Surprise was the first reaction for those who heard the name of this band from Guarulhos, São Paulo, that launched its first recording in July. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of Mamonas Assassinas is the present condition of Brazilian pop music. The thinking is that the deficit of good ideas in MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) has created "alternative" groups that migrated from the secondary school playgrounds to recording studios and became the dominant sound on the radio.
Kids in Brazil have always adored changing the lyrics of well-known songs to objectionable ones and making a parody of the tune's original meaning. They have always loved suggestive jokes. As a result, people in Rio today can always tell which homes have children as they will inevitably hear a discharge of Mamonas Assassinas blaring out into the street. Analogous to Beavis and Butt-head in the United States, anything that amuses young people (the more idiotic the better) is fair game for the media.
To the despair of many Brazilian parents, their kids are consuming the newly released CD with voracious appetites. Attempting to please their capricious kids, some uninformed and "out of touch" parents have innocently agreed to buy the disc. Still upon first hearing, have forbidden their kids to waste their time with "such garbage" and have threatened to return the recording. As with most threats, however, the parents have had to bite the bullet. In the case of Mamonas, the bullet is rather large and goes straight to the head.
In the last few months, Mamonas Assassinas has been performing five shows per week, sometimes three in one day, charging an average fee of 20,000 reais (more than $20,000) for each time they take the stage, giving them an income of over 400,000 reais (around $440,000). Their first recording sold over 350,000 copies in the first two months after release, more than the last CDs by renowned singer-composers Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, and Milton Nascimento combined.
The attack-by-debauchery marathon seems to be beneficial. Their highly abusive lyrics plus a mixture of bizarre rhythms, has inserted Mamonas Assassinas as the most played group on Brazilian radio. In fact, Mamonas is currently getting more radio air-play in Rio and São Paulo than any other artist. Despite the fact that the recording is a comparatively new release, the band played recently at Arpoador beach to an enthusiastic crowd of over three thousand that had their song lyrics memorized. Afterwards, with questionable sincerity, Dinho, the band's singer, stipulated in cynical terms that the band's music is a divine inspiration.
With or without the intention of offending, the group uses a heavy-metal guitar sound and ruthless lyrics to ridicule the continental Portuguese, the caipiras (hillbillies), and principally the people from the sertão (backland people from the Northeast) who immigrate to São Paulo and Rio looking for work during the horrendous Northeastern droughts. These are people who dress and speak differently, who are often illiterate and who will do anything, any type of work, to survive in the big city. They are also a quick-thinking group of people who eventually become acculturated, but who are terribly exploited when they first arrive.
In the thousands of interviews the group has given, one question inevitably rears its head: Why Mamonas Assassinas? The relationship between the name and music is even more bizarre after eyeballing the group's trademark, an enormous pair of firm female breasts that tower over the band members who are carousing below them. The band's 22 year old bass player, Samuel, explained that he dreamt of a name that would bring them success. Even without the fantasies, the band hides behind a cover of natural irreverence.
Until a short time ago, the five Mamonas all had day jobs and would practice in their free time what they exchange today for enormous sums of money. The five live in Guarulhos, close to the international airport on the outskirts of São Paulo where watching planes take off and land is the principal entertainment for the poor. The only attraction in the city is the noisy Cumbica airport. There is no night life in Guarulhos.
On Saturday nights, young people who have enough change in their pockets catch rides to the neighboring cities of Mairiporã or Vinhedo where there is a little more happening. Because the five Mamonas, friends for more than six years, had eternally empty pockets, their only form of entertainment had been bringing together the rest of kids and guiding them through long sessions of brainlessness that helped to minimize their hard lives. They became specialists in inventing off-color escapades.
Samuel was an office boy for four years, and after that a clerk. His 26 year old brother Sérgio, the group's drummer, worked as a production controller for Olivetti typewriters. Bento Hinoto, the guitar player, was the co-owner of a firm that used to install ceilings and office partitions. Júlio, the keyboard player and only member of the band who had a car, used to work as a technician in a diesel motor factory. Dinho, a Baiano, had a situation that his peers from Bahia would joke about but would also have preferred. He lived off of his parents allowance.
