Bob Dylan and the Strummers. Popular Music in Italian Narrative after 1977

Abstract

In this article I will analyse a corpus of Italian narratives set in Italy in the second half of the 1970s. My purpose is to show that the act of listening to popular music and sometimes singing or writing songs as represented in these narratives is part of young characters’ dissent towards the political and social system of those years. In the first section I will give a short survey of the methodological and cultural premises of this study. In particular, I will pay attention to the musical debate of those years, which tended to praise political songwriting against pop music. In the following sections I will tackle the various nuances of the relationship between representations of dissent and musical references, especially to Italian ‘cantautori’ and Bob Dylan, in Porci con le ali by Rocco and Antonia (1976), Boccalone by Enrico Palandri (1979), Altri libertini by Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1980), and other works that have marked the rise of Italian new fiction between the late Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties. In the final Appendix I will briefly examine two novels of the first decade of the 21^st Century – Occidente per principianti by Nicola Lagioia (2004) and Piove all’insù by Luca Rastello (2006) – suggesting that literary references to Bob Dylan and popular music have lost their direct connection to dissent.