BY TIM SMALL
PHOTOS BY ANTONIO ZAMBARDINO
Videos by VICE
Ask any average Italian what pops into their head when they think of Naples, and you’ll almost assuredly get the same three things every time: pizza, garbage in the streets, and the most powerful international crime syndicate in the world—the Camorra. Does that sound bombastic? Well, this is an organization that in the past 30 years rose to be valued at around one-tenth of the aggregated wealth of the Italian nation. Recently explored by author Roberto Saviano (whom Vice profiled last summer) in his book Gomorrah, it is a mafia that deals in illegal activities, such as drugs and weapons trafficking, contraband, and extortion, and additionally controls a huge amount of legal, straight businesses—especially in transport, construction, and waste management, but also in pretty much any economic sphere in which they find an opportunity to invest. It is relentlessly capitalistic, it has destroyed an entire city, it is probably the biggest criminal emergency in Europe, and it is definitely the biggest organization in the southern Italian criminal underground. It is in this reality that a very distinctive genre of music rose to prominence over the last two decades.
Neomelodic music is a strange mixture of techno, pop, Latin American music, and traditional Neapolitan love songs, an entirely singular and totally bizarre form of music that, critics say, is generally performed by nothing more that ex-criminals who became Camorra minstrels.
Bred in the Camorra-ridden, corrupt, and generally all-round despairingly sad working-class underbelly of Naples, this army of singers (ranging in age from eight to 80) tell stories of love found and lost, of the crime that surrounds them, of dreams of success and escape, and of running away from the law, all in the Neapolitan dialect—a very different language from “normal” Italian. The songs are 100 percent cheesy and melodic—not to mention melodramatic—but at the same time they’re incredibly funny. They tell stories that resonate with their audience much more than any other musical genre can (yes, we’re looking at you, American rap circa 2009).
In Naples and most other southern Italian regions, the neomelodics are superstars. They look like quintessential über-guidos: shaved chests, plucked eyebrows, orange tans, pimped-out cars, skintight D&G shirts, and an oil tanker’s worth of hair gel. And while the people revere them as heroes, the mainstream media largely ignores them—which isn’t surprising. But the neomelodics work very hard to break out into the mainstream, where they will attempt to reconfigure themselves as friendly Italian products rather than local, Neapolitan ones. For example, when they are ready to go for the gold on a national level, they drop their Neapolitan dialect and graduate to standard Italian. And when we say they work very hard, we mean they are some of the most intense laborers we have ever encountered, going as far as playing ten (ten!) shows a day, every day, for months, incessantly promoting themselves through the internet, local TV and radio stations, and countless appearances at weddings, birthday parties, confirmations, restaurants, street parties, town fairs, and pretty much anywhere they are invited. They make all those stories about how hard Black Flag went for it when they toured sound like a teddy bears’ picnic. Compared to the average neomelodic singer, Henry Rollins is Little Bo Peep.
Federico Vacalebre, the Italian music journalist who coined the term “neomelodic,” says, “If gangster rap is the CNN of the American ghetto, neomelodics are the CNN of the Neapolitan ghetto.” And though they never explicitly speak of the Camorra, Vacalebre adds that “while the criminality of American gangster rap is more of a myth than anything else, our criminality is in fact very real and very scary.” It’s no stretch then to surmise that the neomelodics’ link to the Camorra is not just in their geographic, social, and capitalistic similarity. Since the Naples Mafia is known for its ability to invest in any and every moneymaking business in southern Italy, it’s perhaps not unfair to say that there is a possibility that the neomelodics’ finances might often be of suspect origin. Perhaps. Can you tell that we’re trying to put this in the most indirect possible way? We’re not being pussies. We just don’t want our people at Vice Italy to wind up with their heads in one place and their torsos in another.
We recently sent a couple of our people to Naples to shoot a neomelodics documentary for VBS.TV. There, we hooked up with characters like Tommy Riccio, an old-school neomelodic star who shoots rays of pure charisma from his eyeballs; Rossella, one of the few female neomelodics, who took us on a six-concerts-in-one-day trip; Alessio, a rising star (and a babe) who’s going to break into the mainstream Italian pop world very soon; and Giuseppe Jr., a “baby” neomelodic singer who first stepped into the limelight when he was nine years old, singing a song in which he smooth-talked a girl into the wonderful world of preteen sex.
While we were there we also hooked up with Antonio Zambardino, a Roman photographer who has been working on documenting the neomelodic scene for the past year. These are his photos you’ve been looking at for the last few pages here. Thanks, Antonio.
Hey, an abridged version of our documentary on Naples’ Neomelodics scene is going to be on MTV. Watch The Vice Guide to Everything, premiering Monday December 6 at 11 PM (10 central), and check out VBS.tv for the full megillah.
