music
twelve o’clock, June 21, 2021 – 10:54 pm
The duo who grew up between Naples and Berlin changes their theme in the wake of “Black lives matter” and launches an animated anti-racial debate on social media
of Giuliano Delli Paoli
The delicate question of cultural appropriation also lands in Naples. The choice of the Neapolitan duo Nu Guinea to change its name to Nu Genea, with reference to the Greek word that means “birth”, announced with a long post on social media with hundreds of subsequent interventions, inaugurates a debate that has so far involved in our country only localized pockets of public opinion, mostly active on the internet. A change of identity that follows the examples of the American DJ Marea Stamper, first The Black Madonna and now, following a petition, The Blessed Madonna, and the Dutch band Dam Swindle once Detroit Swindle. It is a phenomenon destined to divide, born in the first instance in the United States as an academic theory according to which the free adoption of elements of one culture by the members of another considered “dominant” would be disrespectful and would constitute a form of oppression and in some cases of mere identity subtraction. The decision of the multi-instrumentalists Lucio Aquilina e Massimo Di Lena, owners of the musical project now ex Nu Guinea, known for the album “Nuova Napoli” and for the many sold out at their concerts, therefore puts on the plate a question as delicate as it is ambiguous, which involves art in its broadest sense , as a human activity that leads to forms of creativity on paper, free from external constraints and impositions of any kind. The choice of the two young musicians, considered the innovators of the jazz-funk tradition of the city, heirs of that “neapolitan sound” which starting from James Senese’s Napoli Centrale has defined a style capable of uniting the different musical souls of the Mediterranean, squeezes the eye above all to the ideology at the center of another movement from the States, “Black Lives Matter”, literally “The lives of blacks matter”.
The reflection
«Six months ago – he says – after the explosion of important contemporary movements such as“ Black lives matter ”, we began to reflect on the expanded meaning of our stage name. First of all, we realized that historically in America southern Italians like us were called “Guineas”, referring to the darker skin tone, and therefore we felt authorized, erroneously, to use that word without understanding that we were only continuing to feed old people. stereotypes. Then Guinea, although aesthetically beautiful, is still a word linked to an angular colonial past. The inhabitants of New Guinea, in fact, are so called because the English colonialists identified their dark skin not for climatic reasons, but for racial reasons and linked to Africa, very far from Indonesia among other things. A semantic background that therefore has nothing to do with the free and cheerful spirit of our music. We have discussed a lot about being free from prejudice and stereotypes. But there are some that we don’t like anymore, such as considering New Guinea only as an exotic place on the other side of the world, when that’s not the case at all. Finally, our musical style is influenced more by Fela Kuti’s Africa than by Indonesia ». The people of the network and the many fans, meanwhile, are already on the path of “war”, divided into factions between those who label the choice as “pathetic” and “inappropriate” and those who, on the contrary, consider the two artists “courageous” and ” authentic “. And there are few who express themselves on what, to say it with Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni, in love counts more than words, namely music. Yet another unequivocal sign that times have, unfortunately or fortunately, inexorably changed.
June 21, 2021 | 22:54
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