Drawing on his fieldwork research in the southern Italian city of Naples since 1998, Jason Pine offers a fresh perspective on the city’s folklife, and especially its often mentioned “art of making do,” by focusing on the local neomelodica song genre and its complex relationship with Naples’ organized crime scene.
Neomelodica music, which emerged in the 1980s, is a song genre described as “erotic-sentimental” (7), characterized by the extensive use of Neapolitan dialect and usually associated with Naples’ lower-class neighborhoods, including the degraded suburban areas famously portrayed by Neapolitan journalist Roberto Saviano in his 2006 book Gomorra. Partly because of this association, neomelodica music and musicians have consistently been looked down upon as low-quality—as opposed to the classic canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song) famous worldwide—and complicit with the camorra, the local organized crime system. The increasing diffusion nationwide of this genre in the 1990s and 2000s, especially thanks to the many southerners living and working in the Italian north, has ignited local and national debates on both its artistic value and social role.
Entering the debate as an American anthropologist with first-hand experience of both the city and the neomelodica scene, Pine illustrates how neomelodica music is just one of the many elements of Naples’ contact zone, where “the so-called formal, informal, and illicit economies overlap” (9). Within this troubled contact zone, the only way for musicians and their families, agents, and recording studios, to survive on the neomelodica musical scene (and in a few cases to make it on the national musical scene) is by “making do” with the little resources they have—which includes performing at private parties organized for the camorra affiliates’ families. While most discussions of neomelodica music tend to trace a logical and clear-cut connection between this musical scene and the camorra, Pine’s participant observation (mainly as a music video author), as well as his direct contact and close relationship with musicians, agents, and recording studios, allow him to show how this connection is quite subtle and complex. Rather than simply exposing the dynamics of collusion, Pine is interested in exploring the various ways in which all the elements co-existing in this context share the same “affective-aesthetic experiences” (18).
Pine’s attention to these “affective-aesthetic” relations, not only among the various agents of the neomelodica scene but also between them and the anthropologist, is what makes his study of neomelodica music particularly interesting. Dealing with the politics of fieldwork within the Naples contact zone, and particularly with the rhetorical intricacies of the Neapolitan dialect, means dealing with consistent indeterminacy of meaning, to the point that the answer to the anthropologist’s initial research question is constantly deferred and frustrated by his informants. Or in other cases, the interviewees offer hyperrealistic representations of themselves in order to enhance their artistic personas, bringing into question the authenticity of the interviews.
Pine’s analysis of these “self-folklorizing tactics” (5) is equally interesting, since it reflects the way that Neapolitans often react to an external gaze. Faced with the problem of writing about a city that has been too often written about in a stereotypical, folkloric way, Pine brings the notion of gaze to the fore and illustrates the ways that the neomelodica milieu uses this notion to succeed in the art of making do.
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[Review length: 541 words • Review posted on September 17, 2013]