati are two of the most representative cantautori. De André at the present time is probably the most-loved cantautore: his persona and his recordings reached an mythical status in Italy, perceived as a cultural and political guru. Fossati has a more reserved public profile, but he too is perceived as one of the most sophisticated and intelligent song composers.  Before working together in the studio, De André and Fossati shared an intense cultural and musical story. Both born in Genoa, De André and Fossati were immersed in the city’s lively scene, characterized by rich exchanges of musical experiences. That musical scene made possible, the emergence of the so-called scuola genovese used to label some of the first cantautori productions from Genoa  As a guitarist, Fabrizio De André was chiefly self-taught; he never used notation for his compositions, relying mostly on his memorization and on the producers’ and arrangers’ work. Ivano Fossati, on the other hand, had a good musical training and can be considered a musician who became a cantautore A 1980s Shift  In particular, 1984 was a significant year for both cantautori and, Italian popular music as well, seeing the release of De André’s album, Crêuza de mä and Ivano Fossati’s Ventilazione  De André’s Crêuza de mä was entirely sung in Genoese dialect. The album displays great variety, mixing elements from disparate Mediterranean styles in such a way that represents an Italian popular music route to “Mediterranean music”. Crêuza de mä was not an immediate success with the public, but it had an explosive effect in the field of canzone d’autore  Ivano Fossati’s Ventilazione, was a creative turning point for his career, reflecting a will to experiment with special recording and mixing techniques.  From 1984 onwards, both Fossati’s and De André’s stylistic turns related to an interest in music styles from different geographical regions and social backgrounds, mainly Southern European countries. In this sense, they expressed a musical and intellectual idea that was radically new in the Italian canzone d’autore and opposite to the idea that music—and studio production aspects such as recording and mixing—have a subordinate role compared to the lyrics. At the same time both cantautori maintained or even valorized compositional and interpretive features of their idiolects. Vocal Attitudes  The author would focus on De André’s and Fossati’s rhythmic articulation, which means identifying how the voice is used. Their specific way of shaping the notes, during studio sessions as well as in live performances, reveals a particular rhythmic competence, that is, the ability to give sense and coherence to the time-related organization of the sound stream . It is an idiolect feature that was not derived from an understanding of music theory but spontaneously existed at the moment of creation. However, there performance strategies can be liable to analysis and description, in that they follow precise rules and can be identified.  The main feature of De André’s vocal idiolect is related to his expressive rhythmic flexibility and subtle rhythmic nuances, which characterize the melodic profile and are related to a specific way of shaping individual or consecutive notes in time. De André’s vocal attitude intention is to create a melodic “flow” that extends above the accompaniment, intensifying its relations with other structural elements of the song, but without giving the impression of a rubato  Ivano Fossati’s vocal idiolect is also characterized by rhythmic flexibility, but related to a particular melodic-textual pronunciation. This feature is mainly based on a clear pronunciation of the syllables, with the exaggerated stressing each word by strengthening the first consonant and almost giving an added value to the words. Representative examples are in “Una notte in Italia,” and “Questi posti davanti al mare” where there are frequent and unexpected prolongations of the vocals, that produce persistent polyrhythmic tension against the accompaniment. Rhythmic Discrepancies  There are many ways to analyze an artist’s idiolect, the author will focus on rhythmic aspects in vocal performance  The analysis of specific ways to conceive rhythmic organization, not only between voice and rhythm section but also among instrumental part , is is an opportunity to consider the description of micro-variations in the time domain of musical recordings (discrepancies) as crucial elements of musical style . The author’s analysis revealed some remarkable rhythmic features, related to the impact of technological mediation and forming the “rhythmic feel” of the songs  In Anime salve - De André’s last studio production realized in partnership with Fossati , the main feature of the track “Dolcenera” is related to the complex rhythmic formations between the voice and the instrument parts, especially between percussion and the others. In this song it is difficult to identify a static underlying meter . Listening to “Dolcenera” we are immediately struck by several rhythmic “irregularities” offered by the variety of stresses instruments, such as the harp, the clarinet, and vocal seems to play alternatively in compound and simple meter, and the shaker seems to move simultaneously on simple meter in the whole piece.  