Few figures in the history of Italian music embody the idea of pioneer as he is. Frontman de La Famiglia – the Neapolitan collective that in the nineties brought first hip-hop in Neapolitan dialect on the national market – Polo was much more than a rapper. He was an organizer, a graphic designer, a reference point for an entire generation that would later include names like Clementino and, more recently, Geolier, whose performance in Neapolitan at the Sanremo Festival has shaken the Italian pop culture. The Family released an album entirely in dialect in 1998: a cultural and political provocation, at a time when South Italy was usually liquidated and denigrated in the national debate. That record opened a door that many artists would cross over the next few years. Polo then moved to New York, where he managed Farinella Bakery, a pizzeria that became a cult in the city, while continuing to kidnap at night, without ever stopping. Now, at age 54, he returned to study with The Family: to once again indicate a way out of chaos.
How did your relationship with hip-hop start?
It all started with a professor who stopped me at the board. I don’t remember if I was in middle school or high school, but since then I never stopped thinking about it. Then, as my father worked at the Enel, I had access to a travel program for boys named Arca. From the thirteen years on I went every summer in England and France, and I was breathing this culture from the inside. At the age of eighteen, I took money from scratching on the shops’ huts – then nobody did it, and he really earned it – and I bought a ticket to New York. It cost a million and a half lire. A fortune. But there was no discussion. Hip-hop works as the principle of Archimedes: the more something pushes you down, the more culture brings you up.
As you did, were you aware that you were opening a road?
Everything I did in my life was born of a personal need to say something. Hip-hop had struck us as a lightning for what he carried with him: the gesture, the story of the challenge – the New York gangs who, instead of fighting with knives, challenged themselves dancing. The final message, however, was always peace. Unity. It is a culture that cannot pass by fashion, because the message of love is universal. The more something pushes you down, the more it raises you. The principle of Archimedes applied to music.
What are you still carrying behind Naples?
Anger. Always that. There were perhaps ten, twenty years off: I had Farinella, my workers were paid well, it seemed that the company was really going to something good. But they were lying to us, as they often do. And now we are here, in this abyss, all to navigate without compass, because the machines they have built also interfere with that. The family found light at the bottom of the tunnel in the 1990s and pointed it out. Today, with everything I’ve lived, at fifty-four years, I see even further. In the nineties we looked straight ahead of us, 90 degrees. Not at 30. And at 90 degrees you find the horizon: see forever.
The 41st parallel connects Naples and New York. What do these two cities really share?
The sea. The port. A mother with open arms: everyone is welcome. I can assure you that everyone is welcome in Naples. And New York has always been the home and refuge of those who needed to find something different elsewhere. A mother who raised children capable of defending that right for all. What you see today with Mamdani is not the expression of some corrupt electoral machine: it is the people of New York who says: we want democracy, we want something inclusive, we want to feel part of something bigger.
Geolier in Sanremo, singing in Neapolitan. Continuity or breakup?
I’d say niece. He had the courage to do what we did in 1998, when we released an album entirely in Neapolitan for an Italian market in which Naples was systematically dragged into the mud: Umberto Bossi insulted us in full volume, and we took blows in the face, one after the other. We responded with music. Geolier made the same courageous choice on a much bigger stage. We are great supporters of his work.
Looking at the music scene today: did you miss something? The truth, the belonging, the message?
The truth still exists. The protest still exists. But you have to dig to find it, because it is not always in the mainstream, and the algorithm will not help you look for it. Today the real struggle is between your hunger for truth and algorithm. This is the battle we have to fight. There is no currency on this planet – in no country – that can be compared to the feeling of getting off a stage after the audience received exactly what you wanted to give it.
The stage, the respect of the public, leave a cultural sign: what moves you again?
The stage. There is no currency on this planet, in any country, that keeps when you come down from a stage and the audience received what you came to give them. I don’t need any money. I do it to give what I have inside: something I have to give, what I have to say. When I see it coming on people’s faces in front of me, that’s where I get paid. That’s why we keep going out and playing. Sometimes free.
New York in a bar. Go.
New York is beautiful and dear, but all the money is gone. (Original Neapolitan: “New York is beautiful and dear, but it prides itself on the renar. ”
L’articolo The man who recablated Italian hip-hop, from Naples to New York proviene da IlNewyorkese.
