|
Since the beginning of the twentieth century Brazilian popular music
has reflected the social
and political changes that the nation
has experienced. More recently, rap groups such as Racionais
Mc's
and Planet Hemp have used their music in order to convey
messages with explicitly social or
political messages.
By
Tom Phillips
"All the information I have including that about social problems will show up in my music."
Such was the response of Brazilian singer Chico Buarque de Hollanda, when quizzed about the extent to which his
work had served as a social commentary. A similar paradigm can be applied to the way in which throughout the twentieth
century Brazilian popular music has reflected its country's social and political flux—all aspects of daily life, political or otherwise,
were documented in the period's music.
Indeed, far from merely being a passive reflection of such changes, a number of these musical movements have
actively shaped the landscape of contemporary Brazilian society. In examining the way in which popular music has helped map
out Brazil's recent history then, it is necessary to consider a variety of different musical trends, spanning some one-hundred
years and reaching across each of the nation's twenty-seven 'states' and into the musical heritage of Europe, Africa and the
United States.
Samba, in its various forms, was the first significant musical style of the last century in Brazil. "A product of the
carioca proletariat", the first of such rhythms began to evolve in Rio de Janeiro in the immediate aftermath of slavery's abolition
in 1888, according to Lisa Shaw in The Social History of the Brazilian
Samba.
Former slaves from the sugar plantations of the country's
Nordeste and workers from the coffee plantations of the
southern states simultaneously set off for what was then the Brazilian capital in search of work and a new life. "By the second
decade of the twentieth century," writes Shaw, "a small Afro-Brazilian community existed in the port area and other central
districts of the city."
In time such communities came to occupy the city's hillsides from which their
morro (hill) dwellings eventually took
their name. It was in these favelas (shantytowns) that a variety of "black cultural manifestations", samba included, came to
life. On a very basic level then, the very creation of samba reflects the massive social changes occurring in turn of the
century Brazil, the music's conception owing as it does to the mixing of African and European traditions facilitated by mass
exoduses from, in particular, Bahia and Pernambuco.
An analysis of early samba lyrics demonstrates the close linkage between the samba and the social context into
which it was born. Shaw refers to such texts as "highly significant historical documents" in as far as they represent one of the
few companions to a study on the social and political conditions of the time.
The development of the samba plots a similarly interesting path through Brazilian history. Its stylistic transformation
into the samba de exaltação during the 1930s shows a clear correlation with efforts on the part of the military government to
exploit the appeal of such a movement in order to further its own interests. Songs such as Ari Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil"
were used to market this "país do
futuro" (country of the future), at a time when the proliferation of the
rádio de pilha (battery radio) gave Getúlio Vargas' government unprecedented access to the ears, and minds, of millions of Brazilians.
Whilst samba was able to bridge the social divide in Brazil by virtue of its accessibility to both Brazil's black and
white populations, the movement by which it was followed in the 1950s was steeped in exclusivity to the well-off intelligentsia
of Rio's zona sul. Bossa Nova, or literally the 'New Wave', was, according to Christopher Dunn in
Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the emergence of a Brazilian
counter-culture, "a young, middle-class milieu that was disconnected from samba, the
musical tradition of the urban poor."
Born out of "a reaction by the white middle class to black dominance of the traditional samba", Claus Schreiner, in
his book Música Brasileira argues that whilst
bossa nova was not representative of large parts of Brazilian society it
nevertheless reflected clearly "the existing divisions with" it.
While the movement's scope was socially limited, its portrayal of Brazilian society is considered by some to be no
less significant. Brazilian historian and music critic José Ramos Tinhorão, for example, saw the music of João Gilberto, Tom
Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes as a demonstration of "alienation among the Brazilian elite", and wrote at length of how it
"mirrored unequal economic relations between the periphery and the center."
Ultimately though, for many the "golden age" of
bossa nova merely reflected the relative stability of Brazil at this
time—particularly in as far as many of its leading performers, who inhabited the glass-fronted apartments of Avenida Atlântica,
were concerned. As Dunn would have it:
"Its association with a time of democracy, prosperity, and national pride became more pronounced in subsequent
decades of political repression."
