How did you approach the study of North American culture and in particular that of the African American community? 

I consider myself a member of the 1950s generation, perhaps the first to begin to develop a generational identity distinct from that of adults. To be seventeen or eighteen in the 1950s didn’t mean any longer to be just an adult in preparation, but to have an identity related to your generation. This identity essentially revolved around music, which was mainly American music. Those were the years when rock n' roll arrived: Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and later Little Richard, etc. At the same time, they were also the years when, in a rather sleepy political environment, I began to become aware of the existence of something very fascinating that is the Civil Rights Movement. We didn't know much about the bus boycott in Montgomery, but instead, for example, we did know about the whole affair of the attempted integration of the school in Little Rock, Arkansas with the intervention of federal troops, so to speak: the famous scene of the little girls walking through this gallows of racist men and women. That was a scene destined to leave a mark, because it gave the feeling that politics could somehow be something noble. Somehow, it is this dual relationship: the advent of rock music as a generational identity and the model of the Civil Rights Movement as a benchmark for a new morality, as well.

During that period, did you begin to have an interest in the approach of oral history and in music analysis as well?

No, regarding oral history, it was at least another twenty years, or so, before I realised it. What happened at that time was that we talked about America, but it was difficult to go there; I had the opportunity to take a scholarship and I spent a year in Los Angeles, California, for my senior year of high school. That was the time when movements were emerging: on the one hand there were the first civil rights summers (Freedom Summer e.d.), on the other hand the student movement was beginning to rise. There was a special focus on the peace movement, Vietnam had not yet exploded but the US were already involved in Laos and so on. That's when my classmates introduced me to the relationship between folk revival music and movements, so I discovered my first Pete Seeger record, my first Johan Baez records, and Peter, Paul and Mary soon after, then Bob Dylan and so on. Let's say that the interest was mainly in popular music and its relationship with movements. The Civil Rights Movement, which had been so important to me, used music a lot and so I ended up doing my dissertation on Woody Guthrie. Meanwhile, a question came up: «all this exists in America, but what about Italy?». For instance, in the mid-sixties, in 1964 to be precise, there was the famous Bella Ciao show in Spoleto, interrupted by law enforcements, during which they sang against the war. So I also discovered a similar tradition in Italy. On the wave of 1968 underway, I got in touch with Gianni Bosio of the Ernesto de Martino Institute and I also began doing field research in Italy. After a while, I realised that I was more interested in the stories that people told around the songs rather than the songs themselves and, from there, the oral history discourse slowly emerged. 

Did you use the analysis of musical culture as a tool to read the instances of the movements and the relationships they had with music?

Definitely, because, on the one hand, in the United States there was a very close relationship between the folk music revival and the movements: this began during the thirties and it was linked to the traditional left, Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger himself were close to the Communist Party in the thirties and until the forties, as long as it was possible; moreover, during the sixties, in the Civil Rights Movement there was We Shall Overcome. On the other hand, in Italy, Gianni Bosio’s approach argued that: if we want to write the history of the popular world, we have to use the sources that come from the popular world, songs and music are sources. Therefore, the approach to popular music is as a historical source rather than as an ethnomusicological subject. So, a dual relationship between music and politics, music and movements, music and historical class memory.

Were you able to get in touch with the movements of that period in the United States as well? And once back to Italy?

In my first year, 1960-61, I was on friendly terms with all the progressive young people in my school, but nothing more than that, just on the level of opinions. In Italy I didn’t, because I didn’t have any family or personal relationship. The process was rather gradual, that is, there was this moment of encounter with the Ernesto de Martino Institute, so with Gianni Bosio (the popular song), Ivan della Mea, Giovanna Marini, at a time when Sixty-eight was rising. So, let’s say, I was a bit old, I was born in 1942, I was already working in 1968, I had a law degree and I had a clerk job; however, that was the year that led me to go back to university and graduate in American literature and then go on, finding a way to pursue what they called an academic career. So, again, for me a lot came through music, through songs; in fact, from 1969-70 to 1972 I spent a lot of time picking up the tape recorder and going around recording, looking for music. Mostly music related to the events of the peasant struggles in the Lazio countryside, to the events of the workers’ struggles around Terni and the Valnerina area, and then the discovery of the stories that were told around the songs. Little by little, this thing I didn’t even know the name of began to emerge: the oral history. 

Regarding the last few years, I would like to ask you which elements, in your opinion, have contributed to this new wave of protests in the United States related to civil rights- but not only- after a rather quiet period of movements. I was thinking of the historical events that I think have marked the United States in recent years: from 9/11 to the 2007 Crisis and the collapse of the American dream. What do you think about it?  

