ABSTRACT
Beat Italy. Italian Beats. How best to take soundings of the impact Beat has had on Italian authorship as an overlap of dissidence, beatitude, and the life-rhythm of jazz? We might start with the view of Gianni Borgna (1947–2014), politician, essayist, music critic, and an administrator responsible for culture both in Rome and the region of Latium, who if Beat was to be thought implying a beaten generation saw it also as a riposte to materialist culture. He opened the conference “Il 68, musica e contestazione” (“1968, Music and Protest”), 1 a forty-year anniversary at Roma Tre University, by recalling “Rock around the Clock,” written by Max Freedman and James Meyers and a massive 12-bar blues hit recording by Bill Haley and his Comets in 1954.
