Populism and (Pop) Music

"This engaging and important book examines how political actors from Matteo Salvini to the Five Star Movement rely on common taste in music to generate feeling of national emotion. Researchers on populism should read this careful and fast paced analysis and learn that music is constitutive of politics that moves the people.”

—Mabel Berezin, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for European Studies, Cornell University
“This deeply researched and endlessly fascinating book tells of the complex relationship between populism and popular music in Italy. But it does more than this. It reveals how – in general – we might understand better the role of music in politics, and the role of politics in music.”
—John Street, University of East Anglia
This book launches a proposal: to fill some empirical and theoretical gaps that presently exists in populism studies by looking at the potential nexus between populist phenomena and popular culture. It provides a detailed account of the multiple mechanisms linking the production of pop music (as a form of popular culture) to the rise and reproduction of populism. The authors use a case study of Italy to interrogate these mechanisms because of its long-lasting populist phenomena and the contextual importance of pop music. The book’s mixed-methods strategy assesses three different aspects of the potential relationship between pop music and populist politics: the cultural opportunity structure generated and reproduced by the production of music, the strategies political actors use to exploit music for political purposes, and, crucially, the ways fans and ordinary citizens understand the relationship between pop music and politics, and subsequent debates and identities. Moving from the case study, the book in its last chapter offers a more general understanding of the associations between pop music and populism.
Manuela Caiani is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy.
Enrico Padoan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences (DISPOC) of the University of Siena, Italy.