The Music That Made Me: Angelica Frey’s Story

How an antisocial and awkward teen finds a voice through Italian disco music

After Disco Bambino presented readers with his “Why,” Angelica Frey now relays her own musical journey.

It’s April 2019, and I am in a tightly packed karaoke room in Milan’s chinatown. In the last six months, I had lost my mother to a suddenly ruptured brain aneurysm, and my partner of four years had decided that I was not coping well enough for him to continue our relationship. 

Weirdly, by the time March had rolled around, I had been overcome by a propulsive mania: I hoarded work, I resumed seeing my friends, I numbed my loneliness with dating apps with forgettable, but distraction-worthy dates, and I resumed listening to my music. You see, I refuse to listen to music when I am too down on myself.

That April night, we could only fit in that common room, where people are usually courteous enough to select crowd pleasers. As soon as Raffaella Carrà’s Italian Disco anthem “Tanti Auguri” came on, I took it as my personal battle hymn. My world had, indeed, fallen apart (se per caso cadesse il mondo, “should the world fall down” Carrà sings in the opening bars), and I had somehow emerged from the catastrophe, meaning I was still alive (io mi sposto un po’ più in là, I just scoot a little bit, she continues). The ultra-memorable refrain concludes with the climax “e se ti lascia lo tai che si fa? trovi un altro più bello, che problemi non ha.”

And if they leave you, you know what you’re gonna do? You find someone else without issues. 

This “the world only spins forward” philosophy might sound flippant and dismissing to some, but at that moment in time, I did need to be forcibly spun forward.

Italian disco had saved me again! Look, I know that my over reliance on nostalgia in every facet of my life, including work, is something I should be more mindful of, but you use the tools at your disposal for the hand you were dealt. 

As a teenager, I never fit in. I always had a small, but tight group of friends, but I was never someone whose company was coveted by the larger population. In retrospect, I’ll say that that is perfectly fine, but the 2000s were not the 2020s: we made a lot of progress in terms of interpersonal awareness. Unlike Disco Bambino, I lived in a large city in the North that, despite its size, was as dull and conformative as the American suburbia satirized by David Lynch (I think it made some progress, though).

While my peers listened to American, British and Italian pop, not to mention the y2k era Eurodance, and knew all top 40s by heart , I had grown up listening to show tunes, movie soundtracks, and classical music thanks to my dressage-loving father–during a car ride he once asked me “Have you ever heard anything more beautiful than Madonna’s rendition of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina?”

Then, by the time I was a teen, I discovered the artistic value of anime, manga, and video games beyond its sheer entertainment value. Something that changed my perception of pop culture for good was Yuna singing “Real Emotions” and “1000 Words” in Final fantasy X-2. The costume, a beautiful blue minidress with flowy panels coupled with a matching miniskirt, the choreography, and the extremely realistic graphics were certainly more entertaining that the endless dungeons and boss-battles I had to endure to progress with a story. 

Then, during a summer getaway with my classmates in one of the school’s properties, someone started blasting 1970s-80s Italian Discopop during a mandatory game of beach volleyball. I knew those songs, but I always took them for granted. They were upbeat, with vaguely tropical rhythms and cheeky: “se lui ti porta su un letto vuoto, il vuoto daglielo indietro a lui,” (hard to translate, but roughly: if he drags you onto an empty bed, give emptiness back to him) “l’abbracciava sulle casse, sulle casse di nitroglicerina” (he embraced her on top of boxes full of nitroglycerin)  “lui chi è? come mai l’hai portato con te?” (who is he? Why did you bring him along?)  “voglio andare ad Alghero in compagnia di uno straniero” (I want to go to Alghero together with a foreigner) “il cobra non è un serpente, ma un pensiero frequente, che diventa indecente” (A cobra is not a snake, but a frequent thought that becomes indecent) “comprami, io sono in vendita, e non mi credere irraggiungibile”(buy me, I am for sale, and don’t think of me as out of reach) “e poi spiegami dai: cosa sono quei peli neri che sul corpo hai?!” (And now explain to me what these dark coarse hairs on your body are!) That hooked me for good!

