Prato, Paolo

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Paolo Prato is a leading popular music scholar and a published author in Italy and in the English-speaking world, with over ten books and about a hundred academic articles. He has been working in communications since the mid-1980s, focusing in particular on radio, music and youth cultures. He received his National Scientific Qualification in 2017 from the Italian Ministry of Education as Associate Professor of Popular Music. He has taught courses at the Pontifical Gregorian University, LUISS, University of Rome "La Sapienza," Università Cattolica di Milano, and Pontifical Lateran University. He is International Advisor of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Bloomsbury), a member of the editorial board of Musica/Realtà and Popular Music History. In 2018 he was one of the founders of the Portale della Canzone Italiana, established by to the Ministry of Culture, for which he is consultant, writer and member of the editorial board. A longtime contributor to RAI, he has been working for Radio InBlu since the late 1990s.

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    Mina, la canzone pan-europea e gli ‘interpreti generalisti'
    (2021) Prato, Paolo
    At only 24 Mina was already an adult oriented performer: in 1964 she released her first ‘international’ album including cover versions of standards and current hits in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It was a turning point with respect to her earlier rock ‘n’ roll recordings, and it impacted on the level of her public’s taste, familiarizing Italians with a fashionable, global songbook. The article aims at demonstrating the pioneering role that the Italian star played in shaping a pan-European repertoire, along with a string of singers from various countries who were active in the same time frame considered – late Fifties to 1970. What I call ‘generalist performers’ (Caterina Valente, Petula Clark, Nana Mouskouri, Julio Iglesias, Dalida, Mireille Mathieu, Udo Jürgens) dominated the continental market with unprecedented figures, performed in many languages and recorded a great number of LPs and singles outselling almost any other artist over a couple of decades. They were all – Mina among the first– ambassadors of genres, traditions and fads coming both from the Anglo-American world and exotic places, whose central role in establishing a transcultural songbook still has to be recognized.
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    L’Italietta messa in scena
    (2022) Prato, Paolo
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    Tempo d’estate. La canzone balneare nell’Italia degli anni Sessanta
    (2023) Prato, Paolo
    At the peak of the economic miracle (1961-62) a sub-genre of consumer song centered around beach holidays comes to light: pumped by the ubiquitous jukeboxes in the bathing establishments, these Summer hits inaugurate the vogue of the "tormentoni" and are a typically Italian phenomenon, which has no equivalent anywhere else. Behind its rise there are social reasons (more money for leisure activities), cultural (the holiday boom) and market reasons, related to the new ways of enjoying music (the advent of 45 rpms, turntables and portable record players). This article aims to reconstruct the reasons, fortunes and protagonists of the beach song within the context of the society and culture of the time in order to reevaluate its role as a identity marker and the sociological impact on a rapidly growing nation.
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    Pop Goes the Pope: Religion and Popular Music in Italy
    (2021) Prato, Paolo
    Music has maintained a long relationship with cult since ancient times, contributing to its efficacy and strengthening a communitarian identity. The advent of Christianity marked a sensible change in the way music was used, pioneering the very idea of listening as absolute, later extended to Western art music. The spread of popular music in the twentieth century impacted on religion too and the Christian world was particularly affected from the Second Vatican Council on, both within liturgy and in secular activities. A strong impulse to legitimate and even welcome sounds and practices from pop and rock culture was given by John Paul II, in 1997 during a concert featuring the future Nobel Prize Winner Bob Dylan. The article explores this changing relationship from an interdisciplinary perspective, borrowing from history, musicology, anthropology, sociology, theology, and cultural studies, as suggested by the ‘media, religion and culture’ approach. The first part reviews the historical steps leading to contemporary soundscape with respect to religion. The second part focuses on three case-studies, each representing a distinct point of view: that of traditional music revived, centered on collectivity; that of auteur music, centered on the power of the word; that of crossover pop, aimed at offering an aesthetic experience.
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