The Måneskin, marketing, sex and the rock fetish – Daniele Cassandro

From time to time the word rock comes back into fashion in Italy. “The fucking vock” as the comedian Valerio Lundini would say, mimicking the gesture of the horns. In 2021 we talked about it again, a lot, due to a Roman band, the Måneskin, which won the Sanremo Festival and the Eurovision song contest, opened the Rolling Stones concerts in Las Vegas and finally also won the MTV European Music Awards.

On December 1, the Spotify streaming platform sent its users a very detailed report of their annual ratings. So detailed as to touch the dossier of a Specter of digital surveillance. Well, in that mass of data a novelty stands out: the Måneskin were the most listened to artists of our country in the world, with two billion stream and position 58 of the global ranking.

Translated, they managed to become the first truly global Italian artists. They have become for Italy something similar to what Abba were for Sweden, and continue to be: a trademark understood, appreciated and sold everywhere. Because being global isn’t just about being successful overseas. In this sense, just to name a few, Rita Pavone, Gigliola Cinquetti, Toto Cutugno, Al Bano and Romina and Laura Pausini have had success abroad, and how. But they have always represented a niche of Italianness first and of generic Latinity then. For the Måneskin, on the other hand, their geographical origin has never been an identity: their Italian character is at best presented as one more nuance of their sex appeal.

To those who do not follow pop they seem to come out of nowhere: a band born in high school that in 2017 participated in X Factor and, once out, despite not having won, he made a bang. They have no connection with the Italian rock dynasty, they remember various things they have already heard without directly referring to any, they sing in English and Italian without posing too many problems. And their double performance at the final of X Factor 2021 crushed that of Coldplay, who by comparison seemed balding employees of rock.

Faced with such a string of successes, purists have risen indignantly: Måneskin are not rock, they are fake, they are a parody, they come from talent, Gucci dresses them. “Real rock is something else”, repeat the vestals of authenticity, who are often middle-aged men who have bought the Pink Floyd discography three times in their lifetime; first on vinyl, then on cd and then again on vinyl, for the 180 gram reissues.

But what the indignant forget is that they were once young too, and that their rock sucked adults just as much as Måneskin sucked them. The historical importance of rock, in fact, was precisely that of having created a rift between the so-called baby boomers and the previous generation. Before the Second World War, young people as a social category and as a market segment did not exist: adolescence was considered an irrelevant and unproductive gap between childhood and adulthood.

In the immediate postwar period, more or less ten years before the word rock was coined, Frank Sinatra was selling ten million records every year and, thanks to the technology of electric voice amplification, he had invented together with Bing Crosby the crooning. It was a new way of singing sentimental songs in large and crowded clubs: a sort of intimacy enhanced by the microphone that allowed the audience, especially the girls, to crowd under the stage and shout all their love to the artist. In the United States, in the mid-forties, we saw for the first time the delirium of fans, crying at concerts, literally tearing one’s clothes off for a singer. Frank Sinatra began to be known as “Swoonatra”, the man who made (swoon) his listeners. And the more conservative newspapers, as Simon Napier-Bell recalls in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, an exhaustive history of American popular music, Sinatra fans called “teenage delinquents” for their blatant sexual restlessness.

The sisters and younger brothers of the “bobby soxers”, the girls who fainted for Sinatra, so called for the short socks they wore, were ready to put their parents’ respectability to the test in the mid-1950s: “Delinquency and marketing for teenagers found a meeting point in 1954, when Bill Haley played Shake, rattle and roll by Joe Turner, ”writes Napier-Bell. “The Haley version was the first ever white rock ‘n’ roll piece, a fusion of Joe Turner’s obscene blues, country accents and black shuffle.” Rock was therefore born to channel youth rebellion and turn it into commodity.

That sense of threat to the pre-established order of adults, obviously white, also came from the skilful looting of elements typical of African American music, perceived by modest parents of the 1950s as particularly inappropriate and subversive. Sex, rebellion, delinquency and commodification have been characteristics of rock’n’roll since its origins; talking about authenticity when it comes to rock is therefore misleading as well as very boring.

In Italy, in order for adults to realize the existence of rock, it will be necessary to wait until the night of May 18, 1957, when Adriano Celentano and the dance champion Bruno Dossena performed in the “first festival of Italian rock’n’roll “. The entertainer of the evening was the comedian and dancer Jack La Cayenne, called Torquato the springy, a nickname that would later be passed on to the more famous Celentano. There was a large crowd and a problem of public order, with clashes between the police and the boys who had arrived there not only from the Milanese suburbs but from all over Lombardy. The police spread the word that the concert had been canceled and much of the crowd pressing against the gates dispersed. The event was held the same but later and the journalist Natalia Aspesi, who dealt with costume and society for the newspaper La Notte, was there.

“More than once the situation seemed decidedly dangerous,” he wrote, “the hall of the ice palace, under the neon lights clouded by the fuss raised by the restless young feet, looked like a boxing gym in the tenth round. […] When Adriano Celentano & His Rock Boys got the upper hand over the presenter and the scream of the crowd, it was clear that not even the intervention of the police and the carabinieri present would allow others to play “. The explosive ingredients of rock are the same in boom Italy as in the United States of the early 1950s: juvenile rebellion (portrayed in the press as suburban delinquency), hormones a thousand and one primitive and noisy music associated with a dance that adults they do not understand.

Only a couple of years later Adriano Celentano was called by Federico Fellini to play and dance in a memorable scene of the Sweet life. In 1960, the same year the Sweet life, Celentano was at the cinema with another film, the musicarello Howlers at the bar by Lucio Fulci, with Mina, Joe Sentieri and Chet Baker in the role of Chet the American. Howlers at the bar, which already from the title promised the public strong emotions, staged everything that the press scared of rock’n’roll: blue jeans, broken bottles, promiscuity, hooliganism and bands of teddy boys. And so the teenagers, with a few years of delay compared to the United States, also break into the Italian media, rebels, in constant clash with adults but above all sexually active and aware.

In 2021 Måneskin have done nothing but resurrect, for the umpteenth time in recent history, the ghost of rock’n’roll (and of the generational rift that it carries with it) that every ten or twenty years is given up for dead. There are no more juke boxes but there is Spotify, their sexual rebellion is the rejection and subversion of gender stereotypes but the fuel that makes them fly is always the same: physicality, sweat, hormones and rock.

And the fact that adults and censors shake their heads is absolutely natural, indeed, it is a sign that they are doing all the right things. Is Måneskin’s music derivative? False? Swept? The answer to this false problem was given by Pete Townshend of the Who back in 1968: “It’s like saying let’s take all the pop music, put it in a cartridge, close it and set fire to the powders. We don’t consider the fact that those ten or fifteen pieces are all alike. It doesn’t matter what period they were written or what they talk about. It’s the explosion they create when you pull the trigger that makes all the difference. It is the act itself. That’s what rock’n’roll is ”.