With the passing of 1970s Italian disco star Pino D’Angiò in 2024, the torch was handed to a new generation of young Napoli funketeers to keep their city’s funk and disco legacy alive. These producers and musicians—groups like Nu Genea, Mystic Jungle, and The Funkin’ Machine—have a keen awareness of their folkloric past thanks to reissues and strong relationships with their elders, as reflected in their reverential songwriting, helping to usher in the next epoch of the Napoli funk scene.
While Italy in general is well-known for the Italo disco explosion in the late 1970s to early ‘80s—which gave us artists like Georgio Moroder, Hipnosis, and Kano—Naples specifically had its own, lesser known sound. Napoli funk relied heavily on the influence of American funk and jazz—think James Brown or McFadden & Whitehead—blending them with regional folk traditions, rather than the futurism of space disco.
