Tu vuò fà l'americano

Renato Carosone wrote the music almost as fast as he could read the words. In 1956 the head of the Ricordi label, Rapetti, commissioned a song for a radio contest, and Carosone set Nicola "Nisa" Salerno's Neapolitan lyrics to a swing and jazz tune in very little time. He was convinced on the spot that it would be a big success. He was right, and the joke has aged well. The song mocks a young Neapolitan who plays at being American: whisky and soda, rock and roll, baseball and Camel cigarettes, all paid for with money from his parents. It is usually read as a satire of the Americanisation that swept Italy after the Second World War, while the south was still largely rural and traditional. Carosone sang it himself in the 1958 film Totò, Peppino e le fanatiche, and Sophia Loren sang it in It Started in Naples two years later. According to la Repubblica it was the defining hit of his career, and he retired from music in 1960, just four years after releasing it. The song never retired. Boris Vian turned it into a French parody about the craze for all things Italian, Lou Bega and the Brian Setzer Orchestra covered it, and Matt Damon, Jude Law and Fiorello sang it in a jazz club in The Talented Mr. Ripley. In 2010 the sample at the heart of Yolanda Be Cool's We No Speak Americano became an international hit. A Neapolitan joke about copying America ended up being copied all over the world.