Il rock nell'Italia della "guerra fredda culturale"

Rock'n'roll music landed in Neapolitan bay in 1954 with the arrival of the Sixth Fleet -the NATO "Guardian of the Mediterranean"- and its armament. In 1951, for its geopolitical position, Naples (Italy) was officially recognised as the obvious location for the AFSouth (Allied Forces Southern Europe) Headquarters, the NATO command center for the defense of Greece, Italy and Turkey. It was not for the first time that the arrival of the African-American music in the Italian landscape was related to the arrival of the American troops. It was 1917 when jazz music arrived in Rome along with the US troops of General Pershing. A few years later, in 1919, with the shattering impact of its rhythms, African-American music seemed to express the anxieties of an Italy that had just come out of the Great War. Moreover, Mussolini's campaign in the late 1920s and early 1930s called "Radio to the People" used jazz music as an essential instrument to convince Italian people to listen to the EIAR -the Italian public radio controlled by the fascist government . It was on 15 October 1943 when the so-called Victory Disc, the big vinyl records with the swing and jazz tunes played by the big bands, were broadcast by Radio Napoli Station, just liberated by the Anglo-American military forces. Better than any propaganda speech the syncopated rhythms of jazz and swing music, so different from the sound of fascist hymns, suddenly spread among the Neapolitan people the feeling that the fascist dictatorship was finally over. In Post-World War II, with the song Tu vuo' fa' l'Americano (You want to look like an American), the singer and musician Renato Carosone announced the desire of the city to welcome the "American way of life", to forget the traumas of the war and to run toward the modernisation. In the late 50's, from Naples the contagion of rock'n'roll music spread throughout the national territory thanks to the record company and indirectly to the movies that imported the American model. 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 coloured 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".

In Italia il rock’n’roll approda nel 1954, con l’arrivo dei marinai americani alla base Nato di Napoli appena installata nella baia di Bagnoli dove in poco tempo sorgono a ogni angolo bar e locali notturni. Qui i ritmi viscerali e frenetici di una musica dalla matrice afroamericana affascinano borghesi e scugnizzi partenopei. Certo non erano gli ufficiali e le alte cariche militari ad acquistare i dischi di attualità, ma i tanti soldati e marinai entusiasti compratori dei vinili di rhythm’n’blues e di rock’n’roll dai rivenditori d’oltreoceano che garantivano tempi brevissimi di spedizione e prezzi assai ridotti rispetto ai listini di mercato. Nella città partenopea il binomio musica americana-presenza militare non era una novità; risaliva al 15 ottobre 1943 quando i V-disc, i padelloni in vinile contenenti i temi di swing e di jazz suonati dalle orchestre statunitensi e trasmessi dalle stazioni di Radio Napoli, si erano imposti sul ritmo monocorde di marce e inni fascisti per annunciare l’imminente vittoria ed evocare l’avvento della libertà e della democrazia. La presenza dei militari americani non si era esaurita con la fine della seconda guerra mondiale, né tanto meno si era arrestata la corrente dei nuovi suoni provenienti da oltreoceano. Anzi, subito dopo la liberazione Napoli era stata ufficialmente riconosciuta la ovvia sede per il quartier generale dell’ Allied Forces Southern Europe, organismo creato il 19 giugno 1951 come il principale comando subordinato, responsabile per la difesa del fianco destro della NATO mentre faceva fronte alla Cortina di ferro. Con lo scoppio della guerra fredda, vera e propria guerra psicologica tra le due superpotenze la cui vittoria passava anche per la “conquista degli spiriti” delle popolazioni europee, la musica diventava una vera arma strategica della propaganda americana.