At 24, and with the mind of a 13 year old, Dinho is the soul of the group. He was born in Irecê in Bahia but moved to Guarulhos before he was a year old. His parents were going to chance living in the great city of São Paulo. His father is a real estate broker, his mother a housewife and evangelist. Needless to say, Dinho does not follow the word of the Gospel. But this does explain why religion is the sole area that has not been touched by the iconoclastic band's humor, that has in fact been avoided so far.
Until the fifth grade Dinho studied in public school. Later, he tried a vocational school, but in the end he was expelled because of his eccentricity. From the time he was a boy Dinho enjoyed making imitations and is very convincing, especially with distinctive types of people like those from the north and from the interior of São Paulo with their characteristic accents and quaint expressions. He is a clown by nature and was early to discover his avocation for pantomiming celebrities. When he was only 15 years old, he went to a friend's wedding dressed as Michael Jackson wearing a silver jockstrap over his outfit and, of course, the sequined glove trademark. Even the priest laughed.
Dinho never studied singing but practiced by listening to recordings and repeating each nuance and every section until his interpretation sounded exactly like the original. In this way, his voice developed its variety of registers. Coincidentally, this is also the way that notable TV and radio mimics have developed their voices. Dinho never missed an opportunity to dress like a clod, go out into the streets, and interview people while imitating radio and political personalities. Today he continues these same antics on stage between songs.
The first contact Dinho had performing on a stage was thanks to his buffoonery. It happened outdoors at an apartment project for the poor close to where Dinho lived. It was a festa junina, a traditional June party where the backland people, the Brazilian hillbillies, are imitated. A rock band playing at the party was giving up because they didn't know how to sing an enormous hit of the time: Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns and Roses. The band announced that they would have to play an instrumental version of the tune unless someone at the party knew the lyrics and would be willing to come up on stage and sing. Dinho, the outrageous clown who spent his time showing-off even more so than his tasteless friends, went straight ahead.
He didn't know the lyrics but simulated the poses and mannerisms of a top model and pantomimed the singer Axl Rose. He pranced and swaggered around the stage making so much racket that he became a local idol. The public was ecstatic, and the band decided to adopt Dinho as their singer. They went directly from the show to a karaoke bar where Dinho made his friends explode with laughter.
The tremendous response to the band's new line-up prompted Dinho and his friends to start making some money. They began promoting themselves by performing at rallies for political candidates at the city hall in Guarulhos. Dinho, composer of most of the groups' songs, said that it was probably his fault that the candidates for whom he was working lost the elections.
Before becoming a success, Mamonas had been a band called Utopia that played funk and heavy-metal. Dinho brought his imitations into this arena with performances of tunes by Cazuza and Herbert Vianna of Paralamas do Sucesso. Utopia's music lampooned people and parodied the way they live. In fact, many of the tunes on Mamonas's current release were composed during this phase of the band's evolution, when its orientation was doing cover versions of other heavy-metal bands' material.
Utopia also did cover versions of tunes in many other styles: pagode, sertaneja, forró and in this way developed a certain proficiency in those styles. Dinho had already learned to play violão (guitar) by playing backland music with his father. It is the band's familiarity, their competence with these diverse styles, which demonstrates that their versions truly bear no malice.
Guitar player, Bento Hinoto, a Japanese-Brazilian with dreadlocks, stated that the guys in the band like all kinds of music, especially progressive rock, but that they decided to concentrate on a particular sound, a sound similar to Engenheiros do Hawaii, (the trio from Porto Alegre that writes philosophical lyrics and uses heavy instrumentation) because Engenheiros were successful. Keyboard player and singer of "Vira-Vira", Julio Rasec, joked that Utopia once recorded a disc for an independent label that sold over 50 copies.
Through the experience of Utopia, the band's explicit humor and repertoire gradually developed. They took their music seriously at first but were not seasoned musicians and initially experienced monumental confusion on stage. Little by little they were finding that while performing one tune they were delivering an alternate message to their public. The Utopia phase of the group's history lasted for five years before the group decided to assume their current style and start writing the types of parodies that infect all of their shows today. The next step was changing the group's name and expanding the new repertoire. The change was apropos.