During the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, there were opposition movements and movements against the war, even important ones, but there also was a full-fledged information black-out about them, that is, you couldn’t talk about them. Then, there was this crucial moment that was 2011, Occupy Wall Street. When it ended, this moment of mobilisation spread underground. For instance, Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have been possible if the people who were involved in Occupy Wall Street - that was a national movement that didn’t involve just New York - hadn’t reinvented a lot of ways of doing politics and hadn’t to a large extent been connected to his campaign. Regarding the outbreak of Black Lives Matter it is hard to explain why some things are happening now that didn’t happen before, but let’s say that the police violence, the state violence, against African Americans is a long-lasting tradition. I think it is somehow similar to the current discourse on violence against women, that is, it’s always been there, but a moment comes when you can’t take it anymore, when, above all, the victims, the targets of this violence, see themselves as a community, as a collectivity, and take on a collective voice. It’s no coincidence, by the way, that Black Lives Matter began with a group of women and, moreover, it gathered in the streets -an interesting thing about the events of this summer (2020 e.d.)- not only black people. Not since the civil rights era had there been something so shared. In one of the key places, which was Portland, at the marches there were blacks, whites and other discriminated communities; again with a very important role for women. I would say it was also somehow the anxiety about this Trump presidency and all that it has represented. So a series of elements were intertwined. The frightening thing is that the situation hasn’t changed much: the police are still killing, just like before. Where the Black Lives Matter mobilisation ended up is still unclear, at least to me. As I was saying before, the 2011 mobilisation spread in a million ways and, among other things, it reached into Black Lives Matter. We still don’t really see where the 2020 mobilisation is going. For sure, one of the things it did was increased voter turnout, which is not insignificant given what happened in Georgia. But at the moment I have a lot of information limitations, I haven’t been there for a long time, since before the pandemic, so I don’t have anything direct to say. But I would say that somehow the potential of that rebellion- that has been defined as the most important mass rebellion in United States history and which has not had any institutional effect- I think we will see it somewhere. 

During the last mass mobilisation in 2020, besides seeing a strong heterogeneous composition, with the participation of Latinos and whites, we have witnessed a strong gesture of redefinition of the symbols that were in the streets with the toppling of the statues of confederate and racist personalities. In your opinion, was this element very strong? How was it received in Europe? For instance, it has had very strong echoes in England.

In England yes, for example what happened with the statue of Edward Colston, which was thrown into the river [1]. Let’s say that it has become intolerable to have a narrative of history that legitimises discrimination and oppression represented on the streets, in the public space, quite simply. What happened in the United States with the statues of the supposed confederate heroes is the same as what we did with the monument to Graziani, mass murderer in Ethiopia and head of the RSI army [2]. It has become quite unbearable to see personalities represented as heroes who were not, and this has become part of the redefinition of the collective identity. Here in Italy, even the left, better, let’s say some areas of liberal-progressive thought, have completely swallowed the narrative of the American right about the so-called cancel culture. That is, that the idea of toppling a statue of a murderous slave-trader is a violation of history and that, in general, history is not to maintain that statue, which is a lie. In Italy, the dispute about the so-called cancel culture is truly a triumph of right-wing hegemony. Of course, in all situations there may be excesses and whatnot, but it is ridiculous that, because of two journalists who say, in a neighbourhood newspaper in San Francisco, that the prince's kiss to Snow White is a non-consensual sexual approach [3] - which, by the way, it is-, in Italy (!) there is a media campaign like “In America they want to ban Snow White”. In America, two people said that. The attempt to redefine the significance of public space in terms of historical correctness means putting history in its place: i.e. we define murderers as “murderers”; we define rapists as “rapists”; we define bad journalists as “bad journalists”. See the Montanelli case. In this sense, the cultural battle over language and symbols is a democratic battle. Unfortunately, in Italy in Rome, we still have the obelisk with 'Mussolini' written on it and we happen to have Mussolini's heirs in government.

Still regarding the 2020 events, is there a common thread to this historical battle that then leads to the famous storming of the Capitol?

