Popular Music and Society ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20 Punk Rock on the Gothic Line: Resounding the World War II Antifascist Resistenza in Contemporary Italy Federico Spinetti To cite this article: Federico Spinetti (2020): Punk Rock on the Gothic Line: Resounding the World War II Antifascist Resistenza in Contemporary Italy, Popular Music and Society, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2020.1820785 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820785 Published online: 05 Oct 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 10 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpms20 POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820785 Punk Rock on the Gothic Line: Resounding the World War II Antifascist Resistenza in Contemporary Italy Federico Spinetti Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The punk-rock band Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti (CSI) exemplifies a wider movement of musical memorialization of the World War II antifascist Resistenza in contemporary Italy. Considering music as communicative medium, affective experience and social practice hatched within networks of engaged citizenship, I probe its contribution to public debates about the Resistenza since the 1990s until today. Perspectives from memory studies, art history, critical historiography, and political philosophy assist me in elucidating through CSI’s example how antifascist memories are creatively reformulated and reinterpreted in Italian popular music, such that the Resistenza comes to animate an interrogation of present inequalities and emancipatory struggles. Antifascism; Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti (CSI); Italy; memory; Resistenza . . . it is not the past that drives us, but precisely what in it has not happened. (Tiqqun 201) Prologue: “Choose Your Side” ● 2 February 2018, Macerata: a “far-right sympathizer,” exhibiting the fascist salute, perpetrates a firearm attack against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (Ananasso). ● 17 March 2018, Carrara: Swastikas are drawn on the entrance of a branch of the National Association of Italian Partisans (Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia, hence ANPI), a nationwide association founded in 1945 promoting the memory of the World War II Resistenza (“Svastiche naziste”). These and several other incidents exemplify a current rise of far-right movements in Italy. The phenomenon is not without antecedents.1 But, in the last three decades, it has been supported by the unprecedented legitimation of a sympathetic memory of fascism in public discourse. This process began in the 1990s, with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi toying with an at best equivocal approach to Italy’s fascist past, and continues to this day.2 Take, for example, the Lega Nord party leader and former Minister of Home CONTACT Federico Spinetti 50923, Germany fspinett@uni-koeln.de © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne, Cologne 2 F. SPINETTI Affairs, Matteo Salvini, who has pursued aggressive policies against the entry of migrants and refugees into the country and is responsible for the percolation of insistent xenophobic rhetoric at a government level. Salvini has not only tolerated neofascist militants at his rallies, but also publicly quoted Mussolini and associated himself nonchalantly with notorious sites of the fascist era. Dismissing his critics, Salvini has stated time and again that the diatribe between fascism and antifascism should be relegated to a closed chapter of history. When in 2019 he opted out of the April 25 celebrations – the national Liberation Day since 1946 – Salvini glossed this commemoration as a “football derby” between fascists and communists (Lerner).3 That such attempts to trivialize the issues at stake in the memory of World War II and the fascist era are, in fact, relevant to the present is demonstrated by how the current dehumanization of migrants in the context of state policies and public discourse alike is pursued by turning a blind eye toward its detectable congruities with the racial and discriminatory ideology of Nazi-fascism. To extend my point a little, while this opening rings up the curtain on a political climate in today’s Italy, it would be reductive to suggest that this is merely characterized by a far-right tide and antifascist responses thereto. Rather, these are indicators of a circulation of conflicts that, together with a contention about the status of anti/fascism and their memory, have had to do with broader issues of power distribution, values, and political praxis. I will come back to this. In a nutshell, it bears stressing for now that such circulation of conflicts has witnessed searing frictions between solidarity-based, equality-oriented endeavors and elitist and/or ethnocentric exclusionary politics, and that antifascism, in Italy as elsewhere, has tapped precisely into this broad battlefield. Let me now zoom in on a third incident, which brings us to the focus of this article. On 3 March 2018, stickers saying, “Here lives an antifascist,” are furtively posted by far-right militants on the doorbells of several citizens in the city of Pavia (Gallori). As a response, other citizens throughout Italy voluntarily “mark” their homes with similar stickers. Also as a response, the mayor of Pavia, Massimo De Paoli, posts the following song line on his Facebook page: Occorre essere attenti escegliersi la parte dietro la Linea gotica You must think clearly and choose your side behind the Gothic Line.4 This line comes from the song “Linea gotica” (“Gothic Line”), released in 1996 by the punk-rock band CSI.5 Here, beyond its empirical meaning, the land “behind the Gothic line” – i.e., not yet liberated from fascism – stands figuratively for the arena where each person is called to make a choice as to which side of the conflict to stand on. That 22 years after its release CSI’s song should keep its shine, and be perceived as a compelling statement in a dispute about the status of antifascism in the Italian polity, is emblematic of the fact that the construction of the Resistenza memory in contemporary Italy has been knotted with how memorable the songs about it have become. What could be a better indicator that music has truly been onto something of collective importance here? CSI (1992–2000) are indeed a pivotal band in the vast movement of Italian popular music artists who, since the early 1990s up until today, have brought the Resistenza memory to the core of their creative activity. In this article, I analyze CSI’s compositional work as an entry point to this broader phenomenon. I focus on two songs from the mid POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 3 1990s, with the aim to unpack the formal and narrative strategies of memory making deployed by CSI. In the process, I call upon perspectives from music scholarship, memory studies, art history, historiography, and philosophy, in order to interpret CSI’s contribution to the re-elaboration of the Resistenza memory in Italian public discourse. My research is grounded in fieldwork undertaken from the standpoint of a documentary filmmaker and ethnomusicologist on occasion of the band’s 2013–2015 reunion, as well as in ongoing exchanges with CSI guitarist, composer, and co-founder Massimo Zamboni.6 Of consequence is also my personal history as a long-time participant – turned participant-observer over the last ten years – in the leftist milieu within which CSI’s activities and, more broadly, the musically-mediated memory of the Resistenza have been embedded in Italy. I have no ambition here to inspect the reception history of CSI’s songs. However, in a gesture that is all too familiar to ethnomusicologists, I situate CSI’s compositional work in the historical and cultural terrain that alone can illuminate the music-memory nexus in their work as social practice. In other words, I pursue the “social mediation of images” (and sounds) that Alon Confino, taking the cue from Aby Warburg, recommends as methodological sine qua non for memory studies (1390–1391). I do so in two sections below, where I provide an overview of memory politics about the Resistenza until 1989 and, next, of the discursive and social fields within which CSI have operated thereafter. But first, let me begin with a profile of the musicians in question. Genius Dilettantes The musical adventures of Massimo Zamboni (guitarist and composer) and Giovanni Lindo Ferretti (vocalist and lyricist) began when they first met in 1981 in West Berlin, where they had independently moved from their hometown, Reggio Emilia, to immerse themselves in the punk-anarchist and eccentric environment revolving around the Hausbesetzerbewegung (“squatter movement”) and the experimental art movement Geniale Dilletanten [sic] (“Genius Dilettantes”). Back in Italy the year after, they formed the punk band CCCP-Fedeli alla Linea (“CCCP-Faithful to the [Party] Line”) – whose name features the Cyrillic acronym for the USSR, pronounced according to Italian phonetics as tſi-tſi-tſi-pi.7 Based in Reggio Emilia – in the Emilia-Romagna region, administered with overwhelming popular consent since 1946 by the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, hence PCI) – CCCP voiced musically the contradictions and fractures of everyday life in a quasi-socialist enclave within