Made in napoli

A journey inside the Neomelodic, a music wich exists only in the city on Naples, Italy, where the local singer are worshipped as idol but their fame hardly goes beyond the outskirt of the city.Everybody wants to be a singer and often you can find 7/8 years old kids who are professional singers.

“There are more recording studios than pizzerias in Naples” is what you can hear when you ask to someone about music in the city of Parthenope.

During the 80’s a new musical genre was born in Naples: Neomelodic, a synths-pop melodramatic music, a strange mix of traditional neapolitan music and modern globalized pop. You can hear it in every corner of the city and its surroundings spreading out from windows and carsright on the road.

Although geographically limited, neomelodic industry is a business of 200 million of euros per year completely independent from the logic and interests of the main music national labels. If you want to emerge as a singer in a very competitive scenario, you have to pay from 1000 to 3000 euros per months to have your video daily broadcasted on the local tv.

However everybody in Naples wants to be a singer, especially the youngest, therefore there are hundres of “amateur” singers who are satisfied with recording a disc for few thousands of euro and sometimes attending at local tv shows where, for 100 euros, you can perform your songs and let the people in your neighborhood praise you.

The main celebrity of the scenes, worshipped as superstars, release new videos –with millions of visualizations - and attend to local tv shows during the winter in order to promote theirself waiting for the summer to come: this is the season when most of the baptism, marriage and celebrations happened, and if you want your favorite singer at you party you must be ready to pay thousands of euro for a 40 minutes performance.

One of the pecularities of the neomelodic music is that lyrics of the songs are authenthic, close to the life of the audience, and even inspired by some real events.

Sometimes they speak about trouble with law or criminal affiliation, but majority of the songs are about hertbreaks, infidelity, passional, irresistible and erotic love affair or depict the characteristic of the neapolitan urban context: the dynamics and values of the tiny alleys neighborhood where people live in “i bassi” - small houses of one or two rooms on the ground floor with direct access to the street.

The succes and the popularity of a singer in Naples is mainly based on the autenticity of their performances, their messagge and the accessibility: they are not unattainable. Fans can find easily their phone number to contact them or their manager on their videos and often everybody knows where they live.

While all the teenagers of the world are listening Beyonce, in Naples a 13 years old girl prefer to listen Emiliana Cantone because she can understand her language – they even speak the same dialect - she can even call her while she’s at the local tv trasmission and ask to dedicate her a song, or she can call her to perform at this birthday party and sing together her favourite song and taking the hundredth picture with her.

Can you have all of this from Beyonce?