On a first analytical level, such rhythmic interweaving recalls what is often defined as the juxtaposition of two meters, one simple and one compound: a form of polymeter.  The same polymetric feature recurs in other songs of Anime salve. A characteristic example is found in “A cúmba”, a song based on three different vocal parts, the melodic vocal profiles are in a 3/4 meter, while the ostinato guitar arpeggio is in 6/8 meter, and there’s also the usage of sound layering: First, the superimposition of a groove which is looped and layered onto the vocal parts and guitar accompaniment. Second, there is an polyphony in the vocal parts achieved with the technique of overdubbing  The instrumental introduction of Fossati’s “La pianta del tè” is also characterized by a complex form of polyrhythm. The rhythmic articulation of the antara notes is detached from the beat sequence of the prevailing meter, stepping forward through the interplay of bass and bass drum  The tension created by micro-rhythmic and polyrhythmic relations, in accordance with or in contradiction to the beat, reveals a cognition of time that is at once elastic and rigid. De André and Fossati seem to have a very clear-cut sense of the beat. On an instrumental level and particularly on a vocal–melodic level, they display an ability to make rhythm flexible in tempo, irregular in accent, or free in durational values of sounds, while simultaneously maintaining a synchronism with the meter and the organization of other musical events in time. CAP 12. VIRTUOSITY AND POPULISM - THE EVERLASTING APPEAL OF MINA AND CELENTANO  Modugno’s song “Nel blu dipinto di blu” paved the way to Italian pop, pioneered by Mina, Celentano, and many other young interpreters called urlatori (yellers), who came to replace the old guard of the melodic singers. “Italian style” singers used to hold a hand on their heart while they sang. That gesture, a non-verbal sign code dating back to the nineteenth century, which required performers to raise their arms high, as if to invoke Heaven.  Neither Mina nor Celentano respected this code. A mix of elegance and sensuality has made Mina a timeless icon, as she went against her time by challenging some rooted conventions. Mina would express her musicality through her body: she put fingers in her mouth, twisted her feet in an inelegant fashion, flapping gestures of the hands that were only meant to underscore that the performance was going on  Celentano learned to move his hips from Elvis, but focused mostly on his legs, bending inward and outward while turning his feet. These gestures visually summarized the impact of a new generation of Italian pop scene.  Mina’s first record to hit the charts was “Tintarella di luna,” a rock ’n’ roll song written in Italian and built on typical blues chords. Latter she met singer-songwriter Gino Paoli who asked her to record his new song “Il cielo in una stanza”. The song became the first canzone d’autore to hit the charts. Mina was also involved in some experiments, for example singing the title track of the auteur film L’eclisse, participating in groundbreaking musical comedies with Quartetto Cetra and thecomic actor Totò. Over time, she came to hold monopoly in the home entertainment of Saturday night, where she proved to be not only a yeller but an all- round able to adapt her voice to various genres of popular music. Mina has sung in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Turkish, and Japanese as well as in dialects such as Milanese, Genoese, Neapolitan, and Romanesque. Mina belongs to the Top 20 artists’ élite of the world. Her charted singles are almost seventy, most notable was “Un anno d’amore”  Adriano Celentano, in 1957 he took part in the first Rock ’n’ Roll Festival in Milan and later he signed with the indie SAAR, making debut with a string of rock ’n’ roll covers. Celentano created an Italian way to rock featured by a “don’t-believe-it” attitude. In 1959 he won the Ancona Festival with “Il tuo bacio è come un rock”, his first record to hit the charts. His fame spread throughout the country, so that Federico Fellini shot a long scene with him in his La dolce vita. In 1961 Celentano came second at the Sanremo Festival, but his “24 mila baci” was the most successful song. Starting in the mid-1960s, Celentano developed a fanatic religious approach that characterized his entire career, but his gaze remained anti-conformist and simplified. Similarly, his songs displaying civil engagement sounded nonetheless provocative and countercurrent at a time the left had a sort of monopoly in cultural affairs Domestic Impact and Fortunes Abroad  Mina is the prototype of the popular music artist who mediates between national taste and foreign influences. Celentano, on the other hand, embodies the populist interpreter and artist at his best, who does absorb from the outside but invariably bends it to the local taste. Because of this, he sounds more Italian than Mina. Mina is the most versatile singer in Italian pop music, her role in the world’s pop scene has been recognized by many foreign observers Mina was also big in Japan, German, Argentina, she moves in a cosmopolitan world after a lasting relationship with an international repertoire. Celentano, although he grew up listening to rock ’n’ roll, he never learned English, proving to be close to the stereotypical provincial man. Although he is not a cantautore, he stresses the importance of the lyrics, while Mina emphasizes the performance itself. For these reasons, her appeal is more universal. She follows the noble tradition of adult pop vocalists. Celentano belongs to another noble tradition rooted in European protest music. CAP 16. LASCIATEMI CANTARE AND OTHER DISEASES ITALIAN POPULAR MUSIC, AS REPRESENTED ABROAD The “Foreign Genres” of Italian Music  When it comes to popular music, there are two threads of Italian music that seem to draw international attention: the so-called Italo disco, and the traditional Sanremo-like melodic pop (Italo pop). The impact of Italian singers and songs on the foreign market falls into two categories: a global impact (normally that is, Europe and Latin America first and and a geographically specific impact). The first category belong to the likes of Eros Ramazzotti, Zucchero, Toto Cutugno, plus specific songs such as Umberto Tozzi’s “Ti amo” “Gloria”, Raf’s “Self Control”, Nel blu dipinto di blu”. The second category belong to the music that enjoyed a particular success in certain portions of the international market, the German success of the De Angelis brothers, or popularity of melodic singers from the 1980s in the former Soviet bloc like Pupo, Drupi, Riccardo Fogli plus the more global Toto Cutugno, Al Bano Italo Disco  It was founder of the German disco-oriented label ZYX, who coined the expression Italo disco during the late 1970s, simply referring the type of disco music coming from Italy. The first example was “Nessuno mai”. After that, in correspondence with the international explosion of the “Saturday night fever” phenomenon, more and more Italian acts had a go at disco music. Alan Sorrenti achieved stardom with “Figli delle stelle” or Francesca Aliotta is often mentioned as an example of the wide popularity reached by the disco genre in Italy.  By the early 1980s, it became clear that Italo disco was not only a tool for geographical classification, but the expression of a musical style with some recognizable features: - A rigid four-in-a-bar rhythmic pattern, with a bass drum on the downbeats, and a snare and handclap on the upbeats; - A tendency to use repetitive bass riffs rather than the more inventive ones that had characterized the soul-derived disco productions of Motown - Catchy and recognizable melodies, often mixed and post-produced the “Italian way” (in sound engineer jargon, with the vocal parts significantly louder than the rest) - Full access to state-of-the-art music technologies, particularly synthesizers, - Lyrically, a tendency to write meta-songs, that is, to address the song itself, its characteristics and social function (therefore: invitations to dance, arguments in favor of the song’s rhythm, descriptions of the kinetic abilities of a given musical instrument)  The genre went through a similar process as Spaghetti Westerns did in cinema. In both cases, the marketing necessity of making the genres look more exotic brought Italian artists to choose English-sounding stage-names. Another confirmation of Italo disco as a genre was associated with the existence of musicians from different countries, including German Boney M., the Austrian Falco, the English Tracy Spencer. Finally, Italo disco served as a vehicle of promotion for a few Italian soubrettes of rather dubious talent, including Angela Cavagna, Nadia Cassini, and Sabrina Salerno therefore contributed to the international perception of the Italian beauty as a sexy, all-curves, fleshy-lips brunette. Italo Pop  Besides Italo disco, the more predictable Italian entry in foreign market is the Sanremo-like melodic pop referred as Italo pop. Along with opera, this is possibly the example that comes to mind when thinking of Italian music  Also to be excluded from Italo pop are cantautori. This distinction may be a little misleading, as in fact Ramazzotti, Cutugno who are fully represented in international contexts should therefore be considered cantautori. However the label cantautore tends to connote a particular kind of singer-songwriter whose authorship is mainly focused on poetic, self-biographical, and realist tones (also in a political-ideological sense), conveys an image of “socially committed,” “honest,” and “authentic” artist. To say it all, melodies that are too catchy are considered a minus in the cantautore profile.  In order to categorize Italo pop in an acceptable way we shall refer to a number of stylistic features: first , its direct descent from the Neapolitan Song tradition: wide melodic arches, memorable hooks (“Lasciatemi cantare, Cotugno’s “l’Italiano”); abundance of ballads; minor–major key alternation between strophe and refrain (even Conte’s “Azzurro”), neat and lyrical singing style; theme of love in the lyrics, with an inclination towards self-pity; lavish arrangements and production. Beyond this Italo pop adds a more international accent: songs are invariably sung “in Italian,” and dialects may briefly appear only as colorful shades.  