Autonomist Rap In Italy.pdf

‘A Love Born of Hate’

Autonomist Rap in Italy

Steve Wright

I N LESS than a decade, home-grown rap has carved out its own space

within Italy’s music scene. Emerging at the end of the 1980s from the

local squatting movement and riding the crest of nation-wide university

occupations shortly thereafter, Italian rap has since gone on to win a wide

audience throughout the country. Today its inﬂuence is also apparent within

the mainstream of Italy’s pop industry, with prominent performers such as

Jovanotti dofﬁng their caps not only to those ﬁrst rap posses, but also to the

political movement of ‘self managed, occupied social centres’ (CSOAs)

which produced them (European Counter Network, 1998).

While it has recently found its ﬁrst English-language chronicler in

Tony Mitchell (1996), Italian rap merits greater attention than it has hitherto

received, above all from those seeking to abolish ‘the present state of things’

(Marx and Engels, 1976: 49). What follows is a critical look at two such

militant rap groups, Assalti Frontali and 99 Posse. Nurtured within the

squatting scene, both bands are now ﬁnding that their popularity stretches

far beyond it – a circumstance which signals problems as well as possi-

bilities. For this reason, I argue that an exploration of the lyrics and other

pronouncements of these music groups offers a privileged vector from which

to address some of the tensions between cultural labour and political com-

mitment which currently hold sway within Italy’s social centres movement.

Searching for Roots

One thing is certain: this anthology [of Italian rap] exists not as a result of my

records, but instead owes much to that whole movement of groups born in the

‘social centres’, with thanks also due to the independent labels that believed

in this sound . . . (Jovanotti, 1996: 6)

Theory, Culture & Society 2000 ( SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),

Vol. 17(3): 117–135

[0263-2764(200006)17:3;117–135;012910]

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I can’t return to my village empty-handed (‘Gocce di Sole’) (Militant A, 1997:

162)

Both 99 Posse and Assalti Frontali were founded by individuals with already

established identities in Italian autonomist circles. The front man for 99

Posse – Luca Persico, better known as O’ Zulu’, who lists his hobby as

collecting charge sheets (‘one sentence of four months and ﬁve trials in

progress’) – became politically active at 14 (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 83, 59).

Assalti Frontali’s front man, Militant A – another Luca, born like O’ Zulu’

at the end of the 1960s – was involved from a similarly precocious age with

‘the Volsci’, the dominant tendency within the Roman autonomist scene of

the late 1970s and early 1980s (Del Bello, 1997). The name 99 Posse itself

evokes one of Naples’s best known squatted spaces, Ofﬁcina 99; the band’s

ﬁrst big hit, ‘Curre curre guaglio’ (Run Boy Run), celebrates the birth of that

social centre at the beginning of the decade. Elio Manzo of the band Bisca,

which fused with 99 Posse for a time during the mid-1990s, recalls his ﬁrst

encounter with the latter at a Ofﬁcina 99 beneﬁt concert for imprisoned com-

rades, one of whom was Persico (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 27). For their part,

Assalti Frontali are an outgrowth of the Onda Rossa Posse, a group formed

within the orbit of what was for many years the Volsci’s radio station (Radio

Onda Rossa, 1998), and are likewise closely associated with a social centre:

in their case Forte Prenestino, in Rome’s east.

Little has been written to date in English about the Italian social

centres, yet the Italian rap scene is incomprehensible without some under-

standing of them. Hailed occasionally in the local press as laboratories of

cultural innovation, more commonly as dens of iniquity and subversion, the

CSOAs have become the focus of considerable public and media attention

within Italy over the past decade. From a few dozen spaces grouped at the

beginning of the 1980s around the remnants of earlier radical circles, the

centres have spread across Italy in the course of the 1990s, so that a recent

‘unofﬁcial’ tally lists more than 130 of them all told (Tactical Media Crew,

1997), of which close to one-third are concentrated in Rome and Milan.

Keeping track of the exact number from week to week is near to impossible;

since most are the product of illegal squatting, one month may bring an evic-

tion here, the next a new occupation somewhere else (Gianetti, 1994;

Dazieri, 1996). As to their activities, the programme at Forte Prenestino

shows what is possible in some of the larger centres. Apart from a docu-

mentation centre and meeting rooms for political campaigning, there is an

exhibition gallery, practice rooms for bands, space for theatrical perform-

ances, a dark room, gymnasium and ‘tea salon’. The weekly schedule of the

early 1990s saw African dance classes on Tuesday nights, yoga on Mondays

and Wednesdays, and a gym class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Regular ﬁlm

nights were also held, along with courses on design and sculpture (CSOA

Forte Prenestino, 1993a: 28).