In the words of bossa nova muse Nara Leão, once one of the style's best-known singers, as cited in
Música Brasileira: "The bossa nova
had nothing that could be reconciled with the Brazilian reality." Equally apolitical was the Jovem
Guarda (Young Guard) movement of the late 1960s. Its legions, fronted by composers Roberto and Erasmo Carlos, captured a
trademark disinterest in politics of the day. Instead the music was targeted at the "large proportion of urban youth [who] did not
care about droughts in the Northeast or peasants without land… [and] worried more about immediate things: cars, romance,
clothes and school." as Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha, tell us in
The Brazilian Sound.
Tropicalista Time
Although this period did play host to such politically reticent forms of music, it also witnessed the birth of some
deeply politicised cultural practices. Literary critic Roberto Schwarz affirms the way in which, whilst some sections of Brazilian
society in the sixties had become utterly disillusioned with its politics, other parts of the country "had become unrecognisably
intelligent". Newspapers, he explains, were filled with "talk of agrarian reform, rural disturbances, the workers' movement, the
nationalization of American firms, etc." At the fore of these so-called
engajados (engagés) were Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil,
the figures credited with 'inventing' the influential, if short-lived, Tropicália movement. One of Veloso's contemporaries,
Chico Buarque, refers to the social basis of the Bahian's music, explaining, "their art put also forward a new, just, democratic
society," as the singer is cited in Chico Buarque
by Regina Zappa.
It was a style that moved away from the contrived, "defensive nationalism" of the
samba de exaltação and its search
for brasilidade, says Dunn. The film script for 1968's tropicalist collaboration
Tropicália, ou panis et circencis itself
featured a choir of celebrities exclaiming, '"Brazil is the country of the future" as Veloso quips "this genre is out of fashion."'
Instead Tropicália pursued a more subversive agenda, parodying in its music both consumer culture and the oppressive power
structures within Brazil.
Despite much of the tropicalist repertoire being "musically upbeat and
jubilant", largely set as it was within the framework of major keys, the music
often conveyed "both subtly and overtly, an atmosphere of violence and official
repression in Brazilian cities during the late 1960s, " again according to Dunn.
The Gil composition 'Alfômega', featured on Veloso's
eponymous 'white' album of 1969, contains for example a reference to Carlos Marighella, a high-ranking member of the guerrilla
organization Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN).
Marighella, one of the leading figures in the armed fight against Castelo Branco's 1964 dictatorship and whose name
is evoked in the lyric "iê-ma-ma-Marighella", was himself assassinated by "police agents" in São Paulo. Alongside Ché
Guevara, another left-wing figurehead alluded to in Veloso's 'Soy loco por tí, América', Marighella was representative of the
Marxist ideology that was sweeping through large sections of Brazil's educated
juventude (youth) at this time. Another
technique used by the tropicalist group in order to critique the authorities was that of parody and sarcasm: the script for a TV
Global special, for example, contains the following ironic monologue:
"Our political regime is one of the most perfect in history. Here perfect democracy reigns."
Such a political awakening is captured by the title of one well-known tropicalist song,
'Divino maravilhoso".
According to Dunn, the track "dramatically expressed the mood of the late 1960s, which was simultaneously an exciting period of
counter-cultural experimentation and severe political repression." Whilst such suppression never reached the extremes of the
Argentine regime between 1976 and 1982 under Videla, Viola and Galtieri, widespread discontent nonetheless manifested itself
across the country, in protests against the treatment of those dissenting voices that did exist in Brazil.
September 1968 saw pitched battles between politically opposed students in São Paulo, while the Passeata dos Cem
Mil (The One-Hundred-Thousand March), a mass demonstration against the dictatorship, took place in Rio de Janeiro in
June of the same year. Taking to the streets with the "students, professors, artists, clergy, workers and liberal professionals"
were, perhaps unsurprisingly, Gil and Veloso, championing many of the causes to which their music
referred.
Then Came Chico
Alongside the two Bahians at the march was another of Brazil's most influential popular figures, Chico Buarque de
Hollanda. An exponent of a very different school of music, Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), Buarque was himself emerging as
a considerable political force within the musical community at this time. A self-professed
cara de esquerda (guy from the Left), he regularly sang at student ocupações (takeovers) while studying architecture at the University of São Paulo (USP).
The Rio born sambista was vocal in his support for Fidel Castro's communist regime and, in his recent biography,
even admits to formerly keeping a store of petrol bombs in his garage with which to take on the oppressive military police.
