Intellettuali e subculture giovanili di fine secolo: l’hip hop in Italia e la ricerca di Georges Lapassade (1989-93)

This paper intends to investigate the ‘indigenization’ of hip hop in Italy between the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century, through the perspective of figures such as the French intellectual Georges Lapassade. During the ‘long Eighties’, characterized by the decline of collective organization forms and the ‘ebb’ into a private dimension, by the triumph of ‘neo-television’ and by deep processes of consumer homologation, hip hop’s countercultural language seemed to provide an alternative to the decline of the categories of ‘class’ and ‘generation’, as vectors of social conflict and transformation. In the years of the definitive decline of the Italian party system that emerged from the Resistance, of the explosion of the disruptive and fatuous student movement of the ‘Panther’ and of the affirmation of the phenomenon of the ‘posse’, Lapassade was part of a variegated group of Italian and foreign intellectuals who perfected the identification of hip hop as an ‘ethnic’ fact. Around this new category, the attempt to identify social groups that could act as a catalyst for new forms of political mobilization of the Italian metropolitan peripheries developed and failed.