Soon, I started actively looking into the personalities behind those songs. I had often seen them on tv, as reruns of their most famous performances kept airing on national and commercial tv alike. Their outfits and makeup were pure glam, but not necessarily fashionable, at least  when I first consciously took notice of them in the mid 2000s. Space-age-inspired jumpsuits? Unitards and feathers? The women were charismatic and gorgeous without necessarily embodying the restrictive, punitive, and stifling beauty standards of the 2000s. Growing up, Raffaella Carrà was constantly reminded of her curvaceous body and her “outsized” lips, and the goddess-like Patty Pravo was notable for her menswear-inspired stage costumes, her deep voice, her bleach blond hair, for her maximalist makeup, “representing an artificial and un-Italian femininity,” writes Cecilia Brioni in Fashioning Italian Youth.

 As someone who certainly did not fit into the Berlusconi-era beauty standards—an old geezer with one foot in the grave once told me “you’re not beautiful, you’re particular”, and my relatives often told me that I could be pretty if only I didn’t have X, Y, Z defects— seeing artifice used as, yes, art and not as an approximate game of smoke and mirrors was eye opening. 

And look, I eventually became well aware that 1970s maximalism and silhouettes do constitute timeless fashion, but that somehow eluded me when I was largely unaware of what went on beyond my classroom.

This was also the era of MSN Spaces, some proto-blog-like interfaces where you could post articles and image galleries. A gay friend of mine, the former partner of one of my closest friends, had an album called Ai Theai the Ancient-Greek word for “The Goddesses.” La Giuni, La Milva, La Patty, La Raffa went alongside La Mariah, La Celine, and Cher. This was the first time I became aware that these singers were held in such high regard—I never saw my classmates fawn so much over Britney, Christina, or, say, the Backstreet Boys. This was not just fandom. This was an inter-generational pantheon. By lightly emulating them, I graduated from 100% ugly duckling to “you look like a Klimt painting,” as my friend Fabio told me the first time he met me. That summer, an old gay man remarked “oh, you’re so Barbra” (fair complexion and strong features will do that!)

The following year, when I finally found a boyfriend, that friend group promptly serenaded me with Raffaella Carrà’s “Luca,” a song about a one-sided relationship between a woman and a gay guy, who was completely uninterested in her. It proved prescient, as that boyfriend never felt sexual attraction towards me. Oh well. Carrà’s songs (and the Mamma Mia musical I went to see with my dad in the West End) helped me bounce back after the inevitable breakup.

Me and three friends outside a club where we were also denied entry

Still, I did not fully grasp the relevance of set design until 2017, when I had been living in America for four years and I had tried very hard to minimize my whole being Italian (editorial jobs frown at people they perceive as ESL). One chilly October night, my friend C, whom I met in 2014 and who was actually the one who introduced me to my ex, showed up at our place and decided to play his personal trove of haphazard artsy videos on our projector. One of them featured Grace Jones singing “Fame” on a medieval-inspired soundstage. After that performance was over, a slight, curly-haired Angelo Branduardi, clad in a red, flowy jumpsuit completely merged with the setting, and, with his violin, played the opening bars of his Medieval-inspired song “Ballo in Fa Diesis Minore.”

Angelo Branduardi Performs Ballo in Fa Diesis Minore on Stryx

We were watching whatever we could find online on Stryx, the revolutionary, yet tragically short-lived Medieval-themed variety show from 1978. I hate to admit that, until then, I had taken the history of Italian varieties for granted, as something that they would replay in selected segments before or after primetime shows. I was completely oblivious to the level of artistic excellence Italian varieties had reached between the early 1970s and the mid 1980s.

Me and my friend Federico, poorly recreating Dirty Dancing’s main sequence

Without these varieties, a lot of Italian Disco Hits would never have had the reach they enjoyed. And thanks to the care put into each TV performance in terms of set design and costume, each easily became a total work of art. I am happy that my friendship with C and his girlfriend L survived my horrible breakup.

I was not the only one who felt “saved” by that April 2019 Karaoke night. Two weeks later, a friend who had battled infertility for a long time and who sang with me in, in a euphoric-diva-faceoff fashion, discovered she was expecting. 

As a visual-culture journalist in the very thankless and competitive landscape of freelancing, I made Europe and Eurodisco my niche. I sought to write about it in any way, shape, or form, and, in the past years, I succeeded a handful of times.

One, an essay on how Raffaella Carrà liberated more women in Italy than the feminist movement,  made enough impact for Raffaella Carrà to personally reach out to me to thank me for what I had done. I once had an Italian influencer’s boyfriend-manager demand I send him my CV prior to agreeing to set up an interview with the, err, talent. 

I am currently in the process of helping my husband learn Italian. By the time he has mastered the fundamentals of verbs and nouns, I intend to use some of my “core” songs to give his vocabulary and pop-culture knowledge a boost.