How Italian Media Shaped Amanda Lear’s Career

Disco beats and gender enigma, made Amanda a queen in Italy (and beyond).

In previous installments, we discussed the way Italians appeared both wary of and intrigued by sexual taboos, and how disco music provided a “safe” conduit for them to explore them, visually and culturally.

Androgyny, ever one of the main tenets of some of the most illustrious performers in the genre, enticed the Italian public, and Amanda Lear was the performer who most toyed with ambiguity thanks to a cleverly crafted stage persona. 

Despite her French nationality and her early career in the UK, Lear has been a fixture of the Italian TV and music scene for the past 45 years. Italy is the country where she acquired the most widespread and mainstream fandom, where she is mainly known as a TV host and media personality. 

While she innovated the disco genre by writing narrative lyrics that sometimes bordered with actual poetry because she often expressed disgust at the banality of the lyrics of your standard disco fare, the average Italian was not into her because of the depth of her songs…