Abstract
‘Made in Italy’ is one of the most successful examples of nation branding. While Italy’s regional divisions sometimes undermine a common national identity at home and the antics of its political establishment often attract mockery from abroad, its cultural exports continue to be highly attractive worldwide. Italian restaurants have been opened as far afield as Pyongyang (the first there in 2009 under the orders of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il, despite his regime’s hostility towards foreign cultural influences and its problems with food shortages), and fashion labels such as Dolce and Gabbana, Gucci and Prada are desired internationally. Yet, while Italy’s fashion and food are visible worldwide, there is also an aural dimension to the ‘Made in Italy’ brand. This is the subject of Stefano Telve’s book That’s amore!: La lingua italiana nella musica leggera straniera (That’s amore!: The Italian Language in Foreign Popular Music) (in Italian ‘popular music’ is ‘musica leggera’, which literally means ‘light music’, whereas the more similar sounding ‘musica popolare’ means ‘folk music’).
The book’s title, however, only tells part of the story. That’s amore! is not just about the standard Italian language and its dialectics in international popular music. It is also about how other cultures have consumed Italian culture and imagined Italy through this medium, as well as how they have been Italianized. Throughout the book, Telve explores how Italian popular music has moved with the times through modern technologies, and he highlights the role of various media including film, radio and television (and, as much of his research is based on Internet sources, he includes newer media as well). Although changes in the Italian language in recent decades have often been the result of influences of Anglo-American popular culture transmitted through these new technologies, Telve shows that Italian popular music has also had a significant impact on other cultures and languages through such media.
Telve maintains that the Italian language ‘is found a bit in all non-Italian popular music’ (p. 7). In the introduction, he underlines how singing has in the 20th century been an important part of the ‘Made in Italy’ brand, from ‘the global success of the voice of Caruso and other great Italian singers to Bocelli’ (p. 10). This is partly due to the inherent commercialism that distinguishes popular music from other musical categories, as Telve’s discussion on the definition of popular music suggests. In the second chapter, Telve presents a global history of Italian popular music from the 19th century to recent times. He begins with the Neapolitan song and opera; he highlights the boom of the 1950s typified by Domenico Modugno and his ‘Nel blu dipinto di blu’ (In the Sky, Painted Blue), also known as ‘Volare’ (To Fly), which is internationally the most popular Italian song ever; and he ends with the global stardom of a new generation of artists, including Laura Pausini and Eros Ramazzotti, since the 1990s. As Telve underlines in Chapters 2 and 3, the global spread of Italian popular music has been partly based on a traditional dimension that has appealed to the nostalgia of emigrants. Italian emigrants have in turn been an important agent for the international diffusion of the Italian language and popular music, and many of the American crooners who rose to fame in the mid-20th century, such as Perry Como, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, were the sons of Italian immigrants.
Telve spends Chapter 3 discussing the Italian language in international pop music, but one of the strengths of That’s amore! is that it goes beyond a ‘pop’ definition of popular music and addresses a variety of genres, including operatic pop, jazz, hip hop, rock and heavy metal. This offers a broader understanding of how Italianness has been perceived by not only national cultures but subcultures too, demonstrating that the book is more than a study of mutual perceptions between national groups. The connection between the Italian language and international popular music is strongest in operatic pop considering the Italian tradition in opera, and in Chapter 4, Telve maps out the global rise of operatic pop in recent decades. A major point that he makes throughout the book is that the international image of Italy is often not determined by what happens in the country itself but by phenomena outside of it, and operatic pop is an example of this as it is relatively popular in Italy but more decisive in defining musical Italianness abroad. While it is easy to find the Italian language in pop and operatic pop, the genres of jazz, hip hop, rock and heavy metal have worldwide been less associated with the language. Yet, Telve still ventures into these genres in Chapters 5 and 6, and one of the most interesting cases that he discusses is hip hop and how Italian luxury brands in cars and fashion feature as status symbols in the genre. He also discusses the appearance of Dante Alighieri and Galileo Galilei in rock and heavy metal songs, underlining how Italianness is also defined by ‘the evocative power of certain cultural emblems of its history’ (p. 126).
Luxury brands and historical figures are two reasons for the world’s fascination with Italy. In Chapter 7, Telve also discusses the country’s natural beauty, tourist attractions and dolce vita (‘sweet life’) as common themes in non-Italian songs that evoke Italian culture. Yet, it is not all about food, love, sun and wine. The Mafia also defines Italy internationally, and in Chapter 8, Telve discusses Mafia songs that have been censored in Italy but marketed abroad. Telve shows that these themes perpetuate stereotypes of Italy that often result in kitsch or nonsensical songs which rely on very basic Italian words such as amore, ciao, pizza, sí and vino, as discussed in Chapter 8.
In Chapter 7, Telve also discusses international popular music festivals, including the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which includes entries from various European countries and is one of the most-watched television programmes in Europe. It was at Eurovision that Modugno came third in 1958 with ‘Nel blu dipinto di blu’. Telve points out that entries from other countries in Eurovision have sometimes included Italian lyrics. However, the contest is not as popular in Italy as it is in other European countries, and Italy has often not participated in Eurovision since the 1980s. Telve’s book is about the engagement of Italian popular music with other cultures, but Italy’s disengagement from Eurovision prompts questions about how Italians see their own popular music fitting in a European context as well as how they perceive the popular music of other cultures. Together with the costs of participating in Eurovision and controversies over its voting system, one of the reasons why Italy has expressed disinterest in Eurovision may be that it no longer regards it as important for nation branding as much as other countries do, considering that Italian popular music has already proved itself to be globally successful.
Another strength of That’s amore! is its geographical scope. Telve cites many examples from North America and Western Europe, but he also introduces us to operatic pop artists from Australia and highlights the success of Italian pop singers in Latin America. In Chapter 8, he presents material on the censorship of Italian popular music in Argentina under its military regime from 1976 to 1983 and in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, although in both cases it was not solely Italian popular music that was targeted but other Western popular music as well. One region that is under-represented in Telve’s study is the eastern Adriatic. While Telve highlights the successes of Italian artists in Italy’s northern and western neighbours, Albania, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro and Slovenia hardly figure in his study. Yet, because of geographical proximity and historical ties, Italian popular culture has had a significant cultural and political impact on these countries and it played an important Westernizing role during the communist era, including through radio and television broadcasts.
Together with offering a list of key albums, artists, dates, films and songs in the history of Italian popular music worldwide, That’s amore! also includes lyrics from relevant songs and extensive information on the placing of Italian popular music in international charts, as well as a biography with sources in English and Italian.
Telve states that his book springs from recent research on the Italian language in the world and on Italian popular music, and the book obviously appeals to readers interested in these two topics. However, it also provides a perspective on how Italy’s language and popular music have been important for its soft power, and it is in this regard useful for those broadly interested in cultural diplomacy, even though it does not directly deal with the policies of Italian institutions that are concerned with the country’s promotion abroad.