Spaccanapoli is a group from Naples - historically a crossroads for the cultures of the whole Mediterranean region. Our music is rooted in traditions that go back further and deeper than Catholic rituals to the pre- Christian rites of Dionysus. This is the expression of the working people- pulsing drums, impassioned vocals, the wild dances of the Tarantella adn Tammurriata - the vibrant energy of the street carnival celebrated in the shade of the smouldering Vesuvius.
Naples and its surroundings own an astonishing patrimony of folk culture:the popular religion on which it is pivoted, is clearly a catholic overlap on pre-Christian rites, and during its collective moments, it still retains the ancient vitalise of the dionisyan cults, providing the faithful from the low classes with an articulated and rich symbolism.
Music, together with dance, is an essential part of all this: whether it is Carnival with its wild Tarantella (the ancient individual dance of possession) or the spring festival for Madonna di Castello, one of the many Mediterranean Great Mothers, with its exhausting Tammurriata (a dance performed in couples, within a circle of people while people can really sing in a high strangled style up at the top the of human voice on the steady rhythm of the Tammorra the big traditional drum), a whole lot of different forms of traditional music are featured and, like for every traditional culture, music and dance, as ancient languages of the body, help to express and control (allowing to lose and recover identity) any kind of tension within the ritual.
Since the 70s ,with the advent of a late heavy industrialisation and mass culture, the ancient mythical and ritual element, belonging to a still pre-modern society, has begun partly to disappear and partly to be refunctionalized , convening new and more suitable meanings for the anguish of the anonymous way of life of a post-modern world.
The songs and the music contained in this album are not a sample of Neapolitan traditional music and they are not a proposal of re-arranged folk songs; that has already decently been done by ethnomusicologist and later on by the groups of the folk music revival. The song of this album are about folk culture and how it is dramatically undergoing mutation. Some of them come from the repertoire of E Zezi workers group. Since 1974E Zezi, mainly formed by workers of the automobile factories of the industrial belt of Naples, have been singing protest songs composed in the idiom of traditional music, giving to the more one hundred people that have joined the group during the years, the change to express their discomfort and rage.
All the member of this new band come from E Zezi ; the name theyve chosen Spaccanapoli is meant as provocation: is the name of an old street of Greek origin in the centre of Naples, which has been reduced to a touristic symbol but were still now authentic folklore flourishes. There new songs try to describe some aspects of folk culture, and a possible contemporary meanings of it , emphasizing the research in to the Neapolitan traditional languages, both for music and lyrics to display their plasticity and their combinatorial skills.
