Pop Music and Populist Messages

Abstract

This chapter will apply instruments of content, musicological and visual analysis to explore the presence (if any) and forms of populist content in Italian pop music over 10 years (2009–2018), since the emergence and re-emergence of left-wing and right-wing populism in the country. We evaluate how and to what extent the songs’ lyrics, videos and music structures and the artist persona autonomously contribute to the spread of populist tropes, including anti-elitism, distrust of political institutions, celebrations of an authentic rudeness, articulations of specific grievances and celebrations of charismatic leadership. We argue that it is precisely its seemingly non-political features that enable this kind of cultural production to spread political (and, more specifically, populist) worldviews so effectively.

This chapter, from a supply-side perspective, applies instruments of content and visual analysis, and musicological analysis, to pop songs in Italy (namely popular, i.e. mainstream, most diffused¹) over the last two decades, to study ‘whether’ and ‘how’ populist messages, imageries, tropes and ideas can be found in pop music. We do not allude here to populist claims, as if we were working with political party manifestoes, nor do we limit ourselves to the visible manifestation of them, as seen in populist leaders’ speeches. We simply aim to understand to what extent contemporary Italian pop music provides ‘populist affordances’ for both listeners and political leaders. As mentioned, a definitional premise is required: pop music is understood in this volume as a specific genre but also, in a broader sense, as the musical equivalent of mass culture (Tomatis, 2019).

The concept of affordance has been developed in the sociology of music (e.g. DeNora, 2000) and refers to the idea that “meaning, or semiotic force, is not an inherent property of cultural materials, whether those materials are linguistic, technological or aesthetic” (ibid., 40). It is therefore particularly useful to look at the complex relationship between people and the objects they make, between practices of re-appropriation and cognitive processes of reification, with the premise in mind that at the same time, “objects ‘afford’ actors certain things; a ball, for example, affords rolling, bouncing and kicking in a way that a cube of the same size, texture and weight would not” (ibid., 39). This is what we explore in this chapter. This view implies that the space to assign and circulate political (and populist) meanings through music is significantly wide.² However, we also assume that materials are by no means empty semiotic spaces (DeNora, 2000: 40); some songs may afford more than others as ‘populist carriers’, or for being appropriated for populist usages.

However, language is only one part of the meaning. Beyond the discourse/content analysis of the lyrics, a visual analysis (Doerr et al., 2013) of videoclips³ helped us to integrate the context of the messages, that is, the role of persona, symbols, images vehiculating/paving the way to ‘populist messages’ (Caiani & Padoan, 2020a).

3.1 A Surprising Populist Hype in Contemporary Italian Pop Music

In order to look at populist affordances’ presence in Italian pop music, we used, as mentioned, as benchmark, a codebook guiding the analysis, where the various definitions of populism and its characteristics were taken into account, by focusing, in a song, on the lyrics, the video, the persona, as well as the overall context of its reproduction.⁴ Without any ambition of counting, testing or explaining the presence of populist message in Italian pop music, as more proper to political science analyses and measurements of populism applied to other types of sources (Caiani & Graziano, 2016; De Cocco & Monechi, 2022), we firstly found that out of 190 pop songs analysed, a significant number (about 16%) seems to contain certain forms of implicit and explicit ‘populist’ references, from an ideological point of view, to a sociocultural phenomenon (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Populism in Italian pop music (2009–2018)

Overall, populism (or populist ideas, tropes and concepts) seems particularly prevalent in its ‘ideological’ form (i.e. people-centrist and anti-elitist messages)—at least within our time frame. For instance, in the song from Emma, ‘Non è l’inferno’, the insistence on the concept of people with their unheard requests is stressed (if you only knew how unacceptable is this fact/there are people having worked perhaps just one day/and they enjoy more rights/than people believing in the future of our country”, Emma, ‘Non è l’inferno’, 2012⁵). However, since 2016, populist messages, as a celebration of sociocultural low versus high, have become more prominent (as, for instance, illustrated in the cases of some J-Ax & Fedez songs, Senza Pagare, 2017).⁶ In addition, as a surprise, not searched though in our codebook, instead emerging from the analysis of the various texts, 17 songs (9%) include what we refer to as ‘anti-populist’ messages. They are claims which emphasize a critique of politics seeking ‘popular support’ (such as in the song by Ghali, ‘Ninnananna’ (2018)⁷ or a criticism of the stereotypical Italian people, as identified in the song by Due di Picche, ‘Faccia come il cuore’, 2010),⁸ not to mention a position against anti-hate and anti-patriotic messages as evident in Luca Carboni’s song, ‘Luca lo stesso’, 2015).⁹

Finally, we have noted that 9 of the 30 songs alluding to populism, while involved in social and/or political denunciations through the use of potentially populist appeals, tended to deliver a message of disengagement, namely, an invitation to “rely on yourself” with quite pessimistic and anti-political, and sometimes anti-social, tones (as seen in the song by Marracash feat. Gué Pequeno, ‘Nulla Accade’, 2016).¹⁰ We grouped these pop songs under the category ‘disengagement/libertarianism’, which can offer an affordance to populism and populist politics, but also not (depending on the framing of the political populist entrepreneurs in the country). In these songs, we observe a call for a kind of individualistic rebellion against some aspects of the system, or to pursue individual success as a form of overcoming the structural hurdles imposed by the system (present in some rap and trap songs such as Capo Plaza, Tesla, 2018).¹¹ This dimension is directly linked to different social malaises which populist phenomena are often able to politicize and exploit, although the link between populist attitudes and civic and political participation is far from clear: is political disenchantment (‘anti-politics’) beneficial to populism? Does populism fuel or limit political disengagement? (Murat Ardag et al., 2019; Rico et al., 2017).

Moreover (Table 3.2), our analysis also indicated an increase in references to potentially populist elements in pop music over time, which we could relate to the populist zeitgeist (Mudde, 2004) in the country as well as contagion with the populist rhetoric to mainstream politics (Schworer, 2021).