Given its volatility, it is hardly surprising that the movement’s direc-

tion and purpose have long been hotly debated. Some within it see the

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occupied spaces as a means above all ‘to satisfy their own needs and desires’

(CRIC, 1996: 21), others as one contribution to a broader undermining of

the existing social order through the development of ‘segments of life, of

time, of space, that function according to criteria antagonistic to those of

capitalist society, based as this is upon the commodity and its spectacular

domination’ (CSOA Forte Prenestino, 1993b: 18). It is tempting to charac-

terize such alternative emphases as the consequence of long-standing differ-

ences within Italy’s broader ‘antagonistic’ movement between anarchist or

autonomist strands. Such a judgement would be facile, however, for this

tension runs through many centres no less than between them. Nor are

formal political labels necessarily helpful. While many centres identify

themselves as either anarchist or autonomist, it is clear that each term has

multiple (and sometimes conﬂicting meanings), and that some CSOAs are

run by mixed groups, or else refuse such labels altogether (Mauro and Luca,

1994).

The diffusion of social centres up and down the country – their

numbers have doubled since a similar tally was made at the end of the 1980s

(Strumia, 1990: 25) – began with the peninsula-wide occupations which

greeted the demolition (and subsequent reconstruction) of Milan’s Leoncav-

allo centre in mid-1989, and was then spurred on a few months later by the

university movement known as the Pantera, which gave many students their

ﬁrst taste of self-managing an occupied space (Arcidiacono et al., 1995). But

it is the centres’ long-standing, almost symbiotic association with Italy’s

alternative music scene which has most sustained the interest of a wider

audience. This has led some working in the academy to characterize the

centres’ main constituency as:

. . . a post-political generation which replaces the ossiﬁed language of poli-

tics with music; it is a music which homogenizes the space, the desires, the

values, by offering an opportunity to be together, to consume or play music

together, while not engaging in wage labor. The Beastie Boys’ song, ‘You’ve

got to ﬁght for your right to party’, well encapsulates the importance that the

issue of free(ing) time from work has for the Cs. (Viano and Binetti, 1996: 245)

Is this merely rhetoric? Certainly many in the movement share the goal of

one Roman centre in challenging ‘the classic schizophrenia between politi-

cal activity and life’ (Infoshop CSOA Forte Prenestino, 1996: 96). Others

have argued that such a stance simply tries to paper over the gulf which sep-

arates the centres’ ‘politicos’ from their ‘counter-cultural’ types; while the

creative tension between a project against (the constituted order in all its

facets) and one for (new social relations in the here and now) has often been

productive for all concerned, this divide has now become such that it threat-

ens paralysis whenever the movement seeks a unity beyond the mere

defence of its spaces (Cappello, 1996, 1998; Zaccaria, 1997: 215–19). What

is not in dispute is that the appeal of the CSOA is restricted primarily to the

world of youth. For some, this is proof of the movement’s vitality; for others,

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Theory, Culture & Society 17(3)

including the movement’s so-called ‘uncle’, the late Primo Moroni, it is

symptomatic of the Peter Pan syndrome of ‘a generation which has decided

to prolong its adolescence ad inﬁnitum’ (Borrelli, 1995).

Two major research projects of the 1990s have attempted, with the col-

laboration of some CSOAs in Milan (Consorzio Aaster, 1996) and Rome

(Senzamedia, 1997), to ﬂesh out the portrait of those who frequent the

centres. With a thousand or so respondents drawn from two of Milan’s better

known squats, Leoncavallo and Cox18, the Consorzio Aaster study offered

the following snapshot: the great majority of those surveyed were under 30;

more than two-thirds were male, and more than half lived with their parents.

