Rap/Trap/(Neo)melodica/Urban

Sound Technologies and Cultural Identities in the Contemporary Urban South

Abstract

This article examines Neapolitan trap as an aesthetic, social, and technological phenomenon, focusing on its relationship with both the neomelodic tradition and the global culture of hip hop. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining musicology, ethnography, cultural studies, and digital production practices, the essay investigates the construction of a “Southern” sonic identity in which melody and dialect operate as devices of authenticity and belonging. Neapolitan trap emerges as a site of hybridization where the voice becomes both instrument and sign, and the beat functions as an acoustic archive of the present. The direct testimonies of artists such as ‘Nto, Nicola Siciliano, and Vale Lambo reveal how technology, far from being a mere tool, acts as a cultural agent and producer of meaning. The result is a new affective geography of Neapolitan song—one that fuses oral and digital dimensions, melodic intimacy and the roughness of trap sound—thus redefining the boundaries between authenticity and artifice, the local and the global.