PLAYING “ITALIANNESS” IN POPULAR MUSIC: National populism and music in contemporary Italy

This chapter discusses popular music and cultural practices as vectors for the articulation of populism in contemporary Italy. Drawing on the volume’s introduction, the authors explore the ways in which populist messages are socially diffused, legitimised, and popularised within Italy through popular music. More specifically, the chapter focuses on how popular music that contains populist elements is received by individual voters who constitute the potential electoral base for populist parties, as well as on the exploitation of popular music by populist politicians (from the syncretic Five Star Movement (M5S) to the right-wing League) keen to define their own political-cultural identity and appeal to specific demographics. The chapter concludes by highlighting how the contemporary Italian popular music repertoire often affords populist interpretations. However, transforming such populist affordances into an intentional adoption of populist worldviews requires a political elaboration that the authors only rarely detected in listeners. Whilst (nationalist-)populist political elaborations are often promoted by the right-wing League, the Five Star Movement generally avoids the use of popular music for political purposes: different party cultures account for these different strategies.