The veteran singer recalls the way in which Brazilian popular music was affected by the political and social instability at home:
"The institutional violence broke the backbone of the so-called evolutionary line that started in
bossa nova and went towards a political aesthetics of the festivals and protest songs era."
Such social and musical transformations are well documented in Buarque's lyrics. Whilst 1968's
Ato Institucional 5 (AI-5) placed stringent guidelines of censorship on composers, a number of his highly critical songs either crept through
Brasília's censorship department or were released under the pseudonym of Julinho da
Adelaide. Of these 'Apesar de Você' and 'Cálice' were undoubtedly
the most openly critical of the regime. The latter song, which used the image of
a chalice to suggest the imperative 'cale-se' (shut up) and in doing so criticize the restrictive Brazilian authorities, remained unreleased until the
final years of authoritarian rule because of this. Strangely, the former track managed to avoid censorship despite repeated
references to the various crimes of "esse estado". Masked as a song about a lost lover, Buarque's composition became an
anthem amongst the regime's opposition, expounding as it did the possibility of a popular uprising:
Como vai proibir/ quando o galo insistir/ em cantar?
How are you going to forbid/ when the rooster insists/ on singing?
And equally,
Como vai abafar/ nosso coro a cantar/ na sua frente?
How are you going to silence/ our chorus singing/ before you?
No less important to this artistic opposition were figures such as Edu Lobo, Geraldo Vandré
and Milton Nascimento, the latter of whose song, 'Coração de Estudante', was used in the lead up to the 1985 elections to promote democracy. The
São Paulo group Titãs, described by Willis Guerra Filho as "a critical register of the Brazilian way of life", continued this
trend of canções de protesto into the 1980s, when the dictatorship's censorship laws had been sufficiently relaxed. Other
groups from around the country have also added to this canon of socially reflective music. Olodum, an exclusively black drum
troupe from Salvador, for example, has produced a number of songs relating to Brazil's black consciousness movement.
Rebel Rock
In a similar way, more recently, rap groups such as Racionais Mc's, the self-professed
"voz da favela" (shantytown's voice), and Planet Hemp have used their music in order to convey messages with explicitly social or political messages.
The two bands have a history of campaigning for both social and racial equality and, to a lesser extent, for the legalization of
marijuana: tellingly the former group was founded in 1988, at the height of Brazil's black consciousness movement, under the
moniker Consciência Black. Both groups have, however, been accused of having strong links to the drugs trade in Brazil.
Judge Siro Darlan even went so far as to ban Planet Hemp from performing to underage crowds in Rio de Janeiro
recently, on the grounds that their music constituted "drug induction". Nevertheless, their irrefutable popularity (Racionais Mc's
album Sobrevivendo no Inferno sold some two hundred thousand copies in its first month of release alone) is a clear indication
that their music is not without relevance to large swathes of Brazilian society. Their political messages may not always be to
the taste of the higher echelons of society, but they are certainly symptomatic of widespread discontent with the socially
unequal status quo across Brazil.
Aside from the explicitly political musical tracts, there do of course exist more banal forms of popular music. A
renaissance of rock music, particularly in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, has produced a number of well-known bands whose music is
no less reflective of the social changes that Brazil is currently undergoing. Sepultura, Tianastácia and Skank are just a few
examples of the great variety of internationally successful
Mineiro (from Minas Gerais state) groups, whose repertoires take in a
mixture of reggae, heavy metal, samba,
forró and rock.
Equally, the worldwide boom in electronic dance music has not been lost on Brazilians. In the southern states
particularly, DJs such as Anderson Noise, Marky Mark, Xerxes de Oliveira and Renato Cohen have emerged in the last decade,
mixing traditional Brazilian music with modern production techniques and western styles such as Acid House and Hardcore.
Recent collaborations between these producers and artists such as Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee and Jorge Benjor demonstrate distinct
ties with the 'old school' and at the same time significant influences from abroad.
This multi-national mistura is undoubtedly important in as far as it reflects the way in which young Brazilians are
both actively proud of their musical heritage, yet at the same time interested in that from overseas. Just as the Tropicália
movement owed much to the sounds of contemporary Britain, so too does
música electrónica brasileira draw from a variety of
musical backgrounds. The São Paulo based record company Trama, one of Brazil's most internationally successful labels,
highlights well this duality, having itself strong connections to the old guard of MPB. Its owner, João Marcelo Bôscoli, is in fact
the son of the late Elis Regina and Ronaldo Bôscoli, two of the movement's best-loved musicians.
