Reclaiming the Fight. Framing and Resignification of Radical Struggles in Italian White Power Music

Abstract

White Power music is a well-known cultural phenomenon encompassing a variety of politically engaged far-right musical practices worldwide. In Italy, the longstanding tradition of ‘musica alternativa’ has for decades been playing a major role in providing cultural grounds and collective identities for radical right and neofascist movements. However, starting from the late 1980s, multiple waves of far-right artists have been effectively repurposing skin culture into a nativist discourse. Such practices later found fertile ground within the cultural milieus of Italian far-right movement parties, whose ‘hybrid’ approach to collective action and repertoires shaped an entire genre (NSHC) around the reconfiguration of hardcore tropes into a neofascist platform, hence becoming a new musical cornerstone for far-right events. In this paper, I adopt a frame analysis methodological approach on a corpus of recent (2005-2024) Italian White Power song lyrics and three case studies of notable covers of Italian Oi! and hardcore staples in order to investigate how artists related to CasaPound Italia’s cultural circuit have been appropriating traditional radical-left themes and building them into their own discourse. Anti-globalism, anti-capitalism, and struggle against the status quo are thus reconfigured under an identitarian frame, combined with a ‘populist’ ideological approach and a novel aestheticization of fascist symbolism.