American Bandstand, the Italian way

In the late 50’s, the contagion of rock’n’roll music spread throughout the Italian national territory.Through the diffusion among the young people of the new juke boxes, of the gleaming new cover of the 45 records rpm and of the portable record-players, rock’n’roll became the soundtrack of the Italian “great transformation”, the sudden and powerful economic boom.Those who felt the impact of modernization more than anyone else were the teenage girls and boys, who grew up during the hard years of the economic reconstruction of the country. Unlike their parents and older siblings, they had not experienced the traumas of the Second World War and of the civil war that, between 1943 and 1945, had split Italy in two between the fascists and the anti-fascists. In many cases these young people had passed part of their childhood in the athletic and recreational organizations of the parishes or the political parties, but still, for the most part, outside any militant party organizing. So they had not absorbed the culture of ideological conflict between the communists and the anti-communists that poisoned the Italian political atmosphere during the 1940s and for all of the 1950s. It is not hard to believe, therefore, that these young people who came of age in a more democratic Italy, that assured them the novelty of freedom of thought, were more open to accept the myths of the new prosperity synthesized in the “American way of life”. Rock‘n’roll music, with its transgressive charge, accelerated the teenage takeover of the music industry and, in a striking contrast with the melodic tradition that was still prevalent, marked a cultural discontinuity. As this break was perceived as a threat by the political class they tried to devitalize it by promoting an “Italian way of rock and roll” that became mass produced, harmonious in many ways to the national musical tradition. A sort of provincial rock with a little echo abroad, but with a large success among the Italian consumers and coherent with the values promoted by the Italian government led by the catholic majority party of the Christian Democrats (who throughout the Fifties and Sixties controlled all the radio and television broadcasting and part of the music industry). Hence in the mid-1950s, in the new context of economic prosperity, along with the “red scare”, there was for the government a new concern: a too rapid modernization which was breaking the traditional values. The government took prudent measures to control the symbols and rhythms of such a disruptive modernity, trying to contain them in traditional frames related to the new rhythms. RAI-TV -the public radio and television broadcasting controlled by the government- tried to reconcile the unstoppable push of modernization that arrived from the American media with the more reassuring conservative national traditions. One of the significant examples of the role of RAI-TV was the musical television program “Alta pressione” broadcasted in 1962, inspired by American Bandstand the television show that had brought rock’n’roll music into American television. In Italy, “Alta Pressione” was geared toward young people maintaining the traditional pedagogical context of original national TV. As a result, in the last episode of “Alta Pressione”, broadcasted on October 1962, the singer Adriano Celentano performed his rendition of the Ben E King’s tune Stand by me, which in the Italian cover was entitled Pregherò(I will pray). Renouncing in its lyrics any sexual or physical reference, which belonged to the original African-American version, Adriano Celentano’s song Pregherò perfectly interpreted the “Italian way of rock’n’roll” promoted by the catholic majority party of the government.