The Birth of Pop. The Soundscapes of the Early Sixties in Italian Cinema and Television

In post-WWII Europe, popular culture began to relate to a wide range of mediatized cultural practices, having the raising music industry as its centre and essentially revolutionizing the media- and soundscapes we live in. Aim of my contribution is to introduce to the Italian case, and its crucial journey to mediatization from the late Fifties into the Sixties, as an exemplary trajectory for its seemingly excessive foregrounding of music and sounds within the national film and television culture: as a case study, I will refer to Adriano Celentano's cross-media performances. With his debut as the Italian rocker par excellence at the end of the Fifties, Adriano Celentano started an impressive and unprecedented career in our national pop culture. As a singer, songwriter, comedian and actor (later also as a successful television host) he posited himself at the very centre of the process of integration of the media industry that characterized the ongoing modernization of the country. Stressing his beginning decade of activity (Celentano has been noticed by the press first in 1957, and his experience as an independent producer, which had begun in 1962, ended in 1968), this paper aims to delve into his communicative strategies, addressing the issues of Americanism, his body language, the upcoming clash of generations in 1968, the Italian way to mediatization and the role pop music played within this wide context, configuring on a phenomenological level the first basic encounter, for such a conservative country like Italy, with modern pervasive media technologies.