This patchwork of regional and international effects also mirrors the distinct Americanization of sections of Brazilian
society since the 1980s. The same interest in the Estados
Unidos, and indeed Europe, that saw shopping malls spring up across
the nation has now, on a lesser scale, brought about a fascination with 'rave' culture and the turntables on which such
music is performed. One effect of this new direction has been a marked rise in drug use amongst sections of Brazilian youth:
early last year Brazil's first known laboratory for producing ecstasy was discovered in the center of São Paulo, whilst the
previous November saw the police discover some 170,000 pills at the city's Cumbica airport, their biggest haul to date.
A recent survey carried out by USP in conjunction with government researchers showed that around 19.4 percent of
Brazilians had experimented with illegal drugs at some point, while disputed U.S. government figures point out that between forty
and fifty tons of cocaine is consumed annually within Brazil. According to the music journalist Erika Palomino:
"They united electronic music and the visual language of the '60s and '70s. In some way they also become slaves of
'E'."
However, as with the bossa nova from which it draws inspiration, such a medium is largely restricted to the
middle-class nightclubs of Lapa in Rio de Janeiro, Morumbi in São Paulo and Savassi in Belo Horizonte.
A far less exclusive form of dance music currently popular in Brazil is 'funk', a primitive, bass-heavy mix of American
and British house music. "From Rio's favelas
where it was born in the mid-1980s," one journalist recently wrote, "Brazilian
funk has conquered a good portion of the country and can now be heard in São Paulo and Salvador." Just as Rio's samba
schools served, and indeed continue to serve, as outlets from the rigmarole of inner city poverty, so too are the
bailes de funk, an escape from everyday reality for many young Brazilians. According to the website of Furacão 2000, one of the genres's
leading collectives, over 30,000 people attend such parties each week in and around Rio de Janeiro.
The irreverent lyrics, which frequently allude to
popozudas, cachorras and tchutchuca (all various slang
incarnations of the word for a beautiful woman), are a constant target for criticism in conservative sections of the Brazilian media.
Nevertheless, such sexually explicit content does point to a definite shift in the values and inhibitions of the country's
younger generations. Whilst Brazil remains in large part at least nominally Catholic, the gratuitous, and to many offensive,
wording of such music indicates most clearly a kind of social liberalization. Ultimately, the landscape of Brazilian music is as varied and diverse as the population from which this cultural form
comes. Across the country a plethora of different stylistic variations exist, each of which relates in some way to the social,
political and economic makeup of the nation. Given this, it is worth noting that whilst a thread can easily be followed through the
more political elements of Brazilian music over the last century, other, perhaps less highbrow genres are equally important to a
study of the country's social anthropology. Such styles, amongst them the internationally renowned
lambada, and the Carnaval-based
frevo, paint just as telling a portrait of Brazil's history, and for that matter its future.
Bibliography:
Dunn, Christopher, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the emergence of a Brazilian
counter-culture (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
Fausto, Boris. A Concise History of
Brazil (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
McGowan, Chris and Pessanha, Ricardo, The Brazilian
Sound (USA: Temple, 1998)
Schreiner, Claus, Musica Brasileira (London: Marion Boyars, 1993)
Shaw, Lisa, The Social History of the Brazilian
Samba (Hants: Ashgate, 1999)
Zappa, Regina, Chico Buarque (Rio de Janeiro: Dumará, 1999)
Discography:
Buarque, Chico, Chico Buarque (Brasil: Poligram, 1978)
Costa, Gal, Gal Costa (Brasil: Philips, 1969)
Nascimento, Milton, Ao Vivo (Brasil: Barclay, 1983)
Racionais Mc's, Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Brasil: Sony, 1994)
Veloso, Caetano, Caetano Veloso (Brasil: Philips, 1969)
Tom Phillips is a British student journalist who lived in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, between 2000 and 2001. He is Features Editor of the Leeds Student newspaper and writes for a
variety of publications on politics and current affairs, as well as various aspects of the
cultura brasileira. Tom will be based in
Rio de Janeiro starting August 2003. He can be reached on:
tom.phillips@dial.pipex.com and his articles can also be found
at: www.leedsstudent.org.uk
Discuss it in our Forum
Send
your
comments to
Brazzil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Abracos a todos.
Fernanda Nogueira Corradi