Manuel Agnelli

On Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, IULM University conferred the Honorary Master's Degree in Music Publishing and Production to Manuel Agnelli, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, founder and frontman of Afterhours in 1986.

The Rector of the University, Professor Gianni Canova, read the motivation for conferring the honorary master's degree "Forthe multifaceted and fundamental role he plays in the Italian musical and cultural scene, for the revolutionary figure of his music and for the depth and depth of his lyrics," and during the proclamation he added that "Manuel Agnelli represents a form of musical - and not only musical - culture that this country needs today first because it is not fashionable and not liked by everyone and second because he contributed to that extraordinary cultural temperament that occurred in Italy in the second half of the 1990s. Years when in Italy there still existed what can be called an alternative culture, which was not afraid to be disturbing, sometimes even flaying."

During the Laudatio, Professor Paolo Giovannetti, professor of Italian and Contemporary Literature at IULM, referred to Måneskin and how Manuel Agnelli brought rock back into vogue among young people in Italy: "In my courses for quite some time I was struggling to get students to understand what rock is. Today's 20-year-olds know very little about it, rock, they don't grasp its nature as a 'genre,' as a musical genre. They know so little about it that they tend to conceive of it as something distant, in fact coincident with rock and roll. Instead, since the group Måneskin has assumed the prominence it has now, it has become much easier to explain what rock is. 'Listen to Måneskin - I can tell my students - and do you understand what rock is?' As everyone knows, it was Manuel Agnelli, through XFactor who launched Måneskin, and rock is back, somewhat miraculously in vogue, now and here in Italy."

Visibly emotional, the singer-songwriter said he received the honorary master's degree as a great honor and thanked all the key people who have worked with him throughout his journey.

From Manuel Agnelli's Lectio: "From the 1960s onward a certain concept of musician began to take hold, where uniqueness of character, particularity, diversity above all were fundamental: it was important to be different from everyone else. It was important to be unique and identifiable as unique. A very challenging thing, but socially also difficult, because when you are different from everybody then integrating is not so easy. It is paradoxical, though, that in a society that today is trying to achieve an acceptance of diversity at all levels, actually at the artistic level-music especially-there is such widespread homogenization. There was an industry that sought diversity, today there is an industry oiled on homologation. There is a cultural deconstruction that over the last 30 years has meant that we have completely lost the analytical ability to decide what is good and what is not good, regardless of the effectiveness of what we are analyzing. Now numbers have taken the place of our opinions. Numbers are the only objective thing that allows us to decide whether something is good or not."