African-Americans have been saying since 1890 that the statue of General Lee that was removed [4] had to be removed. Again, in relation to a whole series of things that have come to a head now, people haven’t suddenly gone mad and said, for example, "I don't want the Foro Italico to be called the Foro Mussolini any more", they just can't take it any more. Don’t forget that most of these racist monuments are not legacies, that is, they were not erected during the segregation era, but they are being erected now. The equestrian monument to General Bedford, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, was erected in the 1990s in Memphis, Tennessee - the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated -, effectively endorsing a speech along the lines of: 'they were right to kill Martin Luther King, we stand with the Ku Klux Klan'. These are impositions of the present, not legacies. Everybody says: "So what about the Trajan’s Column?", but that has been there for three thousand years, whereas we are now erecting the equestrian statues to racists. The statue of Colson, an eighteenth-century man from Bristol, was made in the late nineteenth century with the precise intention of offering a racial identity as an alternative to the rising labour movement. These are precise interventions on the present.

Do you think it was the outbreak of such a mass and radical movement that prompted the response of racist white America with the storming of the Capitol?

Yes, certainly. The really impressive thing is that the people who stormed the Capitol thought that they were the defenders of democracy. Because misinformation and media manipulation meant that they somehow believed that there was ethnic substitution, liberal hegemony and ultimately that democracy was under threat. At the same time, what they meant by democracy is yet to be defined. I think that to a large extent when Trump said «Make America great again», he was saying very simply: «let's go back to the 1950s, to before the Civil Rights Movements; let's go back to an America where the security and guarantee of racial hierarchies is the guarantor for the most precarious components of the white working classes». From Reagan onwards there has been a very radical, intelligent and thorough job of smashing something that until the 1960s went together, which was the unity between civil rights - all of them, including women's movement - and the labour and trade union movement. The destruction of the trade unions was also made possible and actively sought by the Democratic Party, which since the late 1980s promoted a discourse such as: «we have nothing to do with the trade unions, we want their money and their votes, but we are the party of the professional middle class». This rupture brought in a clever reactionary politics that, without shouting it or saying it out loud, equated the working class with white race. The attack on the welfare era in the 1990s under Clinton was made possible by a rhetoric that more or less went like this: «welfare serves the parasites, the n*ggers who don't want to work, we white working class people pay taxes to support them».

You are referring to the famous “welfare queen” figure [5], aren’t you?

Yes, the welfare queen: black and female. This split meant that every advance, every achievement of African Americans and migrants has been perceived not as a collective step forward for all workers, but as a threat to the ones which existed before. Again, the parallel with the women’s movement: the increasing violence against women - as well as always having been there - is also the effect of a world view in which men think they have the right to command and, as women obey less and less, they feel threatened. The same thing happens when you used to think that in the name of the colour of your skin you were entitled to priority in recruitment and more guaranteed jobs and suddenly you risk having to deal with equality. Above all, you have been deprived of any form of new identity, you no longer identify as a worker, but as white and male. This is happening in Italy as well: the workers who vote for Lega are related to the working class who vote for Trump. That’s nothing new. Your identity as a worker has been questioned, it doesn’t exist anymore, the only identities you have are the gender and skin colour ones, so you defend that. It must be said that there are small, not negligible, signs of a recovery of the trade union presence in the United States: the Amazon case [6] and the Starbucks case [7]. It’s no coincidence that these are all sectors where there is a strong presence of the various minority groups. Even a president like Biden - who is the least anti-union there has been in the history of the United States over the last half century - nevertheless intervened heavily to prevent the railway workers’ strike. It is significant that for the first time in thirty years railway workers were on the verge of going on strike over working conditions, rights and health. These are small, I would say not negligible, signs that challenge the idea that a working class without identity and without political rights as such can continue to exist indefinitely. One thing that is never told in Italy is how many endless obstacles there are to trade union organisation in the United States. The National Labor Relations Board of the 1930s actually started as a recognition of trade union rights, but it ended up putting so many obstacles in the way that it became really difficult to do trade union work. In the United States you cannot go to the labour board and join a union, there is no individual right to join a union.

If I am not mistaken, it is also customary and legitimate for employers to pit groups of unionised workers against those who are not, right?  

Yeah, a worker can only join a union if it is the only union approved by majorance. Moreover, there are also obstacles to mobilisation campaigns. The people who stormed the US Capitol were frightened people, and we have witnessed a politics of fear for more than twenty years now. Fear of migrants, of crime, of precarity.. and fear moves to the right, it always does. I would also add that the historical forms of fear had a very clear historical pattern, that of lynchings.

The last issue I would like to raise is quite related to the issues we have already touched on. On the one hand, the forms of government inaugurated in the 1980s with the advent of neoliberalism, and on the other, mass incarceration (the new Jim Crow), i.e. the militarisation of the police in the governance of social movements and American cities. For example, I was very impressed to see how protests like the one in LA in '92 and those of the last 10 years have been handled. What do you think about that?