Impressed by the strong reception they were getting for their parodies, the band went to a low-budget studio in the very simple Tremembé neighborhood with the intention of recording only four of their funniest tunes. The owner of the studio was impressed and sent a copy to one of his contacts in Rio. The tape turned up in the hands of João Augusto, director at EMI, who asked if the band had more music. Although the band had very little material at the time, Dinho said that they had about 20 tunes and could record at any time.
The songs on the current disc, aside from the four that were recorded in Tremembé, were wholly composed in only three weeks. Each track plays like an episode of the Three Stooges and runs the emotional gamut from A to C. Even the technicians at the recording date were bursting out laughing at the band's absurdities. During the recording of "Robocop Gay," for example, the singer in underwear would imitate a girl doing a strip tease. Nonetheless, with these compositions and a poor quality tape the band landed a contract with EMI that allowed them to complete the final mix in the United States.
Besides plane fare and hotel costs each musician received an advance of $500.00 from João to shop for clothes. When they returned to Cumbica airport in Guarulhos, they arrived as the pride of their city and were dressed like idols. Today the group's performance attire is as diverse as the styles of music that they parody.
The strength of Mamonas Assassinas, their humor and uncanny ability to parody other groups, stems from the long established tradition with São Paulo pop bands that delight in plagiarizing other bands and pop music in general and then lampooning the music. Premê, for example, recorded a loose satire on the tune "New York, New York" titled "São Paulo, São Paulo" that was humorously cynical and chided rather than praised the city's traffic, adolescent pickpockets, and pollution. The lyrics spoke with irony about the city's Italian immigrants and scorned its political leadership.
Despite the fact that Mamonas Assassinas follows a similar off-color style as the band Raimundos, they have an advantage over their peers from Brasília. The Mamonas fusion of sound is more pop and less noisy, the ideas behind the band's foolishness fluctuate from tune to tune, a greater diversity of themes is present in the lyrics, and Mamonas Assassinas puts forth exceptional cultural insights.
Mamonas hasn't stopped at simple platitudes.
They belittle the spoken dialect of São Paulo where the
plural form of nouns is not employed. Dinho sings without
the pluralizing "s." But the parody doesn't stop with just
the lyrics and grammar. Mamonas takes music like
Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" or "Should I Stay
or Should I Go" by punk band The Clash and creates
musical anecdotes with a scorching sarcastic tone. The
singer Belchior, a success in the 70's with his
philosophical lyrics, is imitated in the band's "Uma Arlinda Mulher":
Você foi agora a coisa
Mais importante
Que já me aconteceu
Neste momento em
Toda minha vida
Um paradoxo do
Pretérito imperfeito,
Complexo com a
Teoria da relatividade
Num momento crucial,
um sábio soube saber
Que o sabiá sabia assobiar
E quem amafagafar os mafagafinhos
Bom amafagafigador será
You are now
The most important thing
That has happened to me
In this moment
In my entire life
A paradoxical of the
Past imperfect,
Complicated with the
Theory of relativity,
In a crucial moment,
a wise man knew how to know
That the song-thrush knew how to sing
And whoever amafagafar the mafagafinhos
Good amafagafigador will be
The song just puts words together that don't mean a thing but can sound conclusive when taken all together.
Belchior is, as are many targets of these parodies, a fan of Mamonas. He stated that although the diction used in some of the group's music may have some reference to his way of singing, he doesn't feel that it is offensive. He is aware that it is not flattering but feels that the intention is not so much to criticize as to have fun.
All of the tracks from the current release have the potential of being played frequently on the radio. "Vira-Vira," an impeccable mockery of the continental Portuguese, is the third most often played song on the radio in São Paulo. The vira is a dance and a style of singing in Portugal. Despite their use of politically incorrect expressions, the band has made an incontestable bull's eye with the public.
"Vira-Vira" is unquestionably the most high-handed track out of the 14 no less irreverent ones. With the tune the Portuguese folk dance and song is raped by noisy heavy-metal guitars and a disturbing lyric content. The narrative speaks of the duress of a Portuguese baker who starts an adventure of group sex with a woman.
