Popular music studies have experienced a strange fate in Italy. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and the early 1980s (with the direct contribution by musicians and scholars like Franco Fabbri and Umberto Fiori to the new intellectual formation), a situation of stasis followed. The latter was characterised by the presence of individual important voices but without the support of a constituency strong enough to guarantee in Italy the institutionalisation of this new field of research.

In this essay I propose an analysis of the Sanremo Italian Song Festival from 1964 to 1967, to which is added an introduction about its history and musical, social and cultural features. The aim of the essay is not only to propose a different perspective on the songs presented at the Festival in the 1960s, but also to re-configure our understanding of the popular music mainstream and the mechanisms of musical change in our mass-mediated and industrialised societies, as well as the question of identifying the peculiarities of the Italian canzone.

L’Orchestra, a cooperative established in 1974/75, based in Milan, Italy, was a unique organisation, involving musicians, sound and lighting engineers, music critics and teachers, and concert managers. It was started as a kind of artists’ union, a federation of folk, rock, political song, jazz, avant-garde groups, but in a few months it became a concert agency and a record company; it held music courses for amateurs and published music tutorials; it helped managing the first multipurpose art/social centre in Milan. L’Orchestra promoted studies along various disciplinary perspectives (sociology, music education, ideological criticism, semiotics) that in some respects embody and in others help explain the development of popular music studies and of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in Italy.

Although the canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song) is the best-known Italian popular music in the world, it is also the most misunderstood. It is mostly associated with operatic or quasi-operatic vocal styles, but all the other Neapolitan popular voices, the performance features and even the history of this musical genre are less well known. This essay in particular considers how the porous Neapolitan voice is a ‘space’ for complex negotiations between different musical styles, and how through this voice (that admits within itself the existence of other vocal styles) Neapolitan composers, musicians and singers articulate different relationships between music, history and nostalgia.

Since the beginning of modern canzone, cover versions have represented a shortcut to importing and exporting songs across national borders. By breaking language barriers, these records have played the role of ambassadors of Italian music abroad and, vice-versa, of Anglo-American music at home. Although cover records mania boomed especially in the 1960s, the history of Italian popular music is disseminated by such examples, including exchanges with French- and Spanish-speaking countries as well. After reflecting on the nature of ‘cover’ and offering a definition that includes its being a cross-cultural space most typical of Italy and other peripheral countries in the age of early contact with pop modernity, the paper focuses on the economic, aesthetic and sociological paradigms that affect the international circulation of cover records and suggests a few theoretical explanations that refuse the obsolete ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis in favour of a more flexible view hinged upon the notion of ‘deterritorialisation’. In the final section the paper provides a short history of Italian records that were hits abroad, decade by decade, and ends by highlighting those artists that played the role of cultural mediators between Italy and the world.

By offering a historical reconstruction of the process of contextualisation of hip hop culture in Italy over the last fifteen years, the article assesses the current status of canzone d’autore and its changing configuration under the impact of rap music. From a theoretical point of view, the conceptual framework combines the sociological definition of ‘field of cultural production’ elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu with the related literature on social and symbolic boundaries. From a methodological point of view, the analysis is based on the data collected by Club Tenco (a cultural organisation which plays an institutional role within the field of canzone d’autore) as well as on a series of qualitative interviews carried out with a number of Italian rappers and cantautori. Special attention is paid to a very few crucial figures that can be considered paradigmatic examples in the dynamic process of boundary-making of the two cultural (sub-)fields of Italian rap and canzone d’autore.

Paolo Conte is the most internationally successful of the Italian singer-songwriters who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also among the most idiosyncratic, eclectic and unusual exponents of what Franco Fabbri has defined as the canzone d’autore (author’s song). Nonetheless he remains a rather arcane, cult figure in the Anglophone world – an example of what Simon Frith has called ‘the unpopular popular’. A combination of apparent opposites – the provincial and the cosmopolitan – his music appropriates a global sweep of influences without being definable as ‘world music’. Characteristics of both his rough, untrained singing style and wry, ironic and opaque compositions have strong affinities with US singer-songwriters like Tom Waits and Randy Newman, and he draws heavily on early American jazz influences, although he remains quintessentially Italian. This makes him difficult to categorise in the world music market.

This article examines the politics of the Neapolitan rap band 99 Posse. Growing up in a city characterised by high unemployment and crime, individual band members independently gravitated towards far left politics, and emerged in late 1991 as the house band of the ‘Officina99’, an autonomist squat in the east of the city which gave the group its name. This article examines their political commitment through their songs, covering subjects from youth unemployment to the exploitation of casual workers. Another theme is how, over a decade, their initial denunciation of ‘communism’ mutated into sympathy. It is argued that the reason for their huge success – apart from their rather controversial decision to sign up with a major multinational such as BMG – lies in their ability to make these themes relevant to disaffected young people.