Table 3.2 Populist and anti-populist elements in Italian pop songs (2009–2018)

All in all, the total number of ‘populist songs’ increased over the time frame. In 2009, coinciding with the start of the economic and political crises linked to the Great Recession, only 5% of songs contained some signals of populist ideas, concepts, tropes, whereas, by 2018, the percentage had risen to 32%. In 2009, only in one song (Luca era gay, Povia) did we trace some (conservative) populist features in our discourse analysis of the lyrics. The song focuses on the history of a young man switching from homosexuality (associated with the trauma of the parents’ divorce) to heterosexuality: “I didn’t rely on psychologists, psychiatrists, priests or scientists, I went into my past and I better knew myself”.

In 2018 (amidst the Italian national elections and the formation of the Lega-5SM government coalition), 18 songs were codified as ‘populist’ or ‘anti-populist’, suggesting a sort of politicization of mainstream pop music or polarization along this cleavage (in effect, an increasing lyrical presence of social and political issues framed by populist and/or anti-populist narratives). Moreover, particularly, since 2016, the definition of populism as a politicization of sociocultural tastes and identities—that is, the sociocultural approach—is more appropriate in capturing many of the populist messages found in our analysis.

In particular, we discovered traces of populist tropes, ideas and messages grounded in different understandings of populism. The most prominent type of populism found in a significant portion of the pop songs analysed is populism as (i.) an ideology albeit ‘thin’. Here, we found an insistence on the concept of the people (or synonymous, ordinary citizens, average Italians, etc.) and its construction. These people are often presented as victims, oppressed, ‘desperate, hoping’ (Il muro del suono by Ligabue, ID. 10: see Table 3b in the Appendix for the entire list of songs [ID.n] analyzed), or people ‘who don’t look down’ (i.e. fierce, proud: ID. 23), as a list of precarious workers (as in ID. 28), as well as with references, both in the lyrics and in the videos, to an antagonistic relationship between these people and some elite (either economic, political, national or European, etc.).

For instance, in the song Non è l’inferno, by singer Emma Marrone, winning 2012 Sanremo Festival (ID. 15), we find the celebration of the ‘poor people still believing in the goodwill’ versus politicians who exploit their privileges at the expense of the people (‘working just a day [in their lives] and enjoying more rights than people having served the country’): the people (war veterans, poor pensioners, unemployed, as they appear in the videoclip) desperately calling for some relief (‘tell me what I have to do to pay for my food, my rent, tell me what I have to do!’), compatible with both left-wing populist appeals for social justice and right-wing populist claims made in defence of the ‘deserving poor’ under a familistic frame (see Abts et al., 2021; Otjes et al., 2018; Rathgeb, 2021). The people are described as those dreaming of having an ordinary (heteronormative) life, with a family (“With my son who at 30/Fears the dream of getting married/And naturally of becoming a father”, ID. 15), as well as social protection from the state (“I gave my life and blood for my country/And I find myself starving at the end of the month/My prayers are in the hands of God”, ID. 15). Much rarer is the description of people exclusively holding conservative and nationalist values—as in the case of the song by Pupo, Filiberto and Canonici, Italia Amore Mio (ID. 30): “I believe in traditions of a people who don’t give up/I believe in my culture and in my religion”.

However, overall, references to oppressed people are less recurrent than anti-establishment messages.

On the latter point (i.e. anti-elitism, quite frequent in the pop songs analysed), we can mention the striking case of the controversial song by singer Povia (in 2015: Chi comanda il mondo?, see Fig. 3.a in Appendix), where the European Union is understood as a ‘dictatorship of fake economists, owners of the world, worst than Nazis’, both in the text and images, and housed within a conspiracy theory. However, also in other cases, the lyrics are less explicit, but still evocative.

They are mostly against politicians and/or economic elites, who exploit their privileges at the expense of the people (i.e. “only rich people are allowed not to pay”, as in the cases of the well-known rappers J-Ax and Fedez ID.22). They are accused of being hypocrites and opportunistic (“with voters and to govern you need to have your face like your heart [double sense]”, as in the case of Faccia come il mondo by J-Ax and Neffa, ID. 6). Similarly, Rocco Hunt calls for a popular revenge against ‘the banks which steal’ and against polluting industries (‘life is sweet but then they poison you’: ID. 16), and Ligabue—one of the most important Italian artists often associated with the left—in his Il muro del suono (ID. 10), targets economic elites depicted as “patrons/masters smoking” who “never paid for the silverware”, while using repression in the political realm (“their savaging dogs in the street, during his C’è sempre una canzone (ID. 3) denouncing politicians as ‘firmly sat in their armchairs’. There also features anti-elitist claims which include (more from a class based perspective than a homogeneous conceptualization of the people vs. elite) privileged, bourgeois, conformist people that take advantage of their well-off positioning to commit crimes with impunity (“politically correct/bigoted criminals/and nothing happens”, ID. 17), using a nationalist pretext to increase their power and defend their position (“in Milan they drink Piedmont bubbly wine/because Champagne is French”, ID. 18).

We also found traces of populism as a (ii.) sociocultural phenomenon in Italian pop songs. In these cases, there are references to actions needed by the poor to overcome their plight against the oppressing powers: at times, the only hope for social mobility is linked to reliance on oneself (“Just believing in you/it is the thing that saves you”), mixing a pragmatic adaptability with an individual commitment; in other cases, the antagonistic relation between the people and the elites is located within an urban-periphery cleavage, and forms of popular inter-class solidarity are emphasized (as in the cases of many songs by rappers and trappers Ghali, Emis Killa and Rocco Hunt). Videos often reinforce this message, ones filled with scenes and cultural references taken from popular local realities (e.g. Naples, with images of environmentalist demonstrations against illegal landfills, ID. 16¹²). These songs can be linked to a populism that exalts a people built on socioeconomic foundations and at the same time call for its mobilization. In all cases, anti-elitism prevails over people-centrism. This also differs from other European pop scenes (such as the Austrian or Hungarian ones, Dunkel & Schiller, 2022), where instead different types of people-centrism prevail, mainly in the form of nationalism and nativism. This depiction of the people in the Italian case is very rare (see, for instance, the exception in the song Italia amore mio, runner-up at 2010 Sanremo festival, where old-fashioned, melancholic, melodic with opera-like nationalistic passages can be found).¹³ It is noteworthy that the performance was highly contested by the public and the orchestra at Sanremo, yet nearly ignored by the radios.

