Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
106
his tactics and addressed people indirectly in various ways. He started to produce music
videos that he offered for broadcast on pirate TV channels. He partnered with a recording
studio and came in contact with a boss-impresario. In order to discover the role of the
Camorra, he began to transform himself into a neo-melodico singer writing his own songs
and looking for an impresario. He engaged in the experience of ‘becoming-neo-melodico’
until dangers seemed to accumulate, thwarting the process. Participant observation in the neo-
melodica music scene, it emerged, meant entanglement in a problematic contact zone.
In his research, Pardo has covered the whole spectrum of people’s activities, from the
legal and semi-legal to the outright illegal, always emphasizing the fact that true criminals are
a small minority and that Naples being so often associated with organized crime has been
enormously damaging. As Pine was particularly interested in the neo-melodica music scene
and its entanglements with organized crime, it was natural that he should focus on the nature
and extent of illicit activities. Nevertheless, Pine has addressed all activities that inform the
art of making do, from legal forms of favor exchange and semi-legal working activities to
illicit forms of exchange and both murky and explicit entanglements with organized crime.
To perform neo-melodica music does not mean to be a criminal, but many of the neo-
melodica music singers have found working opportunities in circles dominated by organized
crime affiliates. ‘Singing neo-melodica music is one of the entrepreneurial arts of making do,
and affiliating with a crime clan is an act of entrepreneurial excess. Between them are
multiple and varying potential relations’ (p. 62).
Among all arts, music probably has the greatest potential of affective binding. Indeed,
Naples owes its fascination mainly to its extraordinary musical traditions. The great variety of
Neapolitan musical styles and the capacity of Neapolitan artists to absorb elements from
other traditions and create new styles is alluring. In the case of the neo-melodica music, the
affective-aesthetic effects of music are used to create and reinforce identity. Neo-melodica
singers are not appreciated so much for their musical qualities as for their ability to create
affective-aesthetic atmospheres. They stage the lives of their fans while generating
configurations of Neapolitan life toward which they and their fans orient their everyday
experience. Using the language of the popular classes and melodramatic melodies, they tell
stories that are typical of the poorer Neapolitan urban and suburban neighborhoods; stories of
love and betrayal, and sometimes of fathers in jail or on the run.
Starting from the theoretical framework of performance studies and the Deleuzian
theories of affect, Pine reconstructs in his ethnography environments and atmospheres,
