Abstract
Popular Italian culture has grown ever more interested in the interpenetration between organized crime, state activities and transnational economic processes. However, while these narratives productively analyse—and denounce—the macroeconomic processes underscoring illegal and harmful practices, they also often complement such economic analyses by perpetuating stereotypical characterizations of the people involved in the crimes. In this article, I analyse popular music across five decades, in order to assess the ways in which the denunciation of state crime is persistently connected with cliched representations of the modes of existence that allegedly characterize Southern Italian populations. Focussing on acclaimed political songs by Northern and Central Italian acts, namely I Giganti, Fabrizio De Andre, Litfiba, Frankie Hi-NRG and Fabrizio Moro, the article identifies the textual, musical and extra-musical elements that resort to stereotyping Southern Italians in order to make a point about state-driven illegality. I argue that this type of ethnically biased narrative may paradoxically result in a symbolic absolution of the State, in a way that all responsibility for illicit and harmful practices is attributed to Southern communities.
Highlights
Published in the prominent social sciences journal Meridiana, Gabriella Gribaudi’s renowned essay “Mafia, culture e gruppi sociali” [“Mafia, Cultures and Social Groups”], recently marked 30 years since its publication
Gribaudi opens her essay with a critique of the traditional representations of the mafias1 as a phenomenon that is indissolubly connected to the “caratteristiche culturali di un certo tessuto sociale, con la sua riottosità ad assumere comportamenti ‘moderni’” (“Mafia” 347) [“cultural characteristics of a certain social fabric, with its recalcitrance towards engaging in ‘modern’ behaviours”]
According to Gribaudi, these representations often indulge in racist manifestations, such that the mafia, camorra
Summary
Published in the prominent social sciences journal Meridiana, Gabriella Gribaudi’s renowned essay “Mafia, culture e gruppi sociali” [“Mafia, Cultures and Social Groups”], recently marked 30 years since its publication. De André’s outrageous parody of Neapolitans effaces the elements of politico-economic critique of the song, leaving the listener with a cruel and gratuitous mischaracterization of Neapolitans as irremediably colluding with the camorra Both contained in albums that were released in 1993, in the aftermath of the brutal violence that characterized the 1992 mafia bombings in Sicily, Litfiba’s rock song “Dimmi il nome” [“Tell me the name”] and Frankie Hi-NRG’s hip-hop track “Fight da faida” [“Fight the Feud”] have in common the use of the marranzanu [traditional Sicilian jaw harp], especially (but not exclusively) in their respective intros. While these caveats are essential, they do not invalidate the critical points mentioned here
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