Abstract
This chapter describes how the music club enactment of dark took shape alongside the activist one retracing the history of Milanese alternative music clubs, and in particular of the Hysterika disco, the main dark club in Milan in the 1980s. The specificities of the disco club enactment are addressed and compared to those of the activist enactment: these differences do not relate only to the stance towards political activism, which music club darks dismissed in favour of an identity politics that had to be expressed through a shocking style flaunted in urban public places. It related also to patterns of socialisation, relationship with public space, style and finally criteria of subcultural authentication. In this enactment, in fact, subcultural capital was gained showing high competences in the subcultural canon, regarding both cultural consumption (music, but also literature, theatre, cinema and the arts) and style, and subcultural identities were validated showing a coherence in style throughout all the situations of subculturalists’ daily lives. The two enactments had also their own sub-scene, even if these sub-scenes overlapped, allowing the circulation of members. The chapter ends with the closure of Hysterika in 1991, sketching the main lines of transformation of the enactment in the following decade.
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Notes
- 1.
“What shall we do with all the black shirts? Just one bundle, and then we will set them [on] fire!” This is a famous anti-fascist song from the 1970s.
- 2.
The Italian singer Enrico Ruggeri himself publicised the phantom concert. In an interview with Io donna, a weekly newspaper of Corriere della Sera, he remembers: “My life changed. It was October 4, 1977. One evening a friend and I put up two thousand posters that announced there would be a Decibel punk concert in a Milanese disco, the Piccola Broadway. We put them up at night near schools and squats. On the night of the non-concert, we enjoyed the scene from the terrace of his house, which looked right onto the venue. 200 or 300 punks arrived, then the anti-fascists, the militants, guys from Avanguardia Operaia arrived and they fought; there were wounded. I knew it would end like that. The next day the newspapers spoke about unrest at the Decibel concert, and two months later we recorded our first album.” See https://www.iodonna.it/personaggi/interviste-gallery/2017/03/20/enrico-ruggeri-e-la-reunion-con-i-decibel-facevamo-canzoni-per-far-incazzare/. Last accessed 28 March 2019.
- 3.
Chrisma were an Italian musical duo formed in 1976 by Christina Moser and Maurizio Arcieri. They were considered pioneers of Italian new wave. In 1980 they changed their name to Krisma. “Lola” was the single from their first album Chinese Restaurant, released in 1977.
- 4.
Halloween, directed by John Carpenter (US, 1978).
- 5.
“According to legend, goth originated in the Batcave club in Soho, London, which existed in the brief period between 1982 and 1985” (Elferen 2018: 22).
- 6.
See Sect. 7.4.
- 7.
Den Harrow was a well-known exponent of Italo-disco.
- 8.
See Chap. 4.
- 9.
An interesting exception is the Viridis in San Giuliano Mianese where the S.D.M. collective was founded. It actively collaborated in Creature Simili activities. See Chap. 4.
- 10.
Philopat (1997).
- 11.
Senzapatria. Per lo sviluppo della lotta antimilitarista e antiautoritaria (Without a Homeland. For the development of the anti-militarist and anti-authoritarian struggle) was a magazine published with a variable frequency. Founded in Sondrio, in the north of Italy, it was distributed throughout the country. It was published from September 1978, and in 1992 it fused together with the magazine Anarres. It lived on militant subscriptions.
- 12.
See Chap. 7.
- 13.
See Sect. 5.3.
- 14.
See Sect. 7.2.
- 15.
See Chap. 8.
- 16.
See Chap. 3.
- 17.
- 18.
Jo Squillo (Giovanna Coletti’s stage name), a Milanese singer born in 1962, was an exponent of the punk movement with her all-female band, Kandeggina Gang, formed in the Santa Marta squat during the early 1980s. Their live performance in March 1980 in Piazza Duomo in Milan was famous: the musicians launched red-stained Tampax on the audience as a radical feminist message. Later Jo Squillo changed various musical genres, including new wave, Italo-disco and finally pop.
- 19.
Standa (Società Anonima Magazzini Standard) was a chain of department stores, founded in 1931 and closed in 2010.
- 20.
The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill (US, 1979).
- 21.
With A.C. Milan, one of the two football teams in town.
- 22.
See Chap. 8.
- 23.
See Chap. 8.
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Tosoni, S., Zuccalà, E. (2020). A Batcave in Via Redi: The Music Club Enactment of Dark. In: Italian Goth Subculture . Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_5
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