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Cross‐Cultural “Countries”: Covers, Conjuncture, and the Whiff of Nashville in Música Sertaneja (Brazilian Commercial Country Music)

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03007760500045345

1740-1712

Alexander S. Dent,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Abstract This article uses concepts from anthropