Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction

The Rise of Pop Music Criticism in Italy

Simone Varriale

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137564504
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

This book is the first comprehensive account of how Anglo-American popular music transformed Italian cultural life. Drawing on neglected archival materials, the author explores the rise of new musical tastes and social divisions in late twentieth century Italy.

The book reconstructs the emergence of pop music magazines in Italy and offers the first in-depth investigation of the role of critics in global music cultures. It explores how class, gender, race and geographical location shaped the production and consumption of music magazines, as well as critics' struggle over notions of expertise, cultural value and cosmopolitanism.

Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction provides an innovative framework for studying how globalization transforms cultural institutions and aesthetic hierarchies, thus breaking new ground for sociological and historical research. It will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in cultural sociology, popular music, globalization, media and cultural studies, social theory and contemporary Italy.

© The Author(s) 2016

Simone VarrialeGlobalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction10.1057/978-1-137-56450-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: How Things Come into Being

Simone Varriale¹

(1)

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

End Abstract

In July of 2012, The Guardian published three articles about Italian pop music as part of its ‘Sounds of Europe’ series. These pieces have a slightly revelatory tone: forget about ‘overbearing mamas and sinister mafiosi’, Italian pop has nothing to do with these ‘lazy cliches’ (Khan 2012). The articles describe a familiar constellation of ‘global’ music styles like rock, rap and electronic music, and suggest that they have nothing to envy in their Anglo-American models (Bordone 2012). Italian pop, or at least some of it, has artistic value.

Perhaps these articles state the obvious for some Italian readers, but nonetheless they introduced most Britons, or at least the upper-middle segment represented by The Guardian, to a complex musical landscape. Indeed rock, rap and electronic music have been around for several decades in Italy, in all the versions one can imagine. What sociologist Motti Regev (2013) has called the pop-rock field has become highly diverse and hierarchical. Familiar distinctions between underground and mainstream, alternative and pop, apply to the Italian as well as other national contexts. Moreover, different scenes have their own cultural distinctions between avant-garde and commercially-oriented acts and between different sub-genres. Specialization is sufficiently advanced to require a variety of media. While quality newspapers provide coverage of the most successful pop-rock acts, music magazines, web-zines and blogs focus either on specific scenes or what constitutes ‘good’ popular music across most of them. An exhaustive list of these specialized media would cover more than 40 years of Italian cultural history.

How this story started is this book’s object of investigation. It explores the introduction of American and British pop-rock in Italy and their artistic legitimation: how they started being considered as art. Indeed, to understand the hierarchies of contemporary Italian pop, one needs to reconstruct their socio-historical genesis: How have distinctions between different popular music styles, and between artistically valuable and unworthy popular music, been established? By what social groups and for whom?

To answer these questions, this book focuses on the rise of a new cultural institution, one that significantly contributed to this process: pop music criticism. As I discuss in Chap. 2, critics have played an important historical role in establishing boundaries between the arts (high culture) and popular culture. More recently, though, they have become invested in the artistic legitimation of ‘low’ cultural forms like film, television and popular music, especially jazz and rock. This cultural transformation has taken place at different paces in various Western countries, and Italy is no exception. Indeed, some of the distinctions that Italian critics have established since the early 1970s remain powerful in the contemporary context. As electronic music producer Alessio Natalizia explained to The Guardian, Italian pop music has ‘always been split’ (Richards 2012). However, it is only from the 1970s onward that a distinction between good and bad popular music, and in a sense between different Italies, was fully consolidated.¹

Looking at this decade, especially the years between 1969 and 1977, this book contributes to a growing literature on the artistic legitimation of popular music and culture. Furthermore, it expands this body of work, considering the impact of globalization upon changing cultural hierarchies. In cultural sociology and popular music studies, cultural globalization is receiving growing attention. However, the circulation of cultural products across national borders, and the power dynamics underpinning this process, remain marginal to theories of artistic legitimation. This book draws on some recent exceptions (Chap. 3) to propose a revised theory of artistic legitimation, one that considers how non-national cultural forms become legitimate art. Furthermore, the book pays attention to the contested nature of artistic legitimation, namely how different groups of experts define competing cultural canons, drawing the boundaries between valuable and undeserving popular culture in different ways. Italy provides a valuable case study to reflect on these dynamics, particularly in the years when the pop music press boomed into a diverse cultural sector, and when American and British rock, jazz and soul became available to a growing youth consumer culture.

A further contribution of this book is to ground cultural globalization and artistic legitimation in social inequalities and asymmetries of resources. While pop music criticism emerged in the context of a more urban, literate and socially mobile Italy, enduring divisions of class, gender and geographical location shaped the production and consumption of music magazines (Chap. 4). Here the book reveals one of its major intellectual influences: the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In recent years, an impressive amount of empirical research has drawn on Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) and its central assumption, namely that cultural practices – especially cultural taste – may unconsciously reproduce class divisions. Some of these studies reveal that a taste for avant-garde or ‘edgy’ popular culture has become, in various societies of the Global North, a new means of social distinction, particularly among the younger members of the upper and middle classes (Chap. 2). Moreover, some studies show that consumption of foreign cultural products – a global or cosmopolitan cultural taste – is particularly important to this process. The book contributes to this body of work in two ways. Focusing on critics, it reconstructs the genesis of the cultural institution which makes appreciation for global popular culture, or at least some of it, both possible and legitimate. On the other hand, it reveals that global taste is a source of tensions, a ‘field of struggles’ between experts and audiences possessing unequal cultural and economic resources.

Finally, the book contributes to a growing literature on Italian popular music cultures, one that has adopted a sociological lens only occasionally. Italian popular music has certainly been neglected if compared to the impressive amount of work that exists on the British and American contexts. However, it would be unfair to say that it has been completely neglected, since musicologists, historians and cultural studies scholars have provided important contributions on the subject (Fabbri and Plastino 2015; Prato 2010). When it comes to sociology, nonetheless, only a handful of studies exist. These have addressed specific genres and scenes, like the singer-songwriter song (Santoro 2010), independent rock (Magaudda 2009) and hip hop (Santoro and Solaroli 2007). This book contributes to this hopefully expanding literature with a historical and sociological reconstruction of how the very distinction between good and debased pop music, or pop music (musica pop) and light music (musica leggera), came into being, a reconstruction that considers which cultural organizations and social groups contributed to this transformation. Moreover, existing studies have rarely focused on questions of cultural globalization, treating the Italian context as a self-contained centre, rather than as a periphery of what, in the 1970s, was already a transnationally connected pop-rock scene, one with significant power imbalances between centres (the US and UK) and peripheries (Regev 2013).

Organization of the Book

The book is organized in three parts, with the first situating the Italian case within a wider scholarly and transnational context. Chapter 2 discusses the book’s contribution to cultural sociology and popular music studies, and charts the rise of cultural criticism in various popular and consumer cultures, including popular music. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical approach used in the book’s subsequent chapters. It revises Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory towards a consideration of global forces and their influence on processes of artistic legitimation. The chapter highlights three inter-linked dimensions of transnational cultural legitimation: the discovery and appropriation of new aesthetic materials (‘aesthetic socialization’); the ways in which these cultural resources are mobilized by competing groups of experts (‘legitimation struggles’); and the reception of their aesthetic distinctions among publics with unequal cultural and economic resources (‘homologies and asymmetries’).

The book’s second part investigates this process in relation to the rise of Italian pop music criticism. Chapter 4 reconstructs the socio-cultural transformations that made possible the appearance of specialized music magazines in Italy, and explores how critics drew new distinctions between Anglo-American and Italian, valuable and debased, popular music. This chapter reveals that the aesthetic and generational character of critics’ distinctions obscured the inequalities of education, class, gender and geographical location which marked the emergence of the music press (and the Italian ‘economic miracle’ at large). Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the ways in which music magazines developed competing projects of artistic legitimation. The former focuses on the most successful music magazine of the 1970s – the weekly Ciao 2001 – and examines how this publication promoted a distinctive ‘economic cosmopolitanism’. This ideological project implied a view of cultural globalization as economic modernization and a subjectivist understanding of cultural hierarchies, which I describe as ‘loose’ aesthetic boundaries. This strategy of legitimation gave space to a wide variety of international pop music, helping the magazine maintain its position of commercial leadership in a changing musical landscape. Further, the chapter considers the possibility, unexplored in Bourdieu’s work, that commercial success may be transformed into a form of prestige or symbolic capital. Chapter 6 looks at magazines with less commercial success but greater symbolic recognition, especially for their aesthetic and political innovations: the monthlies Muzak and Gong. This chapter investigates these magazines’ ‘political cosmopolitanism’, which questioned the commercial and aesthetic domination of Anglo-American pop-rock and promoted normative aesthetic boundaries, which presupposed the belief that only some acts and music styles have objective aesthetic value (and hence deserve discussion). More generally, this chapter reconstructs the forms of political activism which, during the 1970s, animated various sectors of Italian society, and which made political engagement an important line of division among music critics.

The book’s third part considers how critics’ affiliation with different cosmopolitan projects shaped their legitimizing discourses, and how such discourses were received by the magazines’ readers. Chapter 7 considers how critics evaluated rock, jazz and soul and how they drew distinctions between and within these genres. It conceptualizes critics’ evaluative work as an ‘aesthetic encounter’ between their dispositions, or habitus (Bourdieu 1984), and musics endowed with specific sounds, images and narratives. I show that critics’ socialization in 1950s and 1960s pop-rock significantly shaped their evaluation of later musical trends, but that this ‘rock habitus’ had to be sensitized to the properties of different musics, and that it was significantly affected by musicians’ gender and race. Chapter 8 draws on the readers’ letters published by Ciao 2001, Muzak and Gong to explore the reception of their projects of legitimation. Readers’ narratives reveal that differences in cultural knowledge, gender, age, class and geographical location influenced their relationship with music magazines. As a result, the chapter argues that asymmetries of resources were likely to shape the reception of critics’ work, and that Bourdieu’s assumption about the social similarity or ‘homology’ between cultural producers and their audience needs to be probed vis-à-vis different socio-historical contexts. More generally, the chapter highlights the role of music magazines as ‘public spheres’ ripe with conflict and power asymmetries (Fraser 1990), but which nonetheless enhanced reflection about the inequalities affecting Italian youth.

Chapter 9 will discuss the research’s main findings and how they enrich our understanding of cultural legitimation and its relationship with globalization processes. This book is based on historical research and archival work: it combines analysis of magazine articles – music features (297), editorials (192) and readers’ letters (487) – with analysis of critics’ public biographies (34) and various secondary sources, both qualitative and quantitative. The ways in which the research has been designed and conducted, and the potentials and limits of the gathered data, are discussed in the book’s Appendixes, which also provide supplementary data that I could not discuss in the main chapters.

Bibliography

Bordone, M. (2012). Italian music now: From Turin to Sicily. Guardian, Tuesday 10 July. http://​www.​theguardian.​com/​music/​2012/​j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: How Things Come into Being
• 1. Situating the Study
• 2. Pop Music Criticism in Italy (1969–1977)
• 3. Evaluating Music and Music Criticism
• Backmatter