This process of militarisation ran parallel to the wars waged by the United States. As weapons and war equipment were renewed by the armed forces, what was decommissioned was then passed on to the various local police forces, who have always seen their role as essentially one of repression. I was struck by how with Black Lives Matter - as of 2015 in Ferguson - in the internal communications within the so-called law enforcement they spoke in military terms, viz: “the enemy to be controlled”. In this perspective they are literally thinking of a civil war, which then refers back to the great themes of the 1960s about the ghetto as a colony, about the ghetto as a militarily occupied territory. This structural dimension is then intertwined with the organisational culture of the police. In Italy we have just had the Verona case and before that the Piacenza case, the Uno Bianca gang, Cucchi and Aldrovandi; there is no doubt that a culture of violence of this kind develops within a self-referential body that is armed and responsible for the exercise of the violence. In the case of the United States, this element is even more pronounced. One of the differences, for instance, between the violences in Verona and a series of police massacres and murders in the United States is that in the former the police acted knowing they were taking on harmless people, whereas in the latter there is also an element of fear because the population is armed. When the police make a stop on the motorway, they are obviously paranoid, because they do not know if the person they have stopped for running a red light is armed. Let’s add another thing, most of the police killings in the United States occur due to traffic violations. In the United States, running a red light is a criminal offence, it’s not like in Italy, where it is an infringement involving a fine. This is one of the elements that emphasise the class and racial dimension, the people who happen to violate traffic laws, because maybe their car lights don’t work, are the people who have the most wrecked cars, are the less rich ones. Don’t forget that, we talk about the police murders of black people, but a less tragic, yet far above the collective average, percentage affects the Latinos and the “ethnic” group most proportionally affected by police violence: Native Americans. There is also a percentage of white people killed by the police. What all these people have in common is that they tend to be poor, is the class dimension.

I’m done with the questions, but I pose one last provocation: do you think rap can be the new music of the movements, as folk-revival and spirituals were in the 1960s-1970s?

The problem is that rap cannot be sung in chorus. Spirituals can, struggle songs can. You can have militant rap, as well as you can have a song like What's going on by Marvin Gaye in the culture industry and so on, but the music of the movements is linked to something you can sing together. Then, here two elements come into play: the first is that, for more or less half a century now, the music which has been produced is no longer music that is intended to be sung again. So much so that, when it was still customary to sing at demonstrations, the songs sung were those of the grandparents. The second is that, for different reasons, it's much more difficult to sing during demonstrations nowadays. In Italy it is not possible anymore because they set up the sound  system and the people who are running the demonstration decide what music is played, you don't even sing the slogans anymore. In the United States, because the confrontational dimension has always been more violent, more physical, as Malcom X used to say: «You don't do any singing; you're too busy swinging», meaning you cannot sing because you're too busy fighting. The relationship between music and movements culminated in the Civil Rights Movement, reaching its peak with the re-use of spiritual music, etc.; nowadays, it is definitely in crisis. So yes, you have Kendrick Lamar and artists like Ani DiFranco, but if you take the Occupy Wall Street videos - where you couldn't get amplification - what were they singing? They were singing We Shall Overcome and Which Side Are You On?, which come from the civil rights movement and the labour movement. The aria, by the way, is that of a spiritual. They were singing the songs of a generation or two earlier. Ani DiFranco re-recorded Which Side Are You On? electrically in the studio, but on the street she sang it acoustically, as it was done decades ago. What has changed is the way music is produced and the fact that less and less we're allowed to sing - they won't let me because I can’t carry a tune in a bag (he chuckles e.d.) - and more and more we're producing music that can't be reproduced outside of a recording studio, that's kind of the problem.

Notes:

[1] The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was toppled and thrown into the city river during the protests over George Floyd’s killing related to Black Lives Matter in 2020.

[2] https://www.ilpost.it/2012/09/30/il-monumento-a-rodolfo-graziani/

[3] https://www.sfgate.com/disneyland/article/2021-04-snow-whites-enchanted-wish-changes-witch-16144353.php

[4] The reference is to the monument of General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia. The statue was removed in 2020 as a result of protests over the murder of George Floyd.

[5] A stigmatising term used by the media and politicians to refer to single African American women with children who allegedly abuse the welfare state in order not to work. Its use was popularised by Reagan to justify the dismantling of the US welfare state.

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/26/amazon-union-workers-strike-protests

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/16/us-starbucks-strike-union-walkout