video: BerlusKaraoke (2010)

author: Matteo Bittanti (concept, execution)

title: BerlusKaraoke (aka SingStar Silvio)

year: 2010

format: still image with soundtrack

description: "BerlusKaraoke" is a re-imagining of Silvio Berlusconi's 1994 televised speech to the nation as a series of karaoke songs.

On January 26 1994, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi announced with a televised speech to the nation that he had decided to enter the political arena, or, better, the field, to use a football metaphor. Titled "Per il mio paese" ("For my country"), his speech opened with these lines:

"Italy is the country I love. Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons.

Here I have learned, from my father and from life, how to be an entrepreneur. Here I have also acquired the passion for liberty.

I have chosen to enter the field and become a public servant because I do not want to live in an illiberal country, ruled by immature forces and by people who are well and truly bound to a past that proved both a political and economic failure"

(Silvio Berlusconi, Entering the field ("La discesa in campo"), January 26, 1994)

Shortly after that announcement, Berlusconi launched a massive campaign of electoral advertisements on his three TV networks. He subsequently won the elections, with Forza Italia, his brand-new party, garnering 21% of the popular vote (the highest percentage of any single party) and

"...bringing into parliament members of his personal entourage—TV starlets, his personal lawyers, his personal doctor, accountants and executives from his companies, and scores of journalists and TV personalities, all of whom owe almost everything to him." (Alexander Stille, 2010)

One of the most significant promises that he made in order to secure victory was that his government would create "one million more jobs", as part of "the new Italian miracle" mentioned ad nauseam in his speech.

It is my belief that Berlusconi's speech would work better as a karaoke song, as its rhetoric, cadence,, and rhythm overtly use the same conventions and cliche' of pop songs. Lines like "Vi dico che dobbiamo, vi dico che possiamo" (I'm telling you we can, I'm telling you we must), "L'Italia e' il paese che amo" (Italy is the country I love) and "Nuovo miracolo italiano" (A new Italian miracle) are used in this context as a refrain, an hypnotic mantra.

With "BerlusKaraoke", I have attempted to imagine what that speech would have sounded like with the appropriate soundtrack, specifically:

- Kylie Minogue's "I Can't Get You Out of My Head"

- Lady Gaga's "Poker Face"

- Coldplay's "Violet Hill"

- Britney Spears' "Toxic"

To achieve such goal, I have appropriated and modified screengrabs of the popular karaoke title SingStar, developed by Sony Computer Entertainment, to create short videos that evoke the look-and-feel of a videogame, and I have sampled lines from "Per il mio paese", mixing them with the instrumental versions of the aforementioned songs. I did consider, at one point, to design an interactive karaoke version of Berlusconi's speech, but ultimately, I opted for simple non-interactive videos as karaoke, by definition, is a democratic, inclusive, and participatory practice, while the language of politics, especially Berlusconi's, is autocratic, exclusive, and mono-directional.

As an aside, Berlusconi's singing career is well known. While in college, the Milanese showman played bass in a group formed with Mediaset chairman and amateur pianist Fedele Confalonieri and occasionally performed as a cruise ship crooner. In later life he wrote AC Milan's anthem with the Italian music producer and pop singer Tony Renis and Forza Italia's anthem with the opera director Renato Serio. With the Neapolitan singer Mariano Apicella he wrote two Neapolitan song albums: Meglio 'na canzone (2003) and L'ultimo amore (2006). Unsurprisingly, in 2009,

Rolling Stone magazine voted Berlusconi the "best rockstar of the year".

Rolling Stone Italy, November 2009

Showbiz and politics are so intertwined in Italy that it is impossible to separated them. As Tobias Jones (2005) explained in his brilliant expose', The Dark Heart of Italy, Il Belpaese is "A country that is proudly visual rather than verbal, based on aesthetics rather than ethics; a country where crime is hardly ever followed by punishment; a place of incredible illusionism, where it is impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality and fact from fiction".

As Alexander Stille (2010) put it:

"Berlusconi’s control of the press and television is unprecedented in a major democracy. Much of his career has been dedicated to the concept that it is appearance and not reality that counts. “Don’t you realize that something doesn’t exist—not an idea, a politician, or a product—unless it is on television?” Berlusconi explained to one of his closest associates. Continuing to remain popular in spite of incompetence, corruption, and national decline, he has shown there is much to that point of view" (Stille, 2010)

In fact, Berlusconi has successfully transformed Italy from a democracy into a videocracy, a country whose public sphere has been completely replaced by simulacra and simulation: television, reality tv-shows, talk shows, soap operas, and soccer, as Erik Gandini has cogently shown in his recent documentary Videocracy (2009):