Iconodemia della musica pop italiana: pratiche di visibilità audiovisiva e performativa nell’immaginario pandemico

Abstract

In addition to infodemic, during the Coronavirus pandemic (especially in its early stages) in Italy there was a real epidemic of images, an iconodemic in which Italian popular music and song-form also played a leading role, both in amateur and professional fields. In fact, a series of short audiovisual objects have spread in the mediascape, in which the songs were played by different types of performances, live or recorded: these products have not only witnessed a series of songwriting practices involving many Italian citizens, but also collaborated in the medial re-semantization of some spaces that had lost their daily value (houses, balconies, cities), ensuring the social positioning of users and renewing, thanks to their reuse by medial newspapers, the invitation to maintain social distancing.

Through the analysis of the different songs and performative practices that have alternated in this phase (remote songs, pop flash mobs, urban performances, songs as self-writing, social positioning), the role played by Italian popular music within the great national pandemic media narrative will be investigated in this paper by using an interdisciplinary approach (in dialogue with media, film, sociosemiotic, geographic, performing and popular music studies), reflecting on the modalities with which music and images have helped to create and feed the pandemic imaginary.

The song-form within this narrative has managed to renegotiate the relationship between places, environments, images and national identity thanks to relocation and atomization processes, transforming every space into a stage through the mediatization of performances; moreover, the singing practices have been used by media as cohesive factors thanks to the use of the soundscape, which guarantees the distance (unlike the physical one), considered necessary to face the virus. The pandemic demonstrates how once again the song-form, in particular thanks to its shift towards the audiovisual format and thanks to its visibility practices, manages to be central within Italians' cultural practices.