Furthermore, the idea of populism as (iii.) a style of communication is also present, although at a lesser extent, as we see from Table 3.1, in Italian recent pop music. In these cases, we find a style of communication designed to evoke emotions (such as hate, fear and enthusiasm: see Salmela and Von Scheve, 2018) offering oversimplified solutions to complex problems along with the celebration of a language which refers to direct and non-institutional/formal style (for more detail on the presence of emotions linked to populism, see the last column of Table 3.1). More generally, we found quite often the adoption of an emergency or dramatizing rhetoric in the pop songs analysed (in the lyrics as well as the images of the video),¹⁴ as in the song of Emma (e.g. “If you, who have a conscience, lead and believe in the country…/Tell me what I have to do to feed myself/To pay me for my stay, tell me what to do”, ID. 15). The rhetorical dimension is often emphasized by virtue of the emotionality of the actual videos (e.g. the faces of depressed elderly people, hollowed out by poverty, appear). On the whole, drama is used to show people’s oppressed and excluded conditions (e.g. the ‘bulls in Pamplona’, i.e. trapped and condemned to death, angry but without a precise direction, Fabri Fibra, ID.18). Occasionally, and at odds with populism understood as a form of political (collective) mobilization (Jansen, 2011; Padoan, 2017), we see a call for individual rather than collective action (‘let’s escape together’, ID. 18). Similarly, suburban contexts are described as those areas in which “the blood comes from the pen when the blade enters/destinies written in the face/drama is the mark of our families” (ID.17), and feelings of anxiety are mobilized, brought by perennial competition (as in the anti-prohibitionist song Maria Salvador ID.13, “the envy that devours society”). Likewise, the proposed solution is individual rather than collective (“I ignore the world and its anxiety”, ibid.).

In other cases, the emergency-emotional rhetoric is not accompanied by hatred or resentment, but rather with hope and pride (two emotions equally related to left-wing populism, as illustrated in Chap. 1, Katsambekis, 2016): they can be linked to one’s socioeconomic condition and territorial belonging. This is the case of Rocco Hunt singing ‘for Gennaro who had a child/for the fishermen, the greengrocers/for all the people of the neighbourhood [rione]’ (ID.16),¹⁵ coupled with strong identitarian appeals (‘this place must not die/these people must not quit from here/my accent must be heard/recognizable’, ID. 16).

It should be specified that this type of communication is practically always accompanied by populist tropes typical of the interpretation of populism, à la Ostiguy, namely, as a sociocultural phenomenon, illustrated briefly before (point ii.), characterized by a certain style of doing politics, behaviour, social bonds and networks aiming to establish a strong relationship with the people.¹⁶ For example, a certain emotionalization-dramatization, combined with nostalgia for an idealized past in its serenity and light-heartedness (a relatively recurring type of emotion: e.g. ID. 21), is found in some pop songs, such as Senza Pagare (J-Ax and Fedez, ID.22,¹⁷ Fig. 3.c in Appendix). This song, while including references to contemporary politics, ridiculing both the establishment and the left (‘help when you need it, like Trump with Merkel’; ‘from class struggle to lots of taxes to pay: Communists with Rolex watches!’), refers mostly to the upward mobility of the singers, through a ‘self-made-men’ storytelling celebrating their own success (‘we enter without paying/and all the people are watching us/but nobody will touch us/like professional footballers/like criminals’). In Senza Pagare, indeed, there are elements of almost every definition of populism (including Ostiguy’s ‘flaunting of the low’). Similarly, in songs such as Tranne te (Fabri Fibra, 2010, ID. 26) and P.E.S. (Club Dogo, 2012, ID. 19), we identified elements that can be linked to Ostiguy’s definition of populism, the former of which mocks middle-class xenophilia (“I will rap in French/so I’ll be perceived as more elegant”) and the latter celebrating a sort of popular laziness (“ready for the videogame/give me just a glass and a beer”). In many cases, similarly to what we have seen earlier, the videoclips are fully compatible with the messages of the lyrics, as in Maracanà (Emis Killa, 2014, ID. 12) portraying a typical popular, humble neighbourhood. Instead, the politicization of locally anchored sociocultural references, perhaps in a more popular way than properly low, is central in the pieces of Rocco Hunt (e.g. ID.16). In other songs, ranging from trap (Cupido, Sfera Ebbasta, ID. 5) to melodic pop (Sempre noi, J-Ax and Max Pezzali, ID. 21), (male) comradery is celebrated.¹⁸ At other times, a celebration of authenticity was also noted (as opposed to artificial, respectable, proper, conformist or, depending on the context, superficial or frivolous behaviour), albeit with calls for either an individual or non-conformist attitude (as Ghali states: “you only are successful when you don’t give a damn …”, ID.9), or for detachment (“I stay away from stress/smoke a bit and then I play [the football videogame] PES”, a song “dedicated to those who have a diploma and have no job”, ID. 19) or, as in trap songs, to celebrate status achievements (“Mom used to be on a pitch, now she lives in a luxury hotel”, ID.24). In all these cases, however, there is a lack of collective appeal that we consider inherent to any populist phenomena (and thus should be identified in a ‘populist message’). Furthermore, if the classic trap themes (sex, misogyny, excesses) can be traced back, to a certain extent, to a low repertoire, they are nonetheless far from the meaning given by Ostiguy to populism, namely the ‘popular mass culture’ (as opposed to subcultural celebrations), even if they are potentially functional in the reproduction of stereotypes associated with ‘the Low’ (which includes a certain anti-intellectualism, e.g. ID. 22, ID. 25). There prevails, in addition, anti-middle-class sentiments, in line with this understanding of populism.