Unlike Italo disco, Italo pop displays more distinctive features. With Italo pop consumers have expectations in terms of songs and performers, and these performers are often stars.  Compilations, are still an item of great interest and constitute a touristic product, particularly for being “synecdoche” of Italian music: the consumer buys them with the idea of making “tour” of Italy . Marketing strategies are therefore designed accordingly. Starting from the titles of these collections, a range of names with a limited number of key-words seemingly combined at random such as Nostalgia Italiana, Bella Italia, Ciao Amore, Canta Italia  Regarding graphical representation, Italo pop covers display a consistent range of analytical cues. 1. The chromatic spectrum seems to wink at the Italian flag colors 2. Italy, as a country, appears in more iconic and indexical form: peninsula, images of cities and monuments, items of pop culture such as pasta, Ferrari cars, or portraits of Leonardo da Vinci , Italian womanizing macho man - a dark-haired, tanned and poorly dressed young man. 3. Pictures of some of the main stars featured in the compilation. How Italian is Italian Music?  Thinking of Italy in a musical context, particularly in a popular music context, might generate at least six different semantic fields: 1. Firstly, Certain musical movements, contexts, and styles that were allegedly born in Italy (opera, bel canto, oratorio, verismo. . .); or those had a strong affirmation in Italy, although born some-where else (cantatas, madrigals, baroque instrumental music); or, finally, those were designed to promote Italy as a country- Verdi, for instance, or Mameli-Novaro’s national anthem “Il canto degli Italiani” . This background has certainly provided elements for an intrinsically musical tradition in Italian pop: the obvious examples are melodic articulation and singing style, both bearing distinctive features that may recall Italy. The foreign listener, for instance, might expect the Italian singer to include a certain evenness throughout the voice, a wide use of legato, technical agility and flexibility, and characteristic lyric, light-but-passionate timbre. 2. Secondly, A lot of the musical and musicological terminology is Italian: Sonata, Cadenza, Intermezzo. It says enough of the Italian presence and importance within the musical world. 3. Thirdly, Several foreign composers have been inspired by Italy for their compositions. Liszt had seven pieces about Italy in his Années de pelegrinage. Bach wrote an Italian Concerto for harpsichord, in the style of the Italian instrumental concertos of the early eighteenth century. In other words, there seems to be a consistence in the representation of musical Italianness from the outside. The decoupage of the musical Italianness is often clearly performed by those who are not Italian, because as outsiders makes it easier to qualify the traits as typical of Italianness. In this sense, foreign listeners might have rather clear ideas on what to expect when buying Italian music. 4. Conversely, there are Italian compositions that seem to disengage from Italian-ness, yet are quintessentially Italian. Ramazzotti’s most famous hits, “Se bastasse una canzone” is designed and performed to resemble an American gospel song. The majority of Celentano’s early hits wink heavily at the rock ’n’ roll tradition. Laura Pausini’s smash hit “Surrender” is sung in English. The foreign listener might qualify these cases as typically Italian, in that they offer a soft exotic view of other musical traditions that is filtered through an Italian taste. 5. The 5th field relates to the perverted-yet-balanced mix of stereotypes, trends, history, and tradition: words such as opera, Sanremo, “’O Sole Mio,” Pavarotti, Bocelli, Puccini, Pausini, Ramazzotti . Once again, people seem to have a prototype of Italian music in mind with a number of exemplary features: the more a musical event bears those features, the more it is qualified as Italian. 6. Finally, most things concerning the Italian tradition are not easily identifiable with the country but rather with a specific regional area: the schools (Venezia, Napoli, Roma . . .), forms and functions such as the the Neapolitan Song, the Siciliana and the Veneziana dance forms. Italy was not an actual nation until very recently. To talk about national characteristics in Italian music is more complicated than talking about regional characteristics. One example is the Neapolitan Song, whose origins, are identifiable with the Piedigrotta Festival . Connoted as “Neapolitan,” the genre became “Italian” when Enrico Caruso further popularized it at international level. Singers and repertoires with a strong regional characterization ended up being identified as generally Italian  We might adopt the Semiotic square model to construct a net of four possible relations of what can be considered italian: - National/Regional. The most syncretistic combination, essentially based on a stereotypical description of Italian music : Caruso, Pavarotti, Neapolitan music, Sanremo Festival, Toto Cutugno, plus some famous songs “l’Italiano”, “Napoli”, “Le mamme”, “C’est Venice”. This first possibility showed remarkable marketing skills by offering to the foreign crowds who adore these figures a cunning mix of regional and national stereotypes. - National/Non Regional. That is, musical instances that attempt to present a unified, coherent national product: opera, bel canto and expressively nationalistic/patriotic approaches in Verdi’s works. - Regional/Non National: This is the context where an approximate idea of geographical authenticity may really emerge in Italy like the local schools, forms and dances. The foreign market finds this a lesser interest because this is where the least number of Italian stylistical traits are recognized. Regional popular music is more of a “niche” than a mainstream phenomenon. - Non Regional/Non National: No matter how Italian they may be perceived, such as Ramazzotti or Pausini have hardly anything characteristically Italian in their repertoire. Their music is largely identifiable with the so-called europop style. If anything, at least, Pausini can display vocal timbre and technique that recall melodic bel canto. Falling into this classification are obviously works that are not properly Italian (such as Bach’s Italian Concerto) but nevertheless make an effort to convey elements typically Italian, and though originating abroad, eventually came to typify Italian music. It is here, we finally find room for genre of Italo disco, which is not only heavily influenced by Anglo-American disco, but might also not feature Italian performers at all CAP 15. KILLER MELODIES - THE MUSICA NEOMELODICA DEBATE Places, Times, Voices  Naples, of course, is famous for its music. Neapolitan Song has played a central role in the development of Italian popular music in the crystallization of what later became known as canzone Italiana. Around the world, old Neapolitan tunes such as “’O sole mio” still embody the stereotypical image of Italian popular music  Over the last 25 years Naples has been swept bydifferent music. Suggesting both a fresh image and a tie with local tradition, Neapolitan writer Peppe Aiello coined the definition musica neomelodica. Neomelodici singers were those who sought to adapt Italian pop-song models and focus on the lives and troubles of young working-class audiences.  Neomelodici typically deal with topics such as love and everyday life from the street’s angle, melodramatic stories on teenage sex, pregnant girls, family conflicts, criminals. Their views on gender roles, love, and sex were often in striking contrast with the old Neapolitan songs. Neomelodici sung in dialect as Neapolitan Song, but broke away from its poetic language, adopting lyrics that included halting Italian, rural idioms, youth neologisms, and street slang. Markets, Audiences, and Stars  Neomelodici is the product of a successful cottage industry, and maintains strong ties with its audiences. Songs are written by local authors, produced in small recording studios for local labels, aired by local radios and TVs. The most popular singers are hired for communions, weddings, private parties  Gigi D’Alessio represents the glossy image of Neomelodici. His unpretentious, romantic content of ballads, is as loved by working-class audiences as he is hated by listeners who identify with “quality” popular music  Yet, in the face of its marginalization on the national scene, Neomelodici continues to enjoy great popularity across Southern Italy, signaling the presence of an alternative music industry and distinctive subcultural traits. By articulating the pride of Southern Italian underclasses, Neomelodici illustrates its artists’ ability to master cultural production and regional distribution, and shows how their music may trickle up”— as in the case of Gigi D’Alessio—to respectable, mainstream society, finally achieving success in the national pop scene. National Discourses on Musica Neomelodica  Articles on Neomelodici published by the national press over the last fifteen years most often focused on the low quality of the music and on its criminal connections  Commercial TV made fun of Neomelodici singers through fictional characters while State-owned Broadcasting often highlighted Neomelodici’s alleged ties with the Neapolitan underworld  Thanks to random exposure on the national media, Neomelodici was subject to some attempts at co-optation into national pop culture. A few Neomelodici singers appeared at the Sanremo Festival, while others cooperated with rap and folk musicians or had their songs featured in minor films. Music Subculture and Criminal Music  Neomelodici has attracted the interest of a number of mostly Neapolitan music writers. Some of them interpreted this music as a popular style of working-class Neapolitans that reversed some of the usual subcultural themes. Peppe Aiello, portrays Neomelodici as a type of “unacceptable” people’s music rejected by the local bourgeoisie  In line with the national media’s representation of the neomelodici as friends of camorristi, another conflicting reading of Neomelodici focused on the music’s alleged ties with organized crime. This perspective is articulated in two books by center-left politician Isaia Sales and by sociologist Marcello Ravveduto. Ravveduto provides an list of Neapolitan singers who had problems with the law and individuals in the music circuit who are said to be close to the Camorra. He also infers the criminal connections from the analysis of the lyrics of ’O Killer” by Gino del Miro, “Il mio amico camorrista” by Lisa Castaldi, “Simme gente e’ miezz a via” by Gianni Celeste. Ravveduto cites one of the most controversial songs ’Nu latitante” by Tommy Riccio, whose lyrics and video narrative romanticize the fugitive from justice as an innocent victim. Ravveduto’s central idea is that Neomelodici’s criminal songs convey a “degenerative message” that symbolically legitimizes the Camorra Bad Music for Bad People  Despite various investigations, to this day no major Neomelodici singer has been condemned for being part of the Camorra.  There is no doubt that some Neapolitan singers and authors do romanticize criminal types and show some degree of contiguity with the underworld. Nonetheless, the claim that contiguity is the music of camorristi, both in a symbolic sense and in the sense of being a type of music controlled by organized crime, appears unreasonable  Hostility towards popular culture has often drawn together conservative advocates of elite culture and leftist intellectuals, frequently criticized urban popular music as a corrupting form of mass culture, and employed terms such as musica popolare to describe rural-derived music. Arguments against Neomelodici therefore seem to combine various prejudices against popular music: aesthetic (the songs lack artistic quality and display tacky lyrics, cheap videos, flashy stars, commercialism), cultural (it articulates a petit-bourgeois pseudo-culture), moral and political (the songs are worthless because they are produced and enjoyed by ignorant, marginalized people, and by extension by criminals).  What seems to worry the critics of Neomelodici most is not the undetermined negative social impact, but its counter-symbolic role. Then, the most disturbing aspect of Neomelodici consists in its challenge to representations of social pacification, national unity, and progress. Open sentimentalism, awkward Italian, controversial content, contiguity with the criminal world, under-the-counter economy: all of this hardly conjure up a representation of a modern country. In fact, it evokes images of large underdeveloped areas inside Italy, of their functional coexistence with the “modern” rest of the country. CAP 13. IN THE COURT OF A FOREIGN KING - 1970S ITALIAN PROGRESSIVE ROCK IN THE UK  Progressive rock of the 1960s and 1970s reflected in many ways Italy’s historical, social, political, and cultural development. In terms of creativity and ideas, Italian progressive rock groups weren’t inferior to their counterparts in London or Canterbury. Nonetheless, a series of structural problems made it difficult to gain an enduring recognition outside Italy, even though they were acknowledged as figuring in “the front line” of international progressive rock and they regularly toured abroad. Among these problems the most obvious were connected to the Economic and productive status of Italian popular music: the lack of an independent distribution system able to sustain the new genre, the general technological backwardness of recording studios, and the difficulty of organizing live events that stepped away from the traditional concert formula  In this chapter the author concentrates on three albums that were originally released in Italy and subsequently launched on the international market: Felona & Sorona by Le Orme, Photos of Ghosts by PFM, and Banco by Banco del Mutuo Soccorso.  These three records not only illustrate an exceptionally creative period, during which Italian musicians and bands made a dynamic contribution to the British scene but are also revealing in their differences with respect to the original versions, often not limited to the linguistic aspect but also involving significant changes in the arrangements and in the structure  In fact, a investigation of these differences allows us to put forward some hypotheses about how Italian musicians viewed progressive rock as a genre, and to identify the specific elements that distinguished the Italian scene from its British counterpart. The link between the genre and the presence of a new generation of musicians; the need for an overall renewal of Italian popular music; the difficult relationship with the counterculture movements and the left in general; the lack of support from cultural and political institutions; and the overlap in production terms with the cantautore scene Progressive, Italian, and English: Questions of Genre and Structure  Le Orme made the contact that was fundamental for their international debut: Peter Hammill. It was thanks to him that the group got the chance to publish their next album, Felona e Sorona. Hammill translated the texts of the whole album into English. In the English version, perhaps to Hammill’s suggestion, the “compression” of the two final tracks on the first side into “The Maker,” together with the inversion in the titles of the first and second pieces on side B,12 gave rise to a more symmetrical structure, with two songs following the descriptions of the planets announced in the title, creating a more linear development.  