Musica andina, noia mortale: fortuna di un infortunio critico (1977-2017)

Upon their arrival in Italy, where they would live in exile for fifteen years after the military coup of September 1973, the musicians of the Chilean group Inti-Illimani found an environment of solidarity, and very willing to listen to them. The Italian public was sensitive both to the aspects of political solidarity and to the aesthetic novelty brought by the Chilean song, reckoning the Inti-Illimani a success whose dimensions were unprecedented in the field of political song and folk roots. There were, however, expressions of annoyance and even rejection at «an unprecedented case of noise jam, which accumulated until it suddenly deflated» (Carrera 2014). The most famous was the one pronounced by the Bolognese singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla in a verse that would soon become a recurring topos of criticism: «Andean music, what a deadly boredom». This remark, which in a way could have been filed as an occasional critical ‘accident’, has instead enjoyed a long fortune, becoming a leitmotif capable of bringing together people who are ideologically distant from each other. Through the sound image of Chilean/Andean music, the topos actually pointed to an entire socio-cultural sphere politically oriented to the left, which had identified with that image to varying degrees. This article traces its trajectory of more than forty years to explore its underlying motivations, following the hermeneutic model proposed by ethnomusicologist Josep Martí for the study of contempt and rejection judgments in the musical field.