Another important though limited share of the songs contain references to populism in terms of (iv.) rhetoric (see again Table 3.a), alluding to a de-legitimization of the political institutions, of other political actors (and their proposals), although we did not find any references legitimizing or endorsing new political actors (i.e. as ‘true challengers’ of the status quo). For example, in reference to three well-known recent Italian hits: the trapper Ghali, in his Cara Italia (‘Dear Italy’, 2018, ID. 2, 133 million views on YouTube), targets both traditional left and right (‘what kind of politics is this? What is the difference between left and right/The toilet is on the left the bathroom at the bottom right’, ID.2); similarly, the rapper Fabri Fibra, in his song Pamplona (2017, ID. 18, 63 million views on YouTube), accuses the political parties of creating artificial divisions amongst the people (‘politics wants to divide us’); while Fedez (L’amore Eternit, ‘Eternal/Asbestos Love’, 2015, 33 million views on YouTube) targets the ‘Italian State’ for being ‘very similar to love: first it fucks you and then it abandons you’.¹⁹ In the aforementioned Pamplona (ID. 18), we also find evocative critiques against the system in general and the Italian state from a suburban point of view where no one escapes from precariousness (“I was with the Lebanese/when he was shot outside the house/but how much violence goes on television/even if better on television than inside the house/Bro, I worked in an office/I swear I was going crazy/there I barely paid the rent/nothing works in Italy”, ID.18), thus mixing both attacks towards a generic system (populism as rhetoric) and insistence on a (not homogeneous, but homogeneously oppressed) people (populism as ideology). We also often noted a direct denunciation of the limits of a (sociopolitical Italian) system that is both non-meritocratic and conformist, including criticisms against the current educational system which fails to guarantee social mobility²⁰ (e.g. ‘You were doing well at school/instead with my head in the air I was a donkey that flies/Then the job market lied to your graduation/And he kept his word to my dreams’, ID.22).

Finally we also found traces of populism more related to (v.) an organizational interpretation of the phenomenon, chiefly to mobilize support or highlight a charismatic leader/actor, who is supposed to embody a ‘popular will’.²¹ In these cases, a type of celebration of a ‘hyper-leaderistic’ relationship is emphasized in the songs, as well as calls for mobilization against the status quo, albeit in small amounts, are made. For instance, there are songs which refer to a cathartic role of the singer, presenting him as a successful manifestation of individual, materialistic and symbolic struggle against the system: this struggle may be conducted in the symbolic terrain (against the ‘taboos of society’, ID. 13) or in the materialistic one (‘bigoted people who do not know what an empty fridge is [and disgusted by] authentic rhymes’, ID. 25). In other cases, songs are characterized by a strong appeal to mobilize against elites, according to a view of populism, as a strategy of mass mobilization (still considered as part of our category of populism as organization: Jansen, 2011). In this regard, passages in the lyrics of the selected pop songs stress a need to collectively pursue a desired social redemption, as in the case of Ligabue’s Il muro del suono ID.10 or in the song by Rocco Hunt, ‘Nu juorno buono’ (‘Forget the banks, we will lend money to them/Zero master, we will steal his throne’, ID. 16). Finally, the title of the song, Andiamo a comandare (‘Let’s go to lead’, ID. 1: a parody mocking rappers and trappers’ celebration of drug and alcohol abuses), was reused by the League leader Matteo Salvini as the slogan for his 2018 electoral campaign (Andiamo a governare, ‘let’s go to govern’): this is a good example of how pop references are exploited for political purposes, as we will explore further in Chaps. 4 and 5.

Moreover, as we can see from Table 3.1 (last column on the right), we also looked at the types of emotions mobilized in Italian pop music (vi.). While some specific emotions have been recently empirically linked to populism politics and populist success in mobilization (as outlined in Chap. 1), our analysis revealed the prevalence of emotions such as anxiety and nostalgia. Anxiety is often triggered by structural oppression brought on by hyper-competitiveness (ID. 13; ID. 18) and lack of social (ID. 15) and environmental justice (ID. 11), and can be read as a potential politicization of grievances—thus more likely to afford left-wing populist interpretations. Nostalgia, on the other hand, refers to a more genuine, pre-digital past (ID. 16; ID. 21; ID. 27) and assumes explicit nationalist-conservative tones in the aforementioned Italia Amore Mio (ID. 30). An interesting contrast exists between this song and Ghali’s Cara Italia (ID. 2), which instead explicitly rejects exclusionary nationalism and engages in a bittersweet declaration of love and pride written by the Italo-Tunisian rapper (“They tell me to ‘go home’/I reply ‘I am already there’”). Nostalgia is connected to the literature (Elci, 2022; Menke & Wulf, 2021; Smeekes et al., 2021) as a central emotion in right-wing populist communication, particularly when referring to an idealized, ‘more authentic’ or even glorious national past.

3.1.1 Disengagement and Libertarianism

As mentioned, also calls for vi. political disengagement are present in recent Italian pop music. They range from songs stressing the need to ‘I ignore the world and its anxiety’ (ID. 13), to songs celebrating the individual success of the singer emerging from difficult environments (ID. 14), and stand for a purely individual liberation (‘believing in yourself/is the only thing that will save you, ID. 17).²² In any case, only through a certain interpretative effort from the part of the listener is it possible to link this role to populism as a political phenomenon. Some examples of this type have been found intertwined with other potential interpretations of populism. In a significant number of cases analysed, we noted a total lack of references to collective appeals, which we consider as inherent to any populist phenomena. The main message of ‘disengagement’ delivered is an invitation to ‘rely on yourself’, with quite pessimistic, anti-political and even anti-social tones—that is, to summon a kind of ‘individualistic rebellion’ against aspects of ‘the system’ (to be understood as the hegemonic set of social and cultural values that accompany different structural stratifications and power relations within Italian society). Another form of this trope found embodies more the pursuit of individual success as a form of ‘overcoming’ the structural hurdles imposed by ‘the system’. For instance, Ghali in his Habibi (2017, ID. 8) mixes anti-politics, social criticism and disengagement (‘They are on you when you drink/and they don’t listen to you when you are thirsty/let’s smoke our grief/let’s drink our problems’), while in his Ninna Nanna (2017, ID. 4), he mocks ‘the system’ from his acquired high-status position (‘my middle finger stays raised/I quit the mud/and I buy a villa for Mommy’).

