Reclaiming the Fight. Framing and Resignification of Radical Struggles in Italian White Power Music

White Power music is a well-known cultural phenomenon encompassing a variety of politically engaged far-right musical practices worldwide. In Italy, the longstanding tradition of grassroots-born ‘musica alternativa’ has been playing a major role in providing cultural grounds and collective identities for radical right and neo-fascist movements for decades. However, starting from the late 80s, multiple waves of far-right artists spurred from the influxes of RAC and Oi! music, effectively repurposing skin culture into a nativist discourse. Such practices later found fertile ground within the cultural milieus of Italian far-right movement-parties, whose “hybrid” approach to collective action and repertoires shaped an entire genre (NSHC) around the reconfiguration of anarcho-punk attitudes into a neo-fascist platform, hence becoming the new musical cornerstone for extreme-right events. In this paper, I adopt a frame analysis methodological approach on a corpus of recent (2005-2024) Italian White Power song lyrics and three case studies of notable NSHC covers of Italian punk staples, in order to investigate how artists related to CasaPound Italia’s cultural circuit have been appropriating traditional radical-left themes related to the Oi! and hardcore scenes. Anti-globalism, anti-capitalism, and struggle against the status quo are thus reconfigured under an identitarian frame, combined with a “populist” ideological approach and a novel aestheticization of fascist symbolism.