Premiata Forneria Marconi was undoubtedly the Italian group that became most famous abroad, met Pete Sinfield, who masterminded the operation of Photos of Ghosts, a collection of pieces from their two previous albums, Storia di un minuto and Per un amico. In London, PFM was able to re-record most of the instrumental as well as the vocal tracks, with the lyrics translated into English by Sinfield. Changes were not limited to the lyrics, however: the pieces were modified quite substantially, reflecting the group’s greater maturity, the producer’s demands for a more international sound, and the availability of more sophisticated recording equipment  Common features point to a number of general considerations concerning Italian progressive rock and its differences with respect to the British context.  First of all, three bands that experimented with operations of “translation” can be associated with a very specific stylistic trend. PFM, with their reminiscences of early King Crimson and Jethro Tull, Le Orme, closer to Quatermass and Banco, owing more to Gentle Giant and Genesis, all looked to the less radically experimental bands of the British progressive rock scene. Such groups were inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth- century music rather than by African-American blues, gospel and soul;  The fact that groups of this sort that embarked on such ventures denotes a fundamental convergence between the British and Italian musical scenes, reinforcing the European rather than specifically British nature of the progressive rock phenomenon  Second, the concept of an album as an organic musical “work” was emphasized in the shift from the Italian to the British market, since the English-speaking public more readily perceived the poetical and musical coherence of albums by progressive rock groups. This coherence was often lost on the average Italian listener who was less equipped to understand the lyrics by British groups and interpret them in the context of a consistent narrative or lyrical structure. Thus the differences between the Italian and English versions of the recordings were the result of a basic misunderstanding of the concept- album frame and structure due to linguistic reasons CAP 14. RADIOFRECCIA - A ROCKER FROM EMILIA BEHIND THE FILM CAMERA - While in Italian cinema the representation of threat through foreign popular music still occurs, Radiofrecci is an early example in which “alien” popular songs are presented as a naturalized element of the national culture. Luciano Ligabue’s debut film, opens new paths for the narrative integration of popular songs in Italian cinema. - Runo tells the story of Ivan Benassi, a.k.a. Freccia and his other friends . Through Radio Raptus, Bruno finds a way to express himself playing the records he and eventually his friends want people to hear. Their story unfolds through two difficult years between their late teens and early adult life. In that search, popular songs represent, a means to express their cultural identity. - The fact that Radiofreccia’s rock soundtrack is allowed to perform these functions depends on the place the music has in the filmic narrative. Music is present not only hrough the nineteen songs and the instrumental cues for the score, but also visually through the ubiquitous radio tuners, record players, and tape recorders in the frame . Music is often discussed by protagonists, and songs are a recurrent topic of conversation among Freccia and his friends. - All these conversations about musical taste construct the role of music in the narrative, establishing the distinction between RAI and free radio as well as between musical genres as signifiers of different cultural identities to which the protagonists affiliate themselve Between Locality and Otherness - Radiofreccia the first Italian film featuring a rock soundtrack, Sixteen out of the nineteen songs are English-language songs,. He wide- spread presence of English-language songs in a non-English-language film where music plays such a crucial role poses several challenging questions regarding the negotiation of the protagonists’ cultural identities. The obvious explanation is that this kind of music was a familiar presence in the musical landscape during the years when free radio stations were spreading - Radiofreccia represents these signifiers of a “foreign” culture as naturalized parts of a local one, appropriated by the characters in the construction of their identities and therefore offered to Italian audiences as a potential element of their culture. - All these songs are powerfully present in the filmic narrative. When they are playing, the characters use them to tell something about their world. When they are not clearly present , songs tell the characters’ story, presenting their inner world, and their culture: in the case of Freccia, a culture of rock and rebellion. Freccia and his close friends share a cultural identity that is constructed chiefly through Anglo-American popular music, and yet clearly presented as a voicing of their own experiences. - Anglo-American popular music becomes adopted as a component of Italy’s musical landscape through being presented as the protagonists’ music. Music is allowed to enter Radiofreccia’s narrative structure, opening new paths for popular music in Italian film.