This may chime with an understanding of populism as a ‘symbolic’ liberation (and revenge) without challenging the ganglia of the hegemonic system (Westheuser, 2020). It seems a push towards disengagement and a fallback towards a private-consumerist and in any case individual sphere, although the effect is to contribute to the creation of a subculture and therefore a collective phenomenon, openly antagonistic towards the traditional bourgeois, respectable morality. The trap genre in particular (for example, see the following songs that we analysed, ID. 24; ID. 25) can be considered a zeitgeist of a sceptical and disillusioned youth who seek luxury and unbridled hedonism, yearned for, but above all justified by the effort made to achieve it, that is to say, emerging from an extremely competitive climate.

3.1.2 Anti-Populism in Italian Pop Music?

We also perceived a feature that we labelled ‘anti-populism’ in our analysis of the most popular Italian pop songs (Table 3.3).

Table 3.3 Pop songs coded as ‘populist’ and ‘anti-populist’ (2009–2018)

These are songs containing ‘anti-populist’ references, in the sense that they implicitly or explicitly target social or political aspects that are part of, or associated with, one of our definitions of populism. These songs may contain, for instance, critiques against an understanding of politics based on mere popular or electoral support (i.e. vote-seeking politics), such as in Ghali’s Ninna Nanna (‘I am not a politician/I do not seek plaudits’, ID.14). Anti-populism also includes criticisms of the ‘average Italian’, that is, a stylization of Italians who lack a sense of civic duty and who focus on frivolous things (‘I’m grateful to have a place/in the sexiest country in the world/where both the loincloth and the bank account/are strictly in the red’, ID. 6; also ID. 34). We also found songs targeting conservatism, xenophobia and sovereignism, often linked to the populist radical right (‘There are people who love their land, its borders/And are so patriotic/Who dream of a homeland without neighbors/But if two people who hate each other can have children/tell me why love is important’, ID. 37), while other ones celebrate values such as freedom, pluralism (including ethnic and religious pluralism) and openness to dialogue (e.g. ‘a way to go/with no hate/without walls nor fears/without flags’, ID. 39).²³ Finally, ‘anti-populism’ appears also in an overtly conflictual sense, that is, through clear attacks against populist politicians, as in the case of Fedez raising the middle finger in the videoclip of Vorrei ma non posto. (ID. 27) when mentioning Matteo Salvini. Other politicians are targeted within an anti-populist frame: for instance, Faccia come il cuore (J-Ax and Neffa, 2010, ID. 6), which implicitly attacks politicians, namely Matteo Renzi and Silvio Berlusconi, whose communication was characterized by optimistic narratives denouncing their critics as prophets of disaster and magnifiers of the problems of Italy, and thus contributing to a collective mistrust towards the future and a sense of pessimism and dissatisfaction. In this case, the optimistic narration by Renzi and Berlusconi (mocked by J-Ax and Neffa) could be equated with populism as demagoguery, as a simplistic and ultimately detrimental (for the people) way of doing politics.

In some other cases (including the aforementioned ID. 6, ID. 14 and ID. 27), anti-populist and populist affordances coexist in the same song. This often happens when the polemic target is the Italian mass culture (spread by ‘politicians who want to distract us’, ID. 16), the ‘average Italian’ or the criminal and corruption-prone Italian society. Such critiques of what we will define as the ‘arch-Italian’ national character (Chaps. 4 and 5) have been absolutely fundamental within the discourse of the Five Star Movement, whose former leader Beppe Grillo repeatedly targeted the Italian amoral familism (Banfield, 1963), and can be understood either in an anti-elitist way (against “politicians who want us to be distracted”, ID.16) or in an anti-populist way (a mere disdain for the ‘populace’). However, a third affordance can be advanced when emphasizing the ‘harmless’ component of such critiques that may even inspire an affinity and proudness of being Italian, despite (or because of) such flaws and a lack of civic sense. All of these considerations lend support to the notion that anti-populism is necessarily viewed through a prism of populist phenomena so as to capture how reactions towards populism may, under certain conditions, contribute in triggering a process of production and reproduction of populist/anti-populist cleavages (Stavrakakis & Jaeger, 2017). Moreover, we can, in a creative manner, re-read Table 3.2 by dividing our time frame in three sub-periods: 2009–2012 (i.e. during the peak of the Great Recession and before the arrival of the Five Star Movement in Parliament); 2013–2015 (i.e. before the full saliency assumed by the so-called migratory crisis, considered a key political opportunity for the growth of right-wing populism); 2016–2018. We can see how both populism and anti-populism have increased over time, witnessing the progressive saliency of the ‘people/elite’ frame in contemporary Italian pop music.

In sum, our analysis suggests that the sociocultural approach to populism is particularly useful to capture the presence of populist affordances within Italian pop music, particularly in the most recent years (while in the early years of our time frame the ‘ideological’ approach prevailed). Celebrations of masculinity, comradery and rudeness, as well as denunciations of hypocrisy (in line with the aforementioned ‘ideology of authenticity’), are particularly recurrent in the pop songs under scrutiny. However, anti-elitist and, indeed, quite evidently politicized claims (populism as ideology) are also widespread, more than initially expected, though in line with the structural, socioeconomic crisis shaping Italy in the early aftermath of the Great Recession (Caiani & Padoan, 2020b).

3.2 Musicological Group Analysis: ‘Playing Italianness in Italian Pop Music’

Our musicological group analysis (MGA) offered to us clues on how links between music and agency, forms of community and ideas, can come to be forged (DeNora, 2000, 39). For the MGA analysis, we selected the 10 most prominent (i.e. representative’) Italian pop song for the potential link between music and populism.²⁴ This selection was based on the songs where populism was more present according to our previous content analysis, and/or on songs (close to the Lega, 5SM or local dialectic culture) that emerged as particularly filled with populism from the field. Povia is an Italian singer widely considered as populist, also in the journalistic debate; therefore, one of his song was inserted in the list. Our assumption here was that music is always part of a discursive and historical context (Doehring et al., 2017), and therefore it acts as an ‘agent of meaning’ (ibid.). This part of the analysis was therefore meant to understand how structural features of a given sound (e.g. melodic, harmonic, micro-rhythmic and auditory aspects) are able to afford observed understandings.²⁵ We did not explicitly seek or limit our search to ‘populist claims’, as in the content analysis, instead to define, through the active involvement of the participants, categories and intuitions, different messages, interpretations, potential uses and exploitations (affordances) of the piece under examination, as well as potential audiences.²⁶

The musicological group analysis reinforced our findings from the content and visual analysis, whilst shedding light on the meanings that individual recipients may ascribe to a piece of music and its sonic structures in a specific social and cultural setting. In particular, nostalgia for a lost past, coupled with insecurity and anxiety, and concepts such as simplicity, humility and spontaneity emerge as those more often quoted and praised by participants of the musicological sessions, while listening our pop music pieces. The participants often highlighted concepts and frames such as nation and nationality (‘Italianità’), ‘nostalgia’, hedonistic values, an individual rather than a collective approach to politics and authenticity (i.e. the singer as a self-made man, with a strong personality, not following others, not prone to compromises), like the populist leader (Taggart, 2000).

Nostalgia was perceived with different meanings (MGA. 2, 5, 6, 9). ‘Nostalgia’ for the child-adolescent age, understood as the time of innocence (2) or when ‘you were content with little’, again with different meanings (5,9), or also, in a more historical and less autobiographical sense, ‘nostalgia’ for an era that has now gone (6). Closely related to the concept of ‘nostalgia’ are those of simplicity, spontaneity and humility (1,2,7,9). There is a construction of a pious, godly people (1, partly 5), but also capable of finding redemption, at least (perhaps it would be better to say ‘almost exclusively’) on a symbolic and collective level (in a rather effective way: 5, 9).

Generally speaking, however, the demand for an individual approach to modern-day problems is perceived in pop songs by MGAs’ participants: in any case, there are no observations of invocations to mechanisms of empowerment (1,2). When they do emerge, these invocations have been perceived as ‘ineffective’ by MGA’s participants (4,6), because they are quite disconnected from people’s everyday experience and expressed through overtly “political” tones. Thanks to the use of dialect, as well as the sound (e.g. rap with reggaeton sounds [7] or a catchy and polished punk-rock [9]), the creation of a collective imagery based on subnational identities appears much more effective. In particular, the construction of a local identity narrative on the basis of stereotypes such as ‘rurality’, ‘rudeness’, ‘pride’ and ‘cult of manual labor’ appeals to the producerist (Ivaldi & Mazzoleni, 2019) and sexist rhetoric of the League.

More specifically, in the case of Non è l’inferno (Emma Marrone), the song was categorized by our participants as “typically Sanremese”, because of the “engaged and highly rhetorical lyrics” and because of the “melody and the singing style, emotional and reminiscent of traditional Italian melodic pop”. Participants noted heavily loaded words and phrases such as “life, blood, country, God, faith, father, I believe in the country”, “it is a quasi-militaristic imagery”, “reactionary” but also “plenty of social critique”. The combination of melody and lyrics is said to target Sanremo’s (stereo)typical followers. Above all, the perceived Italianness of the song was framed in different ways: those who disliked the song described it as “reactionary-populist” because of the references to ‘traditional’ values, while participants keen on the song (in our MGA, those with lower educational levels or aged above forty) considered it “interesting”, “surprising” and an “effective denunciation”, although Emma—despite some recent progressive public claims—can hardly be considered a ‘politically engaged’ singer based on her musical repertoire.

As for Ghali’s Ninnananna, “the message is that he is someone who has made it, has been successful, nonetheless, always with a middle finger raised attitude”… “It’s a fresh genre, to me it conveys the impression of an individualistic society. He does not talk about any integration, because that would mean integrating into a coherent whole. The society depicted—perhaps not desired—is entirely individualistic, so it does not convey any mobilizing message to be taken all together”; instead, “a sense of eternal competition prevails”. Thus, the critique of the system’s logic starts from implicitly accepting one of the tenets of the same system: individualism is legitimized as the only way to survive, although at the same time people are not blamed for their failures. If populism is a “recipe working with its own ingredients of the hegemonic logic”, as Stavrakakis argues, there are some traces of it here.²⁷

Rocco Hunt’s ‘Nu juorno buono’ has emerged from our MGA as a “reassuring” song: a rap song sufficiently melodic to fit the tastes of a broad audience (a catchy melody, centrality of the chorus and appealing as ‘background’ music). It is “reassuring” also in terms of its lyrics, eliciting “hope” through a “non-divisive, ‘light’ social critique”. The usage of Neapolitan dialect contributes in making the song “neither leftist, nor rightist… it mobilizes territorial identities […] there is a difference with Northern dialects, which immediately makes me think of the League”. The persona of the singer is also key: “a fresh-faced [acqua e sapone], somewhat nerdy guy singing about local proudness, unity and hope”. The MGA participants tended to associate the song with the 5SM (although the author publicly describes himself as ‘completely apolitical’): “it is not the typical leftist songwriter style, it lacks complexity, but it is not right-wing, there is a collective flatus. It promotes a sort of ‘positive ingenuity’”, very much aligned to one of the multiple images of the 5SM: not so much the anti-establishment dimension, but rather the ‘kind revolution’ the party repeatedly declared to pursue.