A third were students (with a third of these also engaged in paid work), a

little under one-third were employees, one in six were self-employed, and

the remaining sixth were divided fairly evenly between job-seekers and

those engaged in intermittent paid work. About 10 percent had university

qualiﬁcations. Those women surveyed were more likely to have spent some

time at university (48 percent), and to be ‘quasi-employed’ (either student-

workers, unemployed, ﬁrst job-seekers or casual workers). Most had come

into contact with the centres through friendship circles, and while one-

quarter to one-third rated political or social commitment as an important

drawcard, the most common response emphasized ‘sociality’, along with the

attraction of music and other cultural activities. Finally, the researchers

noted that nearly one-quarter of those surveyed lived outside the region of

Lombardy – ‘an indicator’ as they put it, ‘of the intense territorial connec-

tions established between the centres during important initiatives’ (in this

case, a campaign against the existing drug laws) (Consorzio Aaster, 1996:

23–31, 30–3, 39–43, 44).

Youth = rebellion = CSOA? Not everyone within the movement seems

happy with this string of reductions, yet all, for now, remain caught within

its bind. La Strada, located in Rome’s south-west, has set itself the task of

winning a presence across all age groups within ‘the popular forces’, by

abandoning:

. . . the youth-centred logic of dance rebellion, of rebellion as spectacle . . .

for us the social centre is everyone’s place, where rap and the mazurka have

the same space and the same dignity. (Smeriglio, 1995: 60)

How successful La Strada has been in this enterprise is not clear; but as

even one of its members concedes, for now the occupied spaces are primarily

bulwarks for and of young people in the marginalized fringes of Italy’s cities

(Smeriglio, 1995: 63).

Some musicians associated with the Roman movement have argued

that ‘those who frequent the CSOAs come to hear the concert; they are not

very interested in the social centre as such’ (Nano, 1997: 12); a sense that

many come simply to consume cheap beer and smoke dope without fear of

harassment is equally common (Philopat, 1996: 101; Senzamedia, 1997). On

the other hand, there seems little doubt about the intensity of feeling the

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121

centres can evoke amongst those directly involved in their management.

Militant A’s 1997 book Storie di assalti frontali is, amongst other things, a

tale of lost innocence, of the defence of political committment in the face of

continued disappointments, above all at the hands of ostensible comrades.

But in trying to recapture his sensibilities at the time of the ﬁrst Assalti

Frontali release, he writes:

‘I can’t return to my village empty-handed’ is a phrase that synthesized the

state of mind within which the Assalti Frontali project was born. I took it as

a moral commitment. A tribute. A canticle addressed to the people of the

social centres, the only humanity that interested me amongst our Country’s

new generations. It sought to demonstrate the difference, to bring enemies to

their knees, to illuminate the wealth of the movement. Some said: ‘Ah, but

you’ll always remain in the ghetto.’ I smiled because I saw nothing negative

in that word. For me the village had an incalculable value. The treasure. What

was morally better? Artistically superior? (Militant A, 1997: 70)

Communicating Antagonistically?

Reconciling music and politics has been one of my dreams since I was little.

(Meg, in Cornacchia and Giove, 1997)

Certainly no other art form possesses such immediacy. Music has an un-

rivalled capacity for historical memory and content. (Sergio Maglietta of

Bisca, in FA, 1994)

What matters, believe me, is communicating – Sud Sound System, ‘Fuecu’.

(Pacoda, 1996: 9)

It was punk that ﬁrst shaped the musical sensibilities of the early social

centres. At the start of the 1980s, Italian punks (or punx, as the more overtly

political styled themselves) played a major role in the establishment and

maintenance of a number of Italy’s most important squatted spaces, above

all in Milan (Scarinzi and Trau’, 1984; Bramante, 1996; CS Cox 18 and

Calusca City Lights, 1996: 109–19). Most tellingly, Italian punk inverted the

nihilism commonly associated with the phrase ‘No Future’: rather than a cry

of despair, this became an injunction to ‘invent the present’ (Ibba, 1995: 86;

Moroni, 1996: 41–2). By the middle of the decade, the punk scene had swept

in and through the Milan movement’s ﬂagship, Leoncavallo, turning the

place upside down with concerts of 5,000 fans:

Until then the centre had had good relations with the neighbourhood; in prac-

tice it was like a little cultural circle. So it wasn’t ready for such a massive

crowd and it was completely lacking any sort of security. You can imagine the

chaos in a punk concert: everyone jumping, stage-diving, pogo-ing. At Leo,

to give you an idea, the walls were all white, the posts pink, the senior citi-

zens’ bar all beautifully painted. Not even a mural in sight. At the end of that

concert, there wasn’t one white space left on those walls. But Leoncavallo also

began to think a bit more grandly after that concert . . . (Ibba, 1995: 85).

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