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Raiz — WOP (2004)
1.Scegli me
2. Musica 3. Dietro il tuo chador 4. dare 5. Nun me vuo' cchiù6. Ancora ancora ancora 7. Tu che non ci sei 8. Ilah Shadday 9. C'era una volta 10. W.O.P
Review
WOP is the record Raiz always wanted to make. Or so he said in one of the many interviews he's given Italian media since the June 2004 release of his first solo recording since leaving Almamegretta, the band he had fronted since the early 1990s. He'd long wanted to make a straight-up pop record, "a disk of songs," as he told the Italian online magazine glamour.com. But the "complexity" of Almamegretta, with four distinct creative personalities, wouldn't permit it. WOP captures where he's at these days, his ears attuned to international pop and his thoughts preoccupied with matters of the heart. In the glamour.com interview Raiz says he's on good terms with the compagni from his old band, and he approves of the "bella trasformazione" they've made since his departure. He adds that the first compliments he received for WOP came from Gennaro Tesone, Almamegretta's drummer. Not only is there no discord with his old band mates, the door remains open to future collaborations. If all is well between Gennaro Della Volpe and his former colleagues, things aren't so harmonious with his fans. Instead of winning universal acclaim, WOP has divided his fiercely loyal audience, including critics. The nay sayers claim that with the exception of a couple of tracks, the new material is innocuous and too radio-friendly. One critic-fan wrote that the first single from the CD, the India-infused "Scegli Me," sounded like the pop-rock singer Mango, apparently the worst dis imaginable. The exploration of various musical cultures that had been Almamegretta's forte has become trendy culture-tripping, according to the same reviewer, Antonio Casillo, who accused Raiz of "superficiality" and exotic quote-dropping. Others, me included, think Raiz has made a tight, well-produced and varied pop record that brings his formidable talents as a singer and songwriter to the fore. Though less experimental than Almamegretta, WOP is hardly a radical break with the past. Produced by Roberto Vernetti and ex-Alma keyboardist Paolo Polcari, this "disk of songs" delivers pure pop pleasure while amalgamating the diverse musical styles Raiz explored with his former collaborators — reggae, North African, rock, hip hop, and canzone napoletana — as well as some new flavors, like samba and bhangra. "His calling card remains 'contamination'" (contaminazione, an aesthetic philosophy and approach embraced by Neapolitan and other Southern Italian musicians, disdains "purity" and "authenticity" in favor of cultural hybridity) and "the continuing investigation of Mediterranean sounds," says another reviewer, Giulio Nannini. WOP, according to the thumbs-up review in the Italian online magazine sentireascoltare.com is "a record that brings together the old and the new, and that places Raiz, son of humanity and citizen of the world, in the Olympus of authentic and universal singers." I'd say that WOP is Raiz's Kaya. When Bob Marley released that album in 1978, rock critics savaged him for having gone soft. For the most part the record was made up of short, tuneful, and tender love songs, to the women and the weed in his life. (The title track was a giddy three-minute romp through the ganja fields.) Lester Bangs famously and foolishly accused Marley of having "betrayed" his people. The Rastaman used to sing about burnin' and lootin' and shooting the sheriff, and now he just wants to get high and get laid? What the fuck? Okay, the analogy isn't perfect. Unlike Marley, Raiz hasn't been shot by political thugs, nor has he been opportunistically courted by elected officials. The calm Marley achieved on Kaya was hard-won and clearly fragile, contingent. But like Kaya, Raiz's WOP focuses mainly on romantic love, and when it touches on Big Issues — cross-cultural conflict, terrorism and war, dispossession and emigration - it approaches them from a personal standpoint. "Dietro il tuo Chador" frames the culture clash between the West and Islam as an old Italian story - Romeo e Giulietta. Besotted by a woman in a blue silk chador with eyes full of "fire" and "passion," who lives with her brothers in "the center of my city," he laments the "wall of words" that separates them. After all, as Napoletano and Araba they are "two shores of the same [Mediterranean] sea." But, the force of his love is powerful enough to tear down that wall, as a recently deceased American president was fond of saying. Here critics like Casillo may have a point — the metaphor is hardly the most trenchant Raiz could've come up with. But the groove pretty much compensates for the words. Raiz brought the Maghrebi flava to Almamegretta, and here he and his collaborators make that ethereal-funky marriage of swooping strings and driving beats that reminds me of a North African answer to Cuban charanga. Raiz has explained why he's now writing songs like "Chador" and less of the edgier and militantly anti-racist material that he created with Almamegretta. Truth be told, he's always been a "Love Man." Check your Almamegretta CDs, and it's obvious that for every "Sudd" or "Figli di Annibale" there was a "Respiro" or "Fa Ammore Cu' Mme." The difference now is he's been happily married for the past couple of years, and, as he told Glamour, he feels more fulfilled, and