Dicitencell Vuje
Courtesy of Di Petsa 'Self Birth' via Dazed Digital
If Ladaniva sing in Neapolitan, can localism survive in the globalized market ocean?
In the frenetic post-lunch scrolling of any afternoon, discovering (by chance, just like the most beautiful things) a couple of Ladaniva reels—the duo from Lille who represented Armenia at Eurovision—that they interpreted "Dicitencell vuje" is an epiphanic experience. Suddenly the world becomes a beautiful place again.
They interpret the classic by Rodolfo Falvo and Enzo Fusco as a tribute to the Italian folk music tradition, which, along with the many contaminations that characterize their music, they claim has had a fundamental influence on their formation. Thus, from an unlikely alignment, questions, new loves, and obsessions flare up.
The French-Armenian duo from Lille proves to be a wonderful find. Their style is a kaleidoscope of contemporary and omnivorous sounds, blending Balkan tradition, French folk, Latin American, and Mediterranean rhythms, reminiscent of both Habib Koitè and Cosmo Sheldrake, characterized by a versatility and multiplicity of potential not at all distant from the austere Russian off-road vehicle from which they borrow the name.
A glimpse—splendidly identity-rich and multicultural—that distinguishes itself in the arid current mainstream landscape, tediously flattened on ballads, ditties, and various monuments to emptiness. A Damascus rose in the desert of our time, filled with laments too similar to themselves.
Not by chance, despite modest numbers compared to other competitors, they are rewarded by results: 1,230,000 monthly streams on Spotify, a record placement for Armenia at 8th place in Malmö (immediately after Angelina Mango, who has significantly higher numbers) with "Jako," the lead single of their latest album with approximately 4,180,136 listens.
A complex and light-hearted song (it’s possible, apparently), with a (more or less) meaningful text, celebrating the freedom (experienced and demanded) to be women freely, happily shaking off the weight of external judgment, but where, finally, “la grande bellezza” lies in the vivid accuracy of the arrangement: layered, authentic, and balanced, which alone is a journey around the world of composed and articulated elaboration.
After all, Jaklin Baghdasaryan and Louis Thomas are not "taken from the street," but on the contrary, they have long-standing conservatory training behind them, perhaps betrayed precisely by the palpable sensitivity to the peculiarity of the small.
Is there hope, then? If Neapolitan songs continue to peek into Europe as well as Italy, we can question where the world is going or where we want it to go. Is there still space for the search for the local in a gigantic and global market? What is the future of contemporary music, where are we going, and where do we want to go? Big and small, city center and suburbs, are really adamantine and unbreakable concepts? Are they really incompatible worlds? Where does this swirling globalized world drag us?
Probably, if indeed man is still the measure of all things and in our lives as consumers there is still a glimmer of choice in how and with what we are fed by those who produce, there is still a hidden paradise beyond the mangrove forest of a distant country, and the English (or Anglophones) have not yet taken everything. Since 2000, the Westernized world has been eating more or less everything with more or less the same nonchalance. In the general bulimia of our time, we forget that exoticism is an illusion (prospective, more than optical), and that a ragù eaten in Bangkok is not so different from our Saturday night’s sushi. So, even the universal vocation of a song lies more in its narration and in the sensitivity of the listener than in its actual body.
Once on the swirling carousel of musical capitalism of great numbers, therefore, if one does not get off in time, could really risk believing that outside the Anglo-Saxon musical universe, there are only country fairs and little tunes. After all, it's a simple step, if now even Maneskin hardly sings in Italian anymore. Yet miracles happen occasionally, whether the carousel got stuck or a more reckless child than others jumped off in time while it was spinning—maybe we'll never know, by the way, the fact is that occasionally, after running enough to understand how deep the sea is, you jump off. And here the infinitely small is discovered to be infinitely large, and even a regional language and cultural heritage can become a fertile ground for world music.
So here the black pearls of our time are born, in the short circuits of unbridled accessibility driven forward by Spotify, in those stumbles of chance where mere global and monothematic propagation leaves room for the intersection of seemingly isolated universes. And in a moment, leaping over the Alps, a dialect becomes international, demonstrating that it can dribble even the same Stepmother Italy that not many months ago sweated at the thought of seeing Geolier perform in Neapolitan in Europe, and yet in the current scenario, who can say that Emanuele Palumbo didn’t see far? Probably the key to the survival of small or large local traditions in a landscape that pushes towards the maximum usability of its products lies, despite what they have tried to make us believe, in the content and not in the container, even in a world where sadly characters devour artists—perhaps the key lies precisely in the language beyond the tongue and in the stubborn contamination, contrary to the most bigoted Sanremo logics.
Contradicted by the almost widespread charge of Neapolitans like Davide Petrella (known as Tropico), Nu Genea, more contaminated than ever, to return to Pino Daniele arm in arm with Richie Havens and down there. We probably need to get dirtier, maybe get better dirtier, and there is still room for our roots in a world of glass buildings, and the only walls to break down are those of a parochialism that rejects the inevitable compromise of a hybridization with new languages.