Besides this Portuguese couple, the band describes other amusing situations like, husbands who are worried about their wives' addiction to the television shopping channel, construction workers who are enamored with Jean-Claude Van Damme, homosexual body-builders and their ensuing activities. In the musical mockeries it is possible to identify parodies not only of singers like Belchior, but also of Zezé Di Camargo & Luciano, Cauby Peixoto, and Max Cavalera, singer for Sepultura.
The satire assumes levels of conceptual ideas because the ideas are prejudiced. Dinho, however, defends himself by saying that he doesn't speak badly about anybody, that he only shows daily life. He goes on to say that the music is not created by chance, that it is always inspired by some character around them.
Sometimes the inspiration comes from other compositions, as did the samba full of heavy-metal guitar "Lá Vem o Alemão" that had as its model "Lá Vem o Negão" by the São Paulo group Cravo e Canela. Mamonas batters samba pagode with "Lá Vem o Alemão." Although the tune is an explicit satire on the pagode scene today, musicians from the pagode groups Art Popular and Negritude Junior participated in recording the track. Other pagode musicians, like Alexandre Pires from the group Só Pra Contrariar, applaud the validity of the groove and perceive the comical tune as it should be a facetious joke.
"Lá Vem o Alemão" speaks about a man whose girlfriend dumps him for a blonde guy, the owner of a Ford Escort. Dinho interprets the pain of the betrayed with a voice identical to the singer of the pagode group Raça Negra, Luiz Carlos. But this is not making a mockery of samba. The groove is authentic pagode. Dinho said that the band made a real effort to catch what is important in the pagode sound mix.
Titãs is a band that plays music from punk to reggae to brega (gooey romantic songs whose basic meaning has been changed for the worse). On their celebrated third album, Cabeça Dinossauro, which was chosen as the best Brazilian album of the 1980s by Jornal do Brasil, the rock band scrutinized modern societal institutions and assaulted all who uphold its hypocrisy. The album is satirized by Mamonas with "Cabeça de Bagre II." Bagre is common name for fish, but cabeça de bagre is also slang for moron. Hinoto's pulverizing slash-guitar style on the track demands hearing!
Marcelo Frommer, guitar player for Titãs, has a 12 year old daughter that is a Mamonas fan and doesn't see any problem with the irony of Mamonas. He stated that Mamonas does everything on the basis of stereotype, imitating brega, imitating pagode. In the beginning he felt that Mamonas was in bad taste then started to view it as a healthy form of bad taste.
The heavy-metal dementia on the disc includes the tracks "Pelados em Santos" ("Naked in Santos," a São Paulo beach), Chopis Centis, and Robocop Gay. Chopis Centis targets people from the Northeast who become dazzled and seduced with the splendor of the big cities' shopping centers. In Rio the tune is among the 10 most often played songs on the radio.
A very good explanation for the public's receptivity of a group that mixes the most aggressive form of heavy-metal, with quick-witted arrangements that utilize a variety of rhythmic grooves fado, pagode, rock, forró, sertaneja, and brega, (depending on who and what they are mocking) is that you listen and your laugh is instantaneous.
Another explanation for the band's success is that their lyrics capture and give more emphasis to the language and dialect used by Brazilian kids among their peers than any other song lyrics have up until now. These lyrics oscillate between mockery, bad taste, the grotesque, and the absurd.
Can they come up with material as strong for their next release? Dinho said that he wrote the lyrics to "Vira-Vira" in 15 minutes inside Júlio's VW bug. He says that he is not afraid of being without ideas because he is not pretending, that nobody imagined it would be possible to put together the Portuguese vira dance with heavy-metal guitar.
In the same way Mamonas Assassinas is promising to catch everyone by surprise with their next release. It remains to be seen whether Mamonas Assassinas will be around for a while or if they are going to be only an exceptional craze that looses its breath when the joke is repeated. Until then the jokes just keep going by.
Bruce Gilman plays cuíca for Mocidade Independente Los Angeles, received his MA from California Institute of the Arts, and teaches English and ESL in Long Beach, California.