The Mythologist in Microgroove: Fabrizio De André's Italy (1961-1981)

Abstract

Roland Barthes argues, in his 1957 Mythologies, that in the modern world mass media act as the perfect vehicles for circulating modern mythology, which, as he characterizes it, is the collusion of form and content that seeks to hide ideology in its message, while embedding it in our minds, from whence it can emanate seemingly naturally as our own dreams and ideals. Barthes gives ‘bourgeois song’ as an example of a modern-myth vehicle, a musical style that is exemplified in Italy by the music produced and disseminated by public radio and the yearly Sanremo music festival and competition, which began to define the Italian pop music scene as early as 1951. Yet, starting in the late 1950s Italian music groups and cantautori (singer-songwriters) appeared in Turin and Genoa and set themselves up against mainstream music. The cantautore genre sought to create music that was meaningful, and politically and socially motivated, rather than pure entertainment; it sought, furthermore, to counter mainstream ideologies during the revolutionary years of the mid 1960s and 1970s, when cantautori largely acted as mouthpieces for a generation that sought to raze and re-sow the ideological landscape. This dissertation asks what role popular countercultural cantautori played in propagating, altering, and/or revealing modern mythologies in Italy during the revolutionary years. Specifically, it investigates the role of Fabrizio De André in relation to other popular and mass-media producers working in Italy and abroad during those tumultuous years. The investigation is in four chapters that are organized around four sets of mythical figures: Cowboys and Indians, The Hanged Man, Jesus of Nazareth, and the Spoon River Anthology poet, Edgar Lee Masters. De André’s work is put in conversation with work by Francesco Guccini, Bob Dylan, François Villon, Dario Fo, Pier Paolo Pasolini and others, while his use of each myth is embedded in critical discussions of that myth by scholars and cultural theorists such as Umberto Eco, Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Cesare Pavese and John Hallwas.