The Politics of a Voice: Demetrio Stratos

The chapter focuses on the career of Demetrio Stratos, from youthful rebellion as a rock singer to vocal experimentation as a result of his growing awareness of voice and body as political weapons. Stratos, a singer and musician of Greek descent active in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, interpreted words as barriers to sound and a reduction of the phonetic capacity. He sought to free the expressive potential of the human voice and to deconstruct language as a personal and political liberation. First as a member of Area, a politically engaged progressive rock band with avant-garde intentions, and then mainly as a vocal experimenter, he sought to unravel the mechanisms of social oppression starting with the private issues of life, since in his opinion individual emancipation comes from bodily emancipation, not merely from sexual and social emancipation.