In other cases, and particularly when analysing J-Ax’s songs (Senza pagare with Fedez, and Faccia come il cuore with Neffa), the MGAs highlight how catchy melodies contribute in depoliticizing the songs, and, more precisely, in downplaying any anti-elitist, critical messages. As argued by the participants on Faccia come il cuore (Fig. 3.b in Appendix), “they are the kind of songs that circulate a lot but you have no idea what they’re about. But [J-Ax] is very provocative in his pieces. Literally, it is a denouncement… but language and music do not make it clear. And the message probably wants to be lost… it is a hyper-pop piece”. As for Senza pagare, minor chords play a part in the “motivation”, clearly encouraging collective singing: it “makes you feel powerful”. The song is “typical of the J-Ax and Fedez’ repertoire”, namely, songs where social critique fades away when the chorus starts: again, “transgression pills” are completely overturned by a catchy, entertaining, carefree/light-hearted melody. The participants argued that Senza Pagare triggers identification amongst “lower-middle class people, I mean, not particularly well-off but that can afford a night of excess”. All in all, as the video confirms, the song is a “justification of the social status attained by the singers: ‘we worked a lot for that’, so it is well deserved, and we can afford to be rude” (Fig. 3.c in Appendix). One way to link these reactions with the concept of populism is, on the one hand, to consider populism as mainly symbolic (thus primarily cultural) ‘revenge from the Low’, following Ostiguy (2018) and Westheuser (2020). On the other hand, populism is antagonistic but neither ‘revolutionary’, in the sense that it does not aim to subvert modes of production, nor ‘pedagogical’, in the sense that, while working with concrete, existing cultural materials and imageries, it ends by reproducing them, and thus consumerist and individualistic patterns of consumption (Stavrakakis, 2020). In other words, the song plays with the ambitions of climbing the social ladder, but, like populism, does not question the roots of social inequality. Both Senza pagare and populism do not go beyond a—mostly symbolic—critique of hypocrisy and bourgeois respectability.

Essentially, the picture we draw from the analyses of these ‘hyper-pop’ songs is, as expected, hard to define. Emerging affordances are multiple: from conservativism and heteronormativity to emotional appeals to social justice (Non è l’inferno); flaunting of local (Southern) identity received as both rebellious and non-conflictual, pathetic and simplistic (‘Nu juorno buono); mobilizing effects that, however, do not summon politicization and remain constrained to an evasive fantasy opportunistically elicited by the artists (Senza pagare, Faccia come il cuore and, in part, Ninna nanna).

An anti-bourgeois motive has also been detected in the MGA session focused on Rumatera’s La Grande V. In this case, “there is quite a tidy rock-metal sound, which seamlessly merges with guttural voices to perfectly describe how Venetian identity is depicted: harsh, rude, whilst still spontaneous and warm. It is not the same warm-hearted hospitality you find in Southern Italy… it is warm because it is spontaneous. It’s not only a call for ‘accepting who you are’: it is a call to celebrate how other people describe you, and what in fact you are no longer… because such ruralist imagery²⁸ (Fig. 3.d in the Appendix) does not really exist anymore”. This is a perfect example of how the concept of heartland (Taggart, 2000) may work. The song is not interpreted as ‘divisive’ (“it is a choral song because in the lyrics there is a reference to companies, to the culture of being together”), despite its strong identitarian potential (“it talks about roots, running on the road behind the house, carefree living in a rural province”): “a non-Venetian guy would probably have fun in a concert, would even develop a good impression of Venetian people”, because such an impression would perfectly fit with the existing stereotypes about Venetians.

At the same time, an exclusionary feature is captured: “I know guys personally who hate Rumatera because they ridicule our identity… and, indeed, I also have a sort of repulsion towards this way of portraying Venetian identity, even if I had fun at their concerts. It is their parochialism, which emerges from the ironic juxtaposition between the rude and guttural voices typical of metal genre and the issues discussed, celebrating ruralism”. From these latter considerations, we can acknowledge the enormous pre-political potential of such pop cultural productions, as long as they are not understood as overtly political or appropriated for political purposes. In other words, political appropriation would risk “bringing politics to the fore”: “I am thinking about the [reggaemuffin] Sud Sound System from Apulia, but even [reggae] Pitura Freska from Veneto [both bands singing in local dialects]: in these cases, the effect of the territorial identification is not to oppose the other, broader identities. In the case of Rumatera, you identify with a specific community, and nothing more than that. The integrative dimension of territorial identification is absent. While it is not conflictual, still it is clearly exclusionary”.

This is, arguably, one of the main key takeaways of our analysis: to be populist, songs do not have to be explicitly populist. Otherwise, they look sectarian. This is exactly what emerged from the MGAs focusing on two rock songs from very different artists: the aforementioned Povia (Chi comanda il mondo?) and the left-wing Ligabue (Il muro del suono). These are the most explicitly politicized songs. In the case of Il muro del suono by Ligabue, “he’s talking about something political, corrupt-mobsters-politicians, but in a confusing way. Not in a clear way, I would say almost, randomly, a bit of a set up. The lyrics feel incomplete and undefined to me, but it motivates you to look for something inside”, “a kind of criticism that is isn’t clearly directed at anything… Unaddressed rebellion, too abstract; this ‘cowboy’ slang sounds a bit ridiculous… You struggle to identify with it because it’s not about you. It is a politically engaged song, far from being effective, though”. Indeed, this is not very different for what was argued on Chi comanda il mondo?: “it is an overtly political, anti-EU song; I definitely wouldn’t define it as leftist, it is… radical. What makes this song rightist is its conspiracy thinking. It is ‘clickbait’ because in order to like it you must have a predisposition, in the sense that you must not be particularly sophisticated, and yet you have to command some political interest and competence”. In sum, a song like this is more likely to further politicize an ‘enlightened minority’ than to have some pretensions to become ‘commonsensical’: “in the first half of the song, while rapping, with words that end in -ists, terrorists, sovereignists, which are all very old twentieth century words, an ideological era, and he repeats, repeats, repeats them… well, he is really telling you that it is a political, militant song”, “it aims to further politicize a minority, not to become commonsensical”. For these purposes, for a non-sympathetic audience, Povia appears as less than effective: “the rock is associated with something inconvenient, it’s like when someone goes on TV and says ‘now I’m going to say something inconvenient, albeit nine times out of ten they state platitudes or bullshit. Well, anyway, the fact of presenting yourself as inconvenient provokes a certain expectation in the listener”.

3.3 Conclusions

In this chapter, we started exploring the multiple ways in which popular music may contribute in the spreading and reproducing of populist discourses, establishing too that it can reinforce the populism/anti-populism cleavage. Our analysis showed the extent to which the typical populist ‘people vs elite divide’ becomes ‘common sense’ through apparently ‘harmless’, entertaining, ‘non-political’ recent Italian pop music productions. More broadly, this chapter has shed some light on the articulation of ‘populist’ frames, as they are traceable in pop music, which can be seen in the double sense of expressing something but also ‘linking’—in essence, forging a bond between distinct elements that do not necessarily need to be connected (Hall, 1981; Laclau, 2005).

The findings show that a significant portion of the songs (through their lyrics, videos or the persona of the singer) contain—and may contribute in spreading—populist tropes and frames, including anti-elitism, the distrust of political institutions, celebrating ‘authentic rudeness’, articulations of specific grievances and celebrations of personal charisma (as embodied in the charismatic leader/musician). We argue that it is precisely its seemingly non-political features that enable this kind of cultural production to effectively spread political (and, more specifically, populist) worldviews. We also identified in (Italian) pop music the presence of anti-populist messages and calls for political disengagement (various studies based on survey data found a positive correlation between populism—i.e. populist voters—and either apathy or protest, e.g. on Italy, Mancosu, 2018, in particular on the 5SM, Pirro & Portos, 2021).

As we have seen in a diachronic perspective, pop music with ‘populist contents’ has unquestionably increased over time. Sometimes the frontier between populism and anti-populism is extremely porous, and this has partially to do with some cultural self-narratives about Italy and Italians: Italian people portray themselves as good, generous people (often in very familistic tones), and, at the same time, as bad citizens, indifferent to the common good, devoted to frivolous things and/or to the private sphere. These depictions have been objectified in several hit songs from the past,²⁹ and particularly from the eighties onwards (Martinelli, 2013), in a negotiation of the national identity as well as the urban/rural and regional cleavages, often exploited, reproduced and negotiated even today. This has emerged particularly from our MGAs. Such narratives on Italians can be a fertile breeding ground for anti-political messages, but also for denouncing their own Italian people (and there we identify the eventual ‘anti-populist’ component) as the responsible of the malfunctioning of democratic institutions.

Moreover, whatever the characterization of populism is as an ideology; a political strategy, a logic of political articulation of the ‘people’ (as in Laclau) or as a politicization of sociocultural markers, populist phenomena entail a process of identification, as shown in our MGA analysis, operating vertically, as shown in the manifestation of a leader (or a party, or a pop celebrity), and horizontally, with the ‘people’ whom individuals feel that they belong to.³⁰

The experience of group analysis in particular has been used as a unique opportunity to address musical properties explicitly, facilitating a discussion on music. It is here where the sociology of music, often criticized for its neglect of the actual sounds of music, and music analysis can meet, and we used this potential for our study. In our analysis, different social and political ‘affordances’ (DeNora, 2000) are identified: music appears to have the potential for carrying political messages, values, as well as weltanschauung through emotions.

Our analysis therefore pointed to the inherent ‘active’ features of any practice of consumption (not forgetting the ‘passive’, structurally determined features) to the extent that the cultural object (pop music pieces, in our case) is in fact co-produced by the listener (as producer of meaning) and by the listeners (as negotiators of meaning). This is, indeed, how music fandom works, and how increasingly politics works, as the literature on ‘political fandoms’ highlights (Erikson, 2008). If “politics, like popular culture is about creating an ‘audience’” (Street, 1997: 60), the significant overlap between political and cultural (particularly music) fan communities stays in the “emotional constitution of electorates that involves the development and maintenance of affective bonds between voters, candidates and parties” (van Zoonen, 2005: 66), as we will see in the next chapter.

To summarize the findings of this chapter: first of all, we showed the importance of the concept of nation and nationality (‘Italianità’) in current Italian pop music—a concept which populist phenomena have often much to do with (Stavrakakis & De Cleen, 2020). This nation, however, is understood mostly as a common, shared cultural repertoire as well as (not necessarily positive) cultural traits (i.e. the nation of the average-Italian), as opposed to an ethno-nationalistic, even revanchist, definition of the people.

Secondly, the importance of ‘nostalgia’ was a key discovery in our findings, a celebration of ‘good old times’ characterized by simplicity, humility and ‘authentic’ values that helped in understanding the current Italian popular music. Indeed, populism as a political phenomenon often entails some nostalgic sense of belonging to (and loss of) an idealized heartland (Taggart, 2000) and, more broadly, a celebration of pre-modern values in times of transformation (and crisis) (Germani, 1965). However, we also observed the presence, somewhat contradictorily, of hedonistic values in the pop messages conveyed by the singer, presenting themselves as ‘hero’, having been able to attain success in spite of humble or disadvantaged beginnings and backgrounds. In addition, these artists endorse a justification of a luxurious lifestyle, as well as an individual approach to politics, with some feeling of ‘hope’ for the future, rather than calls for social and political conflict. As we will explore in Chap. 6, this aspect is strongly confirmed by our interviews with fans of selected singers. In addition, as the MGAs and the interviews underlined, populism and pop music are both frequently associated with the concept of authenticity. Foundational studies on populism—mainly focused on European populist radical right parties, including the Northern League (The League) in Italy—have developed and then built upon the concept of ‘heartland’ (Taggart, 2000), a “territory of the imagination” which embodies the “positive aspects of everyday life” and which serves as a source of inspiration for populist imagery. Authenticity is arguably also connected, as we have shown above, to the ‘truth-telling’ role that populists (and several pop stars) aspire to be associated with. All of these considerations are remarkably similar to the reflections on rock music as characterized by an “ideology of authenticity” (Peterson, 1997).