more tender, than ever before. Auguri, Raiz! And as he told the Italian-language edition of Rolling Stone, his recent reading matter also has influenced his music: "mystical stuff, also poetry, Sufism, and the Hebrew Kabbalah, and [Gershom] Sholem." I admit that the thought of Raiz jumping on Madonna's kabbalistic bandwagon is pretty disturbing. And this turn toward the mystical is surprising from the man who wrote "Cheap Guru," Almamegretta's terse rebuttal to New Age bromides. But I don't think there's much chance he'll be changing his name to Mordechai anytime soon or selling "acqua di Kabbalah" at his shows. If there is something to the idea that personal and/or spiritual contentment can be bad for artists, it's also true that such a state of mind doesn't have to make you oblivious to the world and its discontents. WOP, in fact, is preoccupied with how hard it is to find and keep "un poco di felicità" in a world full of war and terror, dispossession and vast inequality. Raiz sings "Tu che non ci sei" to a daughter as yet unconceived, pleading with her not to hate him for bringing her into a "horrible world." He promises her that everyday he'll struggle against "this reality," so that "war stays far from our land." "Ilah Shadday," is a pacifist hymn for Israel/Palestine, its Aramaic title, meaning Almighty Lord, underscoring the common roots of Jews and Arabs. Naïve, undoubtedly, but moving nonetheless: "this land can give life to all of us, all it takes is good will," he sings. On "Scegli Me," he avows, "The only homeland I'll fight for is you." "Non me vuo' cchiu" proves Raiz has a sense of humor. It begins as a canzone napoletana, vera e propria, and incorporates a spoken middle section where Raiz comes on like a Mediterranean Barry White, reproaching an ex for taking what she could from him before saying "addio." In his richly accented and, as always, idiosyncratic English, he reminds her, "You wanted da 'owze? I bowt you da 'owze." ("You wanted the house? I bought you the house.") As well as a lot of Gucci, Versace, and Bulgari. "C'era una volta" is the CD's least pop and most experimental track, and the most Almamegretta-ish, a seven-minute-plus dance floor odyssey that opens with Raiz's spoken introduction, segues into a trance-y section, with Raiz singing in napoletano, leading to a four-on-the-floor disco interlude, with digitalized middle eastern sonorities swirling over the rhythmic pulse. It's the kind of spacey elettronica calda that Almamegretta perfected on Imaginaria (2001), the band's last studio recording with Raiz on the mic. The CD ends with the title track, named for an epithet familiar to all of us with Italian roots. Our webmaster Papa Joe tells me that this hiphop/ragamuffin fusion sounds so like the work of American rapper KRS-1 and Spanish alternative rocker Manu Chao as to be actionable. Being only slightly familiar with KRS-1's output, and never having heard anything by Manu Chao, I have to defer to Papa Joe's judgment. But whatever Raiz um, appropriated from whichever sources, he's come up with something stunning, no less than a manifesto for a new, multicultural Italy, as well as an Edward Said-ian rejection of tribalism and fixed national identities. "WOP" opens with a snatch of Napoli-style melody that Raiz sings in napoletano and English, in the guise of an Italian immigrant in Lamerica sending a musical postcard to the famiglia back home. The intro is sonically distorted to sound like a scratchy old 78, placing the missive in the early decades of the twentieth century. Flash forward to today, when other impoverished people without papers — "wops" — are seeking a better life by emigrating — to Italy. Raiz sings about loving Italy because it's "the meeting point of every culture on the earth, Asia, Europe, Africa." And he loves the new Italy, "made from India, Morocco, Albania, Colombia and Senegal." Raiz isn't just identifying with all those "without papers," whether they're the Southern Italian emigrants of the last century or today's refugees from the global South who end up on the shores of Lampedusa or Brindisi. He's also saying vaffanculo to Italian chauvinists like Umberto Bossi and his Lega Nord and to their similarly blinkered American cousins in places like Bensonhurst, who, che ironia, are the descendants of wops: "Don't you remember, some years ago, when your relatives left here to find some happiness in the world? Ya can't stop anyone who wants it and doesn't have it!" If this all sounds high concept, and high-minded, let it be said that WOP is one slammin' manifesto. The song's rapid rhythmic and melodic shifts give the track texture and build excitement, and Raiz's vocal is a marvel, especially when he unleashes the ferocious ragamuffin bark we first heard back in '93 on Fatalla. Then there's that bombing bass that's sure to whomp the hell out of sound systems everywhere. WOP may not be the record that all of Gennaro Della Volpe's fans wanted. But it's nonetheless an auspicious beginning to his new career da soloista. Though aimed squarely at the pop marketplace, and not just hardcore Almamegretta fans, it delivers the goods that made us love Raiz in the first place: a charismatic, soulful persona, a compelling vocal style, by turns fiery and tender and always heartfelt, and an animamigrante (wandering spirit) that still produces the most cosmopolitan of Italian music.
By George De Stefano
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