Rome, 17 April. (askanews) – “‘Pop Nation’. The idea of Homeland through music’ was born from my prolonged studies on the idea of nation, in particular from the study of a very important political sociologist, Robert Michels, who at the beginning of In the 1930s he wrote his ‘Prolegomena on patriotism’, imagining them as the first volume of a great work on the idea of the Nation and this first volume, which was never followed up because Michels would die, was dedicated to the sociology of national songs I found this a starting point, a theme, which I then connected, going backwards, with Giuseppe Mazzini and his ‘Philosophy of Music’ of 1836 and with a recent study, ‘Brivial Nationalism’, published for the first time in ’98, by a British scholar, Michael Billig, in which we perceive the many ways in which the idea of the nation passes without us realizing it, but forgetting the music. So I thought there was a connection, a reconstructible excursus, starting from Mazzini crossing Michels, then the twentieth century, asking myself if in the post-war period the idea of the Nation still had” with music “a close relationship as it had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”. Leonardo Varasano, author of ‘Nazione Pop’ (Ed.Rubettino), explained this during the press conference to present the volume to the Chamber of Deputies. “I asked myself this question – continued Varasano, PhD in Contemporary Political History and Councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Perugia – and the answer I got, in relation to the Italian case, I consider it positive because I found many cases, starting from the 70s, of implicit or explicit references to the idea of Nation and from there I drew a subdivision into 3/4 possible families of Italian pop songs through which the idea of Nation passes. on the one hand there is love, there is nostalgia, on the other hand there is a copious strand dedicated to the criticism of national consumption and also to anti-politics”.
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