What is Italo Disco? Histories, aesthetics, identities

The ‘Italo Disco’ label emerged in the early 1980s as a distinctive dance music genre that achieved significant international success, to evolve later into other streams of electronic music (such as Italo house) and, more recently, to be re-evaluated in tune with the broader trends of nostalgic and retromaniacal rediscovery of dance music styles. The panel aims to offer a multi-disciplinary deconstruction of this genre – rooted in musicology, sociology, cultural studies and cultural history – focusing on its historical trajectory, its multi-layered aesthetics, its peculiar industrial processes and the cultural processes that have contributed to shape its identity, placing a distinctive emphasis on the tensions between its local national rootedness and its international circulation. First, Italo Disco will be addressed in its cultural and social history, placing emphasis on the process of symbolic construction of its ‘Italian’ identity and addressing the reconstruction of authenticity supporting its contemporary revival within today’s dance music cultures. Then, the panel will trace some of the historical and stylistic boundaries of the Italo Disco corpus, examining repertoires and electronic production practices that emerged at the intersection between internationally established Italian disco music producers and local underground post-punk musicians. The same dialectic between internal and external perspectives, between construction and attribution of italianicity/italianness and the re-appropriation of such meanings by the national community, will then be addressed with regard to the peculiar industrial dynamics of Italo Disco – and of dance music in general – within the Italian media system of the 1980s. Finally, we will consider Italo Disco from the point of view of its retrospective narration in different media, from documentaries to streaming platforms, by highlighting what strategies have been used to frame its cultural memory - as well as a specific imagery of the 1980s - using a number of tropes related to authenticity, performance and performativity.