a capitalist and predominantly Catholic country.8 Their music received mixed, even polarized responses, which earned them significant popularity nationwide in the course of the 1980s. CCCP navigated a semantic ambiguity that equally confounded consolidated models of political affiliation and music genre categorizations, juggling a fine line between the serious and the humorous, the politically radical and the complacently provincial – an ambiguity encapsulated in the band’s epigrammatic self-designation as punk filosovietico – musica melodica emiliana (“pro-Soviet punk – melodic music from Emilia”).9 The monumentality of their music – reinforced by a declamatory vocal delivery – and the recurrent references to socialist anthems, figurative markers, and slogans pointed to a sincere affiliation with the ideals of communism, including a fondness for the progressive social achievements of the “red” Emilia-Romagna. Even further, they paraded the idolization of 4 F. SPINETTI the figures and paraphernalia of Marxism and state socialist modernism, which remained common currency among many Italian communists despite the democratic reformism and the open dissociation from a Soviet model pursued by the PCI since the 1970s. But CCCP’s taste for the absurd and theatrical exaggerations also seemed to undermine formulaic ideological rhetoric. They exposed the “barbarity” of socialist state bureaucracy and power structures,10 and also the increasing consumerist drive engulfing the socially progressive, yet wealthy and self-indulgent Emilia-Romagna. As a result, CCCP displaced the authoritative narratives of socialist realism and progress in an existential no-man’s -land, or what they called “unsettled realism.” With the fall of the Berlin Wall, CCCP disbanded. Ferretti and Zamboni soon teamed up again as Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti (“Consortium of Independent Players”), shortened to CSI – yet another acronym, this time alluding to the post-Soviet Confederation of Independent States. Here, they grouped with Giorgio Canali (guitar), Ginevra Di Marco (voice), Gianni Maroccolo (bass), and Francesco Magnelli (keyboards) – the latter two being former members of Litfiba, another influential band of the 1980s.11 CSI partly retained CCCP’s experimental slant, but softened its roughness toward a more polished indie punk-rock, with their lyrics becoming more intimate and poetically refined. Orphaned by the disappearance of “the mother of us all” – as Massimo Zamboni called the Soviet Union in an interview with me (Spinetti, Nemico) – and by the dissolution of the PCI in 1991, CSI cast an anguished gaze onto the ruins left behind by 20th-century European socialism. They addressed the crumbling myth of the Soviet revolution, with its promised liberated humankind being strangled by an “automatic machine without soul” (in the song “Unità di produzione” – [Production Unit,” 1998]; the trauma of the Yugoslav wars, where the hopes of a multiethnic and just society were suffocated in bloodshed (“Memorie di una testa tagliata” [“Memories of a Severed Head,” 1993]; “Cupe vampe” [“Dark Flames,” 1996]); the dismantling of the Western European welfare-state and homegrown brands of (micro-)socialism, swamped by an unbridled and stupefying neoliberal capitalism (“Forma e sostanza” [“Form and Substance,” 1998]). In the face of vanishing myths, CSI identified the Resistenza as the one historical experience that they could still reclaim from the shaken foundations of their political universe. In the course of the 1990s, they put out several releases centered on the Resistenza, including two albums, Linea gotica (1996) and La terra, la guerra, una questione privata (“The Land, the War, a Private Matter,” 1998). CSI helped consolidate an emerging interest in the Resistenza shared by several other musicians active in a variety of music genres, ranging from hip-hop and ska-punk collectives like 99 Posse and Banda Bassotti to folk-rock acts such as Gang, Modena City Ramblers, and Yo Yo Mundi. These artists have reinterpreted songs from the wartime partisan repertoire as well as written new compositions on topic. A landmark – albeit not isolated – event was the 1995 Materiale Resistente project (“Resistant Material,” hence MR), which was conceived and coordinated by CSI and Fabrizio Tavernelli, frontman of the indie-rock band Acid Folk Alleanza. Designed for the 50th anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Nazi-fascism, the project took off with an open-air concert held near the town of Correggio, province of Reggio Emilia, where several popular music bands were invited to contribute a song dealing with the Resistenza legacy. Given massive audience participation at the concert, the project developed with POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 5 the release of a compilation album (CSI et al.), a documentary film (Chiesa and Ferrario), and a photobook (Ferrario). MR achieved nationwide resonance and was a pivotal initiative for what has become an enduring movement of musical revitalization of the Resistenza. In the last 25 years or so, this has involved, alongside the “historic” bands of the 1990s, a younger generation of nationally or locally active musicians. As already manifest in the MR project, this movement has not been limited to releases, but has also entailed events of collective participation, notably festivals such as the successive editions of MR (2010; 2015) or the annual Resistenza festival Fino al Cuore della Rivolta in Fosdinovo, province of Massa-Carrara. Here, live music has often been interwoven with other frames and media of memory making, such as exhibitions, poetry and prose readings, theater performances, roundtable debates, and visits to commemorative sites of the Resistenza. A Nation at War Music of and about the Resistenza did not appear for the first time with the 1990s revitalization movement. For one thing, several wartime partisan songs have long had a stable presence in the communal singing repertoire of leftist rank and file, on occasion of informal gatherings, party or civic association festivals, demonstrations as well as public commemorations. Some renowned partisan songs – notably “Bella ciao” (“Goodbye Beautiful”) and “Fischia il vento” (“The Wind Howls”) – were performed and released over the years by a number of established recording artists. Further, from the late 1950s through the 1970s, the Resistenza song repertoire was collected, studied, and recast by the Italian folk revival. Particularly the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano collective of researchers and musicians (“New Italian Song Repertoire,” founded in Milan in 1962) gave such repertoire a central role within its larger endeavor to reanimate protest and working-class songs as a resource for left-wing opposition to bourgeois hegemony (Plastino; Fanelli, Contro 57–91, 109–18). Invested with a valence of radical contestation, the folk revival’s engagement with the Resistenza can hardly be assimilated to that of the political establishment. However, when it comes to how the Resistenza was represented, there were noteworthy points of convergence between the revival and the memory politics piloted by official discourse. The complexity of such memory politics, and the turns it underwent across four decades until the end of the 1980s, clearly escape the confines of this article.12 But a few main concepts are vital as I proceed in my discussion. For one, the partisan struggle was extolled in institutional representations as the founding myth of the newly born Italian Republic and its Constitution. The Resistenza narrative came to acquire the epic proportions of a liberation struggle in which a whole nation – or at least the greater part of it – had participated, with the rhetoric of official pronouncements typically resting on the tropes of heroism and martyrdom. Precedence was also given to the Resistenza as a patriotic struggle against Nazi-German occupation, rather than as one side in a veritable civil war. As a result, “the deeds of active minority groups have been extended to all society” (Paggi 102), serving a pragmatic attempt to redeem Italy from its participation in the Axis powers in an international geopolitical context, as well as a self-absolving demotion of the overwhelming popular support enjoyed by the fascist regime. This provided the template within which most Resistenza historians, too, operated. 6 F. SPINETTI At the same time, the Resistenza memory came to be implicated in a Cold War paradigm of political demarcation and entrenched within the self-serving narratives of political sides vying for ascendancy – primarily, the PCI and the Christian Democrats. This scheme brought about a near monopoly over Resistenza discourse on the part of these parties and resulted in an arguably overstated emphasis on tracing back the partisans to politically defined affiliations and party cadres. By virtue of the decisive contribution of communists to the Resistenza, it was the PCI that made the most conspicuous efforts to lead Resistenza discourse, and that had the most at stake in doing this. On the one hand, the PCI could play along with the national liberation narrative. It was indeed Luigi Longo, eminent party exponent, Resistenza leader, and key figure of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, who encapsulated such narrative in his famed phrase, un popolo alla macchia (“a nation in the thicket,” metonymically referring to the clandestine guerrilla war). In this way, the Resistenza was functional to the legitimation of the PCI as a credible political formation in a national and international context, where its status as the second largest party in Italy enjoying a third of the Italian electorate, and as the largest communist party in the capitalist hemisphere and the orbit of NATO, was clearly an anomaly (Gundle). On the other hand, the PCI – and more generally the left – could claim for itself the position of a vanguard within the Resistenza and, therefore, the entitlement to uphold the bequests of the most progressive forces in Italian society. In this sense, the Resistenza legacy came in some significant way to be cherished the most on the left of the political spectrum, without necessarily becoming its sole property. For many within and without the PCI – including the extra-parliamentary left critical of PCI’s penchant to political compromise and its vocation as a mass party with considerable power – the Resistenza stood as the emblem of a truly revolutionary social movement. Given all the above, it is not surprising that Resistenza-related music was primarily cultivated within and by the political left. This included people, associations, and trade unions directly or indirectly affiliated with the PCI as well as supporters of other organized contestation movements. As a counterpart to the grand narrative of national liberation, the musical representation of the Resistenza, including that of the folk revival, solidified a canon of the partisan song repertoire imbued with the acclamatory tones of a heroic tale. The one song that most eloquently condensed this approach was “Bella ciao.”13 Its emergence as the musical icon of the Resistenza – although rather apocryphal, given its marginality in the partisans’ wartime repertoire – had to do with how powerfully its lyrics bring together three distinctive markers of the unitary struggle narrative: the eulogistic register centered on the martyr hero; the conciliatory perspective sanctioned by the absence of references to any specific party tradition; the selective identification of the enemy as a foreign invader, sidelining the dimension of the civil war. “Don’t Fear Your Time” I take once again the cue from a line of “Linea gotica” as I now outline the historical conditions in relation to which CSI, as other artists of the revitalization movement, have operated. While the folk revival lost its momentum as the heated political season of the 1960s/70s faded out, it was only a decade later that the institutional antifascist narrative POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 7 came to be shaken, following the momentous changes in geopolitical and ideological coordinates precipitated at an international level by the 1989–1991 disbanding of state socialisms in Eastern Europe. In Italy, this process culminated in the dissolution of the PCI (1991) and the Christian Democrats (1994), and had two primary consequences as far as the memory politics of the Resistenza goes. First, the receding hold of traditional political parties over history narratives opened a breach for the emergence of a critical historiography of the Resistenza. This has problematized the rather monolithic picture handed down by institutional representations, attending refreshingly to several neglected facets of the Resistenza and venturing into its existential and ethical complexities, as well as its areas of ideological and political fluidity.14 A second consequence is that Resistenza discourse has been challenged by the rise of a new political right, featuring an alliance of entrepreneurial neoliberalism, identitarian populism, post-fascist nationalism, and Catholic conservatism. Since the 1990s, this has pursued a revisionist agenda preaching hostility toward the Resistenza and a veiled or overt rehabilitation of fascism and its memory. Perhaps less acrimonious, but no less insidious have been its appeals for national reconciliation, with the corollary that differences between fascism and antifascism be evened out and ditched as disconnected from contemporary issues – an argument that, as we have seen, persists in Matteo Salvini’s current declarations.15 This has played into a bid to drive the Resistenza into a corner of the political spectrum and demote it to the status of sectarian heritage of a supposedly fanatical radical left. In the musical domain, too, polemic rebukes by right-wing pundits have targeted partisan songs, including “Bella ciao,” the most politically ecumenical of them all. “Bella ciao” continues to this day to be a staple item of collective singing on commemorations, demonstrations, and sit-ins held by diverse political subjects. Nonetheless, it has been accused by Resistenza detractors of being divisive within a national community that, so the argument goes, no longer shares an antifascist ethos. This situation has aroused widespread perception on the part of critical historians that the tenets of antifascist morality have been undermined, leading some to announce a “crisis of antifascism” (Luzzatto).16 What is missing – or at best downplayed – in this alarming picture is the role played by a diverse constellation of social actors, operating on the fringes of and beyond state and party politics, in carrying forward the Resistenza legacy as an ethical-political resource in contemporary Italy. These have ranged from cultural associations such as ANPI and ARCI,17 to research and educational organizations such as the federated Resistenza institutes and archives, formed since 1949 in many provinces of the country, to the antagonist milieu of the often squatted centri sociali (“social centers”). A large part of these actors belongs to the pluralistic universe of civic engagement known in Italian as left-wing associazionismo, which has developed in the postwar period often in dynamic symbiosis with the PCI, yet surviving the latter’s demise.18 A networked culture of bottom-up participatory citizenship – what Robert Putnam has encapsulated in the notion of “civic-ness” (83–120) – associazionismo consists of volunteer-based and self-managed associations involving large sectors of civil society and displaying a variety of vocational foci. Holding this variegated civic community together is a shared ethos of the common good (bene comune), where antifascism, the Resistenza memory, and the values inspiring the republican Constitution are of the essence. 8 F. SPINETTI This associative network has gained prominence since the 1990s as a site of participatory political praxis, to the extent of becoming a catalyst of initiatives for more institutional actors such as trade unions and local municipalities.19 Amid a generalized fatigue of 20th-century mass organizations and, particularly, the evaporation of the coordinating role of traditional party apparatuses, left-wing associazionismo in Italy has provided a persuasive, alternative circuit of grassroots activism. Rather than harnessed to long-term systematic strategies or to a school of thought, yet under the umbrella of a shared antifascist and communitarian ethos, civic engagement has become increasingly diversified and exploratory, providing a field of encounters and “coalitional efforts” (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 159) among heterogeneous actors, whose proclivities and needs are harmonized or contended on the basis of a certain pragmatic approach. Music from the Ground Up A hallmark of this associative community has been the integration of political engagement (including initiatives of active memory) with expressive culture and “recreational” activities (Fanelli, Casa 55–61). The pessimistic appraisal of antifascism’s current state of health – and of political participation in general – on the part of critical historians in Italy appears related to an underestimation of this integration. Little attention has been paid not only to the shift in political agency represented by the escalation of associazionismo, but also to its attendant models of engaged sociality and memory making linked to artistic and musical life. These have generally been considered of lesser importance than the institutional channels of memory politics historians have typically been preoccupied with.20 But, while a scrutiny of the “everyday history of memory” (Confino 1402) is yet to be produced, perhaps nowhere can a memory culture of the Resistenza as practice of the everyday be more eloquently approached than from the perspective of musical life. My emphasis on associazionismo is precisely meant to trace the compass within which memory work in music has been central to articulating “the connections between representation and social experience” (Confino 1388). As I already mentioned, the associazionismo of “red” Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany provided a rooting for the 1980s bands CCCP and Litfiba – forerunners of CSI.21 Bred in this cultural matrix, CSI as well as other musicians of the Resistenza revitalization have continued since the 1990s to partner with a broad array of actors within associazionismo. They have not only relied upon existing social and communication networks therein, but also contributed to further recruitment into Resistenza memory practice. Vital here have been the experiences of the independent record labels of the 1990s – such as CSI-run I Dischi del Mulo and Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti – and, more recently, of local fundraising and online crowdfunding campaigns, which have provided the means for independent production as well as forums of community building around specific projects. Typically, Liberation Day anniversaries have punctuated memorializing musical activities. Some of these – whether involving releases or participatory events or both – have been undertaken in response to catalytic moments of mobilization. A case in point was the 1995 MR project, which, as noted earlier, was captained by CSI and featured the support of the Correggio municipality: this took place as a deliberate reaction to the turn in political life marked by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s formation of the first republican government with the participation of ex-fascist exponents in 1994. POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 9 Most such initiatives, however, have had a somewhat looser connection to immediate political occurrences, and have taken up emergent and diffuse patterns quite in line with the forms of participatory citizenship they have been intimately bound to. In this way, musicians have contributed to an everyday practice of civic engagement where the Resistenza memory framework has been steered toward critical vigilance over a plurality of perceived present predicaments. Besides the upsurge of far-right and revisionist trends, these have ranged from warfare to the erosion of civil and workers’ rights, from ecological unsustainability to global inequality, from the aggressive monologue of neoliberalism and tightening techniques of social control to racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration policies. Predictably, in fueling this composite scenario of social engagement with the affective and representational emphases of their mediation of the Resistenza memory, contemporary popular musicians have taken up a variety of expressive approaches and political slants. Many of them, with CSI as a notable example, have hardly strived to administer readymade recipes, political master plans, or token incitements to protest. Rather, their preoccupation has been to reinterpret innovatively the legacy of the Resistenza, navigating a territory where this could at once be a point of reference for the survival of emancipatory ideals, and a resource for the imagination of new aspirations. As Massimo Zamboni recalled about the days leading up to MR, “There was a great desire to know what would become of us, to figure out who was still standing. Beyond the rhetoric of the 50th anniversary [of the Liberation], beyond sacrosanct events like partisans’ parades and celebrations, we wanted to be present in a different way. How could we represent the partisan struggle? What could our world of music have to do with that world?” (Spinetti, Nemico). In the next section, I analyze two songs from the mid-1990s that exemplify the ways in which CSI have gone about reformulating the Resistenza memory, stepping away from both a previous tradition of musical representation (notably, that handed down by the folk revival) and a broader mythologizing narrative. While I inspect the distinctive approach of CSI, my discussion is meant to touch on a novel poetics of memory that has been underscoring much of contemporary Resistenza-inspired popular music. A New Poetics of Memory The song “Guardali negli occhi” (“Look Them in the Eyes”) was composed by CSI for the 1995 MR event and released in the namesake collection album. Its genealogy is related to a lieu de mémoire (“site of memory,” Nora). Upon visiting together the Resistenza memorial in the main square of Reggio Emilia in 2013, Massimo Zamboni recounted to me that what inspired the composition and the title of the song were the photographs of fallen partisan fighters that stood before us, spread out on several self-standing castiron panels. Back in the early 1990s, these photographs were grouped to form a mosaic on a wall-mounted marble slate, from where “the partisans all looked at you at once.” This gaze was for Massimo “difficult to hold.” Yet, he could not escape the call to stare back emanating from it and the demand for honesty with oneself it placed on the beholder, because “you can’t speak trivialities before an audience of dead like them” (Zamboni, “Interview”; Spinetti, Nemico; Ferrario 49). This gives a sense of the deeply felt ethical investment implicated in the composition of “Guardali negli occhi.” 10 F. SPINETTI The song consists of two distinct parts. The first one builds on a two-chord guitar progression resting on a dub-inflected drum pattern and bass riff. The lyrics – performed in the signature quasi-recitativo of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti – feature a collage of verbatim and freely adapted excerpts from various partisan and historic protest songs. These include “Bella ciao”; the lesser-known “Il disertore” (“The Deserter,” recaptured intermedially from a book by partisan and writer Nuto Revelli)22; the 1944 partisan song “La badoglieide” (“The Badoglio Epic,” attributed precisely to Revelli and other partisans of his brigade); and the 1960 antifascist protest song “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia” (“For the Dead of Reggio Emilia,” authored by Fausto Amodei, one of the key figures of the folk revival). The second part features the (almost) integral text of the famed partisan song “Il bersagliere ha cento penne” (“The Rifleman Has a Hundred Feathers”), set to a five-chord guitar sequence with no rhythm section. At no point are the employed musical features drawn from the original songs cited in the text; they are instead squarely placed in an indie-rock, post-punk idiom. This stylistic deterritorialization, together with the intertextual fabric of the lyrics, creates a complex semiotic layering of multiple histories and agencies. The Resistenza here appears not only as a mnemonic referent signified through a remediation of its songs, but also a catalyst for the navigation of interlocked temporalities. It is tempting here to tinker with Martin Daughtry’s notion of “acoustic palimpsest,” which foregrounds acts of erasure and inscription as constitutive of sound practices and experiences (48–51). Apt to our case is the variant of Daughtry’s model where effacement and overwriting are “the intentional products of creative effort” (61). And yet, Daughtry’s acoustic palimpsest – remaining faithful to the historic referent of the metaphor – is implanted on a desire to obliterate the past (69, 77), such that the resurfacing and/or latency of the layers buried by successive accretions is the unwitting result of accident or the coronation of archeological unearthing. This does not quite capture the more dynamic interplay between erasure and inscription activated in CSI’s song, where omission is meant to evoke (rather than discard); overwriting is meant to reveal (rather than obscure). What, then, is being revealed? For one, song fragments from the past are here meant to elicit the very presence of the missing parts, a substrate smoldering beneath and inbetween the textual and musical tapestry of CSI’s song. Concomitantly, the formal operation at play reveals itself through an explicit assertion of difference with respect to the mnemonic referents it freely repositions. Take the citations of “Bella ciao” in the opening and elsewhere in the song (e.g. una mattina mi son svegliato eho trovato l’invasore, “I woke up one morning and found myself face to face with the invader”). Given the popularity of these lines in Italy, their use is tactical: they provide an obvious identity marker to CSI’s song, conjuring up “Bella ciao” as a mnemonic target that can hardly be missed. It is precisely because other lines of “Bella ciao” are overwritten (and its original melody is nowhere to be found) that the operation of interpolation is exposed, and its unexpected textual juxtapositions and musical reconfigurations acquire poignancy. Consequential to this interpretation is the notion of hypermediacy, applied to memory studies by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney drawing on the work in media studies of Bolter and Grusin (21–50). These scholars have argued that constitutive of cultural memory are “medial frameworks” in which symbolic and material artifacts and practices POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 11 (architectural, plastic, literary, musical, visual, and audiovisual) afford processes of continuous reconfiguration (erasure and inscription) of the past. Rather than being transmitted pristinely, memory is constructed through chains of remediation within and across expressive forms or “memorial media” (Erll and Rigney 1–11; Rigney 69–70). Every act of (re)mediation may exhibit the prevalence of or move in-between two analytically distinct formal strategies, namely immediacy and hypermediacy. These encode, I would gloss, two different relationships with the past. The modality of “immediacy” strives to bring the past back into the present intact, without filters. A relationship of transparency is obtained by downplaying or hiding the new memorial medium that, in fact, concocts such relationship. This was by and large the approach of the Italian folk revival. Their work relied on the essentialist idea that past working-class expressive culture carried an autonomous worldview with respect to dominant culture(s) and, as such, could sustain the emancipation of the oppressed and subaltern classes also in the present. Their recuperation of Resistenza and other political songs focused on the stylistic identity of the originals as well as the composition of new songs that bore the same thematic and stylistic imprint. Effectively obfuscating the remediation at play, the revival pursued a continuity of expressive forms on the basis of a perceived continuity of worldview that verged on identification between past and present political subjects. By contrast, hypermediacy foregrounds a reverse procedure: the memorial medium is brought in relief – through formal techniques such as interpolation, hyperbole, irony, montage – such that the operation of remediation and re-writing of memory is reflexively laid bare. The resulting relationship with the past is layered, often more opaque, open to semantic ramifications and ambiguities. Quite productively for my analysis, this “dual logic of remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 2–5) resonates with Georges Didi-Huberman’s distinction between two strategies of mnemonic imaging – which he posits discussing the famed Auschwitz Sonderkommando photographs of August 1944. These he calls monade temporelle (“temporal monad”) – viewing (or listening to) the mnemonic referent as having the “simplicity” of a monad, “a whole from which nothing can be taken away” – and montage de temps (“montage of times”) – treating the mnemonic referent as fluid and fragmentary, with a keen sense of its “complexity” and stratifications, including that of the present memory act itself (45–46). To read or listen to “Guardali negli occhi” as a (hypermediated) montage de temps means first of all to understand it as a memorial gesture – and a “concrete, political” one at that (96) – performed by a subjectivity whose agency is exhibited up front. It is not so much a document through which traces of the past can be retrieved with the exactness hounded by historiographic lenses nor a text through which the present epoch may be inspected with the transparency assumed by a textualist exegesis. Rather, it is an “event (process, labor, battle)” (52) that manipulates those traces and tackles that epoch; the enunciation of a phenomenological condition, of situatedness in the anthropological sense; a self-portrait of sorts (63). Key to this gestural montage is a game of contrasts, of “extraneous elements” (étrangetés, Didi-Huberman 113); a re-assemblage suggesting an intimate solidarity, not assimilation, between the otherwise discrete temporalities stitched together in the song. The present gaze onto the past morphs into a hypothesis of possible routes toward re-owning a legacy from the vantage point of a sharp awareness of difference. As Massimo Zamboni said apropos of “Guardali negli occhi” back in 1996, “It’s our point 12 F. SPINETTI of view, history rewritten for our use and consumption” (qtd. in Campo 7). Formal indiscipline with respect to the source materials is the primary signature of this selfreflexive reclamation of the past into the present – an assertion of “difference and bond,” différence et lien (Didi-Huberman 178): the stylistic shift to a popular music vocabulary, the blatant intertextual manipulation of the lyrics, and the affectively detonating contact between these two levels. Of further consequence here, Didi-Huberman stresses the dimension of imagination permeating the montage de temps (45–56, 142–52, 170–219), thus coming close to a central feature of the postmemorial condition examined by Marianne Hirsch. In Hirsch’s analysis, imaginative projection and poietic reelaboration are key to the affectively charged and visceral “living connection” (1, 33) with the past coveted by “the generation after,” the one remembering experiences it has not itself lived (3–5). Imagination is an act of freedom, therefore, a liberation of memory from inherited formal and narrative orthodoxies. In what we can now call CSI’s hypermediated postmemorial montage de temps, the porous, open-ended and unpredictable overlaying of histories orchestrated on a formal level – that is, on the level of the relationship with the past – allows for a congruous, equally liberating eruption of the present on a narrative level – that is, on the level of the representation of the Resistenza.23 Consider, for one, the free rendition of textual fragments from “La badoglieide” in “Guardali negli occhi.” The line Ho memoria di leggi razziali (“I remember the racial laws”) is a spurious, “extraneous” addition to the original text, a gesture of inscription that, by placing an emphasis on the laws promulgated by Mussolini in 1938, flashes up a present concern about ethno-racial and cultural chauvinism – which, in Italy as elsewhere in Europe, already rose in the early 1990s, further burdened, particularly in CSI’s perception, by the interethnic hatred that engulfed Yugoslavia in those years. A further change of narrative is obtained in the ways the affective status and meaning of the music-text nexus of the original “La badoglieide” is altered by genuinely musical means: the playful tone of the original satirical ballad (indicting General Pietro Badoglio’s two-facedness for serving first under, then against Mussolini) is overwritten by Ferretti’s grave vocal delivery as a disgruntled and accusatory enumeration of colonial aggressions: E ricordo la guerra di Etiopia La conquista di Addis Abeba L’Albania, la guerra di Grecia I remember the Ethiopian war The occupation of Addis Ababa The wars in Albania and Greece By the same token, the musical setting of “Il bersagliere ha cento penne” at the end of CSI’s piece dismantles the emphatic character of the reference partisan song (itself a remake of a World War I alpine trooper song). Lyrical melodic phrasing, suitable for full-blown choral singing, is replaced by ominous vocals; linear major-key harmony turns into an open minor-key figure, while timbral clarity is stained by the incursion of an abrasive, disquieting guitar. Zamboni commented to me: “The partisan is here a solitary hero, a loser, already ousted from the future s/he’s fighting for” (Spinetti, POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 13 Nemico). What emerges here is a challenge to the heroic national mobilization narrative that, as we have seen, dominated the Italian memoryscape of the postwar decades; a pensive interrogation of a no longer victorious, but now rather enigmatic partisan. It is precisely a deeper consideration of this shift in narrative paradigm that I now turn to, and that leads me to “Linea gotica” – a song that has already peeped out in these pages. The Happiness of the Partisans Released as part of the 1996 namesake album, “Linea gotica” keeps away from any magniloquent depiction of heroism, but rather sketches in poetic fashion the existential dimension of the partisans’ choice to rebel and fight. While hypermediated (musical and textual) formal strategies germane to “Guardali negli occhi” are employed here too, the montage de temps in “Linea gotica” effects an even denser mutual overwriting of present and past. Most enunciations in the lyrics, in particular, may fluidly apply to the partisans’ experience and/or a contemporary subjectivity, with the narrating voice straddling ambiguously such temporal divide. As in “Guardali negli occhi,” the free play of “extraneous elements” and associations steers clear of any linear or descriptive exposition. Rather than a self-assured proclamation of identification with the past, what is sought after is a tentative exploration of “resemblances” (Didi-Huberman 189, 19) and elective or “affiliative structures of memory” (Hirsch 21, 36–39). This is a gesture that brings past and present at eye level, in intimate conversation. The song’s form consists of a strophe/refrain alternation (repeated once), with no percussion. The strophes are dominated by a harmonically static counterpoint of distorted bass and electric guitars, with spoken vocals. In a contrasting soaring effect, the refrains build on a 4-chord harmonic sequence with guitar arpeggios accompanying more melodious vocal articulation. I will first consider back to back the content of the strophes, before moving on to the refrains. The incipit of the first strophe features an intermedial quotation from renowned writer and partisan Beppe Fenoglio (I ventitre giorni 3) recounting the short-lived liberation of the Piedmont city of Alba, single-handedly accomplished by the partisans in autumn 1944. Setting the ethos of the whole song, CSI choose to zoom in on an episode that turned into defeat and “despair,” and yet could galvanize the partisans’ hopes, having occurred as it did against all odds. The incipit of the second strophe portrays an assembly that – we are led to imagine – somewhat resembles that of the partisans in Alba. It is clear that the reference is to the 1995 MR concert, which was staged next to a partisan hideout in the countryside surrounding the town of Correggio: Luogo della memoria, pomeriggio di festa (“A place of memory, a festive afternoon”). The next lines continue to conjure MR, all the while enacting a close dialogue between past and present: Giovane umanità antica fiera indigesta Cielo padano plumbeo denso incantato incredulo Un canto partigiano al comandante Diavolo Ancient young humanity, proud, untamed Gray sky of the Po valley, dense, enchanted, in disbelief A partisan song [rises] for Commander Devil 14 F. SPINETTI These evoked images (and sounds) could equally apply to MR and the Resistenza, whether they signify the materiality of places “behind the Gothic line” (i.e. the Po valley); the moral and affective condition of a humanity that is as young as the one of old used to be; or the singing homage to Germano “Devil” Nicolini, partisan commander in the area of Reggio Emilia, who participated as a cherished witness and supporter in the MR event. Along a similar scheme of montage de temps, the lines closing both strophes are temporally polysemic: Non si teme/Non temere il proprio tempo è un problema di spazio . . . Geniali dilettanti in selvaggia parata Ragioni personali una questione privata Don’t fear your time, it’s a question of space Genius dilettantes in a wild parade Personal reasons, a private matter Here, an intermedial fragment taken from Soviet poet Osip Mandel’štam (24; “you’re still lucid, don’t fear your time, don’t be sly”; Zamboni, Il mio primo dopoguerra 179–80) is complemented by a proposition (“it’s a question of space”) pointing to the issue of carving out for oneself a “physical, mental, existential and political space,” as Zamboni glossed this line for me (“E-Mail to the author”). This is a reclamation of agency that resonates as much with the partisans’ ethos as with the struggle of the civic associazionismo discussed earlier to articulate an activist social space in alternative to party politics. The next two lines evoke CCCP’s origins in West Berlin’s punk scene (“genius dilettantes”) and, concomitantly, the partisans, who are depicted – quoting again Fenoglio (I ventitre giorni 4; Una questione privata) – as a “wild parade” rather than a structured army, pursuing “private matters” rather than ideological imperatives. What gains center stage here in the representation of the Resistenza is the dimension of existential investment and personal responsibility, of erupting rebellion and youthful liberty, a far call indeed from the age-long narrative of mass liberation struggle, martyrdom and heroism of institutional memory politics. The refrain of “Linea gotica” further qualifies these concepts, elevating them to an affective climax, like a vision dawning, through the emergence of harmony in the musical score: La facoltà di non sentire la possibilità di non guardare Il buon senso la logica if atti le opinioni le raccomandazioni Occorre essere attenti per essere padroni di se stessi . . . The right not to hear, the option to ignore Common sense, logic, facts, opinions and counsels You must think clearly to be in charge of yourself . . . Against all odds, in defiance of prevalent judgments and obvious conveniences, despite the likelihood of defeat – malgré tout (“in spite of all”) says Didi-Huberman – one can revolt. It takes self-possession, lucidity, and a “wild,” “proud” heart filled with hope. I cannot help but think of Giorgio Agamben’s studies in the genealogy of political sovereignty. Agamben identifies in the “state of exception” – Ausnahmezustand, a notion he draws from political theorist Carl Schmitt – a sphere of action outside the juridical system that entails an exertion of violence, of arbitrary power, with neither legal nor POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 15 ritual sanction (Stato 32–34, 66; Homo 3–45). This is a “fundamental political structure” (24), the violent root of sovereign decision-making upon which the instauration of any social and juridical order rests, and which periodically resurfaces with the activation of state violence against the most acute endogenous and exogenous conflicts. According to a Foucaultian bio-political paradigm, the state of exception has become the norm of modernity, emerging in particularly forceful ways with Nazism as well as the current “rebirth . . . of fascism in Europe,” but in fact potentially conquering every aspect of life under the purview of contemporary technocratic despotism, ubiquitous warfare, and panoptical surveillance (135; Stato 9–32, 110–11). But the state of exception – a sovereign act “absolutely outside and beyond the law” – can also have a liberating and anarchistic side to it (12). Here, Agamben turns to a close reading of Walter Benjamin (“Kritik der Gewalt” 64 and passim), who, responding polemically to Schmitt, saw the possibility of a form of violence or power (Gewalt) erupting in opposition to or as a defense against the ordering and ultimately oppressive violence (mythische or drohende Gewalt, “mythical” or “impending violence”) of the state and the legal apparatus. Benjamin conceptualized this liberating violence as “pure” (reine), “immediate” (unmittelbare) and “divine” (göttliche), whose “highest manifestation” (höchste Manifestation) in human action he named “revolutionary violence” (revolutionäre Gewalt). In glossing these concepts, Agamben emphasizes that “The very character of this violence is that it neither establishes nor preserves the law but deposes it . . . thus inaugurating a new historical epoch” (Stato 69–70). Accordingly and quite fittingly for my discussion, Agamben sees a “close relationship” between Benjamin’s (and his) notion of state of exception, and “civil war, insurrection and resistance” (Stato 10, 20–21, 77; Stasis 30). This line of thinking comes close to the ways CSI – and several other artists of the revitalization movement – have narratively reinterpreted the Resistenza. This is no longer viewed as the founding chapter of consolidated democratic structures to be defended, but rather as an episode of radical rupture – a rebellious, beyond-the-law generative tension bearing testimony to the possibility of human actions freed from inherited rules. The last line of “Linea gotica” – mai come ora, “like never before” – even further depicts the Resistenza as an unprecedented episode in national history, whose promise remained largely unaccomplished, but whose legacy, now stripped of its mythical aura, can be redeemed and projected toward new horizons of antifascist morality. It is here that the imaginative investment with the past comingles with the imagination of a possible future, very much in the spirit of a utopian or, more precisely, uchronic desire. This, in the words of Alessandro Portelli, is “not about how history went, but about how it could have gone” and pursues a “glimpse of the possible alternative worlds that might have existed” in order to continue to believe that “the most desirable of possible worlds . . . could be created one day” (150).24 This is itself an act of resistance malgré tout, which reverberates with the struggles taken up and the aspirations harbored by contemporary associazionismo in spite of the quandaries to both Resistenza memory and political action I outlined earlier. It is a gesture of imaginative memory of the kind Benjamin (“Begriff der Geschichte” xii and passim) and Didi-Huberman after him (208–12, 221) view as an act of “redemption” (Erlösung) of the world on the part of the “generation of the defeated” – read here both the “loser partisan” of Zamboni’s quote above and the orphaned utopists of today. 16 F. SPINETTI If this status of the Resistenza can be detected, as I believe it should, in CSI’s memory work, it is interesting to remark that it intersects some of the innovative propositions emerging from current Italian critical historiography. Here, the Resistenza has been often interpreted in stark contrast to the narrative of “a nation at war,” emphasizing its fragmented and molecular morphology over osmosis with the structures of political parties; its experimentalism in novel egalitarian social, intercultural, gender and labor relations over ideological centralization; its spontaneity and pragmatic inventiveness over a military and political master plan. These are some of the traits intimately related to what Valerio Romitelli has called “the happiness of the partisans” (Felicità dei partigiani). Resistenza armed bands were “substantially irregular, without any State legitimacy” and the political and human experience they lived was essentially “outside the system” (Odio 77, 93, 96), like in Agamben’s state of exception. Further mirroring much of the narrative of “Linea gotica,” Giovanni De Luna has captured a significant subjective and moral dimension to this. He points out that joining a partisan unit, was . . . like crossing an abyss. You would change your name . . . and be basically born again, accomplishing through your battle name a sort of existential rebirth, giving way to a recapitulation of what you truly wanted to become. . . . Being part of a partisan “band,” of a community in arms, led to . . . a world in which nothing could be taken for granted; the choice to take sides had to be constantly renewed and every time, to make that choice, you were alone with your own conscience. (15-16) De Luna further contends that there existed a “perfect Resistance,” made of women and men who “tried to give the best of themselves on a political as well as human level,” people with different backgrounds and political orientations who “broke through old ideological and social barriers, [and] overcame the grounds of historic discriminations” (12–13). See how closely such interpretive moves resonate with “Linea gotica”’s reprise of the refrain: Occorre essere attenti scegliersi la parte dietro la Linea gotica Comandante Diavolo monaco obbediente giovane staffetta ribelle combattente La mia piccola patria dietro la Linea gotica sa scegliersi la parte You must think clearly and choose your side behind the Gothic Line Commander Devil, disciplined monk, young dispatch rider, rebel fighter My little homeland behind the Gothic Line knows which side to stand on Three points I would like to underline before I come to a close. First, to capture the connotation of the reflexive verb scegliersi, this should be paraphrased as “to choose independently for one’s own benefit” – which encodes the intimate conversation with oneself and the sovereign drive to rebellion explored above. Second, note that communist Germano “Devil” Nicolini appears next to a “disciplined monk,” that is, Giuseppe Dossetti, antifascist Catholic priest, jurist, and partisan operating, like Nicolini, in the area of Reggio Emilia. Whether or not the intended reference to Dossetti is readily caught, what is evidently cued here is an alliance between people who “broke through old ideological and social barriers,” at once moving away from the consolidated political affiliations magnified by the party-centered Cold-War Resistenza narrative, and speaking POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 17 in meaningful ways to the diffuse, coalitional, and pragmatic political praxis of contemporary bottom-up civic associazionismo.25 Finally, it is not the Patria (“Homeland”) of the national heroic tale that chooses the right side; it is “my little homeland” that did and may possibly do again – an assembly of like-hearted associates, a town (be it Reggio Emilia, Alba or any other), a band of rebels. Epilogue A rather preposterous assumption has hovered in the background of my discussion: that the post-Berlin Wall years could be construed as one epoch, our epoch, and collapsed into one expansive present of sorts – one bookended here by CSI’s mid-1990s musical memorialization of the Resistenza and its reutilization in a 2018 public debate about antifascism. Inadequate as this operation certainly is, it may be partially vindicated on account of the continuing salience of what took off with the momentous turn of events of 1989 – i.e. both the “crisis” of antifascism and the creative responses thereto, in Italy as elsewhere. It remains that a closer inspection of the trajectories and turns of the Resistenza music revitalization movement and its social mediation over such a historical period is no doubt called for. Further exploding the chronotope of my inquiry, I have processed CSI’s compositional work through a robust theoretical arsenal, allowing myself to indulge in an “imaginative leap” of the kind sponsored by Martin Daughtry (53–54) – yet another seemingly preposterous gesture, which, paradoxically, I performed in an attempt to do justice to CSI’s work by listening carefully to its open-ended invitation to imagination and philosophical reflection. Somewhat reassuringly, Massimo Zamboni wrote to me as I was working on this article, “As for the lyrics of ‘Linea gotica,’ I am delighted that you’re agonizing over them. If I tried to explain them to you, I would only tamper the host of reflections that they can arouse in you” (“E-Mail to the author”). Perhaps a short final anecdote can speak to both these predicaments. As I followed Giorgio Agamben’s breadcrumb trail, I arrived at the writings of Tiqquni, the collective of anonymous theorists and activists, who, publishing originally in French through the 2000s, geared Agamben’s thought to laying down the seditious commandments of a theory of diffuse insurrection. In the 2010 English edition of their Introduction to Civil War, in the closing poetic section entitled “How Is It To Be Done?” (204), as if on cue, I stumbled upon the following verse: “Not to fear one’s time is a question of space.” Although Tiqqun present this line as a quotation, they do not credit it. And although I chose to translate it differently, we can be certain; we know where it comes from. Notes 1. For an instructive review of the history of neofascism in postwar Italy, see Vercelli. 2. Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship began in 1922 and ended in July 1943. To this, one must add fascism’s storming rise in 1919-1922 and the Italian Social Republic, Mussolini’s reconstituted regime under the aegis of Nazi-German occupation (1943-1945). The partisans’ liberation struggle (Resistenza or lotta di liberazione) was waged both against foreign occupation and the Italians who remained loyal to Mussolini. The term “civil war” designates this latter dimension of the conflict. For a history of the Resistenza, see Behan; Flores and Franzinelli. 18 F. SPINETTI 3. Examples of all the above abound. See, for instance, McKenna; “Salvini.” 4. All translations from foreign languages are by the author. Lyrics used courtesy of Massimo Zamboni. 5. The Gothic Line (German, Gotenstellung) was the defense line set up in summer 1944 by German field marshal Albert Kesselring across northern and central Italy to contain the Allies pressing from the south. The lands along and north of the Gothic Line witnessed the most lasting confrontations between the Italian partisans, and Nazi-German and Italian fascist forces. 6. For the purposes of this paper, I bracket out the Resistenza-related activities of former CSI members, including the band’s short-lived iterations as ex-CSI and post-CSI, with Angela Baraldi substituting vocalist Giovanni Lindo Ferretti (see Spinetti, Nemico; “The Enemy”; “Passaggi” 90-95). Beyond the point are also the controversial, conservative-leaning positions taken up by Ferretti after CSI’s breakup. 7. CCCP included also avant-gardist stage performers Danilo Fatur and Annarella Giudici, and variable instrumentalists. On CCCP and CSI, see Campo; Rossi; Tomatis 546, 589-91, 622-25; Zamboni, Il mio primo dopoguerra. 8. On homegrown socialism in Italy’s “red regions,” see, in English, Kertzer; Ginsborg 102-04. 9. This self-designation shrewdly hints also at the variegated mosaic of expressive forms and popular culture nurtured in the networked civic associations of Emilia-Romagna (Dei), which provided a breeding ground for CCCP. 10. CCCP’s album title Socialismo e barbarie (“Socialism and Barbarity,” 1987) subverts Rosa Luxemburg’s slogan “socialism or barbarity.” 11. A number of drummers followed one another in CSI. Like CCCP, Liftiba were bound to a circuit of civic associations, this time in “red” Tuscany (Casini). 12. For an exemplary study, seeFocardi,Guerra della memoria. 13. On “Bella ciao” and its history, see Pivato 182-86; Pestelli; Bermani. 14. A study that is widely regarded as seminal isPavone. While I will spotlight some of the propositions of current critical historiography in my analysis of CSI’s songs, the overall body of literature and the issues addressed therein are too large to be summarized here. For a useful overview in English, see Sica. 15. These positions echo those expressed by the forefather of Italian revisionist historiography, Renzo De Felice (see e.g. Ferrara). On Italian historiographic revisionism and its percolations in public discourse,see Mammone; Ventresca; Mattioli; Focardi, “Antifascism.” 16. For a broader, transnational consideration of historiographic revisionism, including the socalled “crisis of the antifascist paradigm,” see the Introduction to this thematic issue. 17. Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana (Italian Recreation and Culture Association), founded in 1957. For an exemplary study, see Fanelli,Casa. 18. An exception here, centri sociali have emerged out of the 1970s countercultural and leftradical autonomia. Antifascism here is often practiced as direct-action militancy, with the organizational model of the international Antifa network gaining prominence since the late 1990s. 19. ANPI and ARCI have decupled their subscriptions since the 1990s. On these and other aspects of associazionismo, see Ginsborg 119-29; Fanelli, Casa 6-9, 40-46; Biorcio and Vitale. 20. On the points I raise here, see Ventresca 204-05; Fanelli, Casa xiv, 28. In turn, few studies in Italian popular music have done justice to the preeminence of the Resistenza theme in the musical articulation of public memory – among these is Pivato 318-23. 21. On associazionismo and popular music in Emilia-Romagna and elsewhere, see, for instance Colarossi et al.; Bassi; Fanelli, Contro 95-106. 22. Revelli assigns the origin of this song to the 1830s but testifies to its use by Italian soldiers on the World War II Russian front (102). 23. For “narrative” as a key notion in memory studies, see, among others, Rigney 70-71. 24. See also Tiqqun’s epigraph to this article. Along similar lines, Slavoj Žižek, talking about the French and Bolshevik revolutions as memorialized in European leftist imagination, states, POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 19 “The reality of what went on . . . belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity” (44-45). 25. For discussions in music scholarship that resonate with the “alliances that tend to cross-out identitarian politics” (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 159) signified here, see Mattern and Giroux. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Einaudi, 1995. ——. Stato di eccezione. (Homo sacer, II, 1). Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. ——. Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma politico. (Homo sacer, II, 2). Bollati Boringhieri, 2015. Ananasso, Agnese. “Raid razzista a Macerata, spari contro gli africani: 6 feriti. Fermato italiano incensurato.” La Repubblica, 3 Feb. 2018, https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2018/02/03/news/ macerata_sparatoria-187934230/. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020. Bassi, Franco. Vent’anni fuori orario. Wingsbert, 2014. Behan, Tom. The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies. Pluto, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. “Zur Kritik der Gewalt.” 1921. Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze, Suhrkamp, 1965, pp. 29–65. ——. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” 1940. GesammelteSchriften, I.2, edited by Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 690–708. Bermani, Cesare. Bella ciao. Storiae for tuna di una canzone. Interlinea, 2020. Biorcio, Roberto, and Tommaso Vitale. Italia civile. Associazionismo, partecipazione e politica. Donzelli, 2016. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT P, 2000. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso, 2000. Campo, Alberto, editor. Fedeli alla linea. Dai CCCP ai CSI. Giunti, 1997. Casini, Bruno. In viaggio con i Litfiba. Cronache rock degli anni Ottanta. Zona, 2009. CCCP. Socialismo e barbarie. EMI, 1987. LP. Chiesa, Guido, and Davide Ferrario, directors. Materiale resistente. Dinosaura, 1995. Documentary film. Colarossi, Marco, et al., editors. Correggio Mon Amour. Storia di storie della musica rock in una città della provincia emiliana. Lucio Lombardo Radice, 2008. Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5, 1997, pp. 1386–403. doi:10.2307/2171069. CSI, et al. Materiale resistente 1945–1995. Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti, 1995. CD. CSI. Linea Gotica. I Dischi del Mulo, 1996. CD. ——. La terra, la guerra, una questione privata. Black Out, 1998. CD. Daughtry, Martin J. “Acoustic Palimpsests.” Theorizing Sound Writing, edited by Deborah Kapchan, Wesleyan UP, 2017, pp. 46–85. De Luna, Giovanni. La Resistenza perfetta. Feltrinelli, 2015. Dei, Fabio. “Postfazione: Case del popolo e cultura popolare.” In Antonio Fanelli, A Casa del Popolo. Antropologia e storia dell’associazionismo ricreativo, Donzelli, 2014, pp. 217–26. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images malgré tout. Éditions de Minuit, 2003. Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney, editors. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. de Gruyter, 2009. Fanelli, Antonio. A Casa del Popolo. Antropologia e storia dell’associazionismo ricreativo. Donzelli, 2014. 20 F. SPINETTI ——,. Contro canto. Le culture della protesta dal canto sociale al rap. Donzelli, 2017. Fenoglio, Beppe. Una questione privata. Garzanti, 1963. ——. I ventitre giorni della città di Alba. 1952. Einaudi, 2015. Ferrara, Giuliano. “De Felice: Perché deve cadere la retorica dell’antifascismo.” Corriere della Sera, 27, Dec 1987, pp. 1+. Ferrario, Davide, editor. Materiali resistenti. Dinosaura; Laboratorio 80, 1995. Flores, Marcello, and Mimmo Franzinelli. Storia della Resistenza. Laterza, 2019. Focardi, Filippo. La guerra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi. Laterza, 2005. ——. “Antifascism and the Resistance: Public Debate and Politics of Memory in Italy from the 1990s to the Present.” Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics 1922 to the Present, edited by Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, and Cristina Clímaco, Berghahn, 2016, pp. 258–75. Gallori, Paolo. “Pavia, antifascisti ‘marchiati’ con adesivo sulla porta di casa. La reazione dei sindaci che si ‘automarchiano.’” La Repubblica, 3 Mar. 2018, https://www.repubblica.it/speciali/ politica/elezioni2018/2018/03/03/news/pavia_antifascista_segnalati_con_adesivo_sulla_porta_ di_casa-190277837/. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020. Ginsborg, Paul. Italy and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State 1980–2001. Penguin, 2001. Giroux, Monique. “From Identity to Alliance: Challenging Métis ‘Inauthenticity’ through Alliance Studies.” Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol. 55, 2018, pp. 91–117. doi:10.5921/ yeartradmusi.50.2018.0091. Gundle, Stephen. Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991. Duke UP, 2000. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012. Kertzer, David I. Comrades and Christians: Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy. Cambridge UP, 1980. Lerner, Gad. “Il boomerang di Salvini che riduce a un derby la festa del 25 aprile.” La Repubblica, 22 Apr. 2019, https://rep.repubblica.it/pwa/generale/2019/04/22/news/il_boomerang_di_sal vini_che_riduce_a_un_derby_la_festa_del_25_aprile-224653842/?refresh_ce. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020. Longo, Luigi. Un popolo alla macchia. Mondadori, 1947. Luzzatto, Sergio. La crisi dell’antifascismo. Einaudi, 2004. Mammone, Andrea. “A Daily Revision of the Past: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Memory in Contemporary Italy.” Modern Italy, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 221–26. doi:10.1080/ 13532940600709338. Mandel’štam, Osip. Viaggio in Armenia. 1933. Translatedy by Serena Vitale. Adelphi, 1988. Mattern, Mark. “Cajun Music, Cultural Revival: Theorizing Political Action in Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, 1998, pp. 31–48. doi:10.1080/03007769808591704. Mattioli, Aram. “Viva Mussolini!” Die Aufwertung des Faschismus im Italien Berlusconis. Schöningh, 2010. McKenna, Josephine. “Salvini under Fire for Address from Notorious Balcony Used by Mussolini to Watch Executions.” The Telegraph, 5 May. 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/ 05/salvini-fire-address-notorious-balcony-used-mussolini-watch/. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020. Nora, Pierre, editor. Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols., Gallimard, 1984–1992. Paggi, Leonardo. “Antifascism and the Reshaping of Democratic Consensus in Post-1945 Italy.” New German Critique, vol. 67, 1996, pp. 101–10. doi:10.2307/827779. Pavone, Claudio. Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza. Bollati Boringhieri, 1991. Pestelli, Carlo. Bella ciao: La canzone della libertà. Add, 2016. Pivato, Stefano. Bella ciao: Canto e politica nella storia d’Italia. Laterza, 2005. Plastino, Goffredo, editor. La musica folk. Storie, protagonisti e documenti del revival. Il Saggiatore, 2016. POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 21 Portelli, Alessandro. “Uchronic Dreams: Working-Class Memory and Possible Worlds.” The Myths We Live By, edited by Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, Routledge, 1990, pp. 143–60. Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton UP, 1993. Revelli, Nuto. Le due guerre. Guerra fascista e guerra partigiana. Einaudi, 2003. Rigney, Ann. “Cultural Memory Studies: Mediation, Narrative, and the Aesthetic.” Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, Routledge, 2016, pp. 65–76. Romitelli, Valerio. L’odio per i partigiani: Come e perché contrastarlo. Cronopio, 2007. ——. La felicità dei partigiani e la nostra: Organizzarsi per bande. Cronopio, 2015. Rossi, Michele. Quello che deve accadere, accade. Storia di Giovanni Lindo Ferretti e Massimo Zamboni. Giunti, 2014. “Salvini: ‘Il fascismo è cosa del passato, non potete sminuire la manifestazione per qualche saluto Romano.’” La Stampa, 10 Sept. 2019, https://video.lastampa.it/politica/salvini-il-fascismo -e-cosa-del-passato-non-potete-sminuire-la-manifestazione-per-qualche-saluto-romano /103470/103485. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020. Sica, Emanuele. “Introduction.” Italy and the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives, edited by Emanuele Sica and Richard Carrier, Brill, 2018, pp. 1–12. Spinetti, Federico. “The Enemy – A Partisan Hymnbook: Critical Notes on Memory, Music, and the Making of A Documentary Film.” Music in Society, edited by Amra Bosnić and Naida Hukić, Musicological Society of FBIH; Academy of Music, University of Sarajevo 2018, pp. 217–45. ——. “Passaggi di memoria: Fischia il vento e la sua eredità nelle canzoni.” Studie Ricerche di Storia Contemporanea, vol. 90, 2018, pp. 67–100. ——. director. Il Nemico – Un breviario partigiano. Lab80film, 2015. Documentary film. “Svastiche naziste su sede Anpi a Carrara.” ANSA, 17 Mar. 2018, https://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/ politica/2018/03/17/svastiche-naziste-su-sede-anpi-a-carrara_71c1c917-b2ed-492e-855f4e9e55a7a8aa.html. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020. Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. The MIT P, 2010. Tomatis, Jacopo. Storia culturale della canzone italiana. Il Saggiatore, 2019. Ventresca, Robert. “Debating the Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy.” Modern Italy, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 189–209. doi:10.1080/13532940600709288. Vercelli, Claudio. Neofascismi. Capricorno, 2018. Zamboni, Massimo. Il mio primo dopoguerra. Cronache sulle macerie: Berlino Ovest, Beirut, Mostar. Mondadori, 2005. ——. Personal Interview. Reggio Emilia, 10 Jun. 2013. ——. E-Mail to the author, 29 Jan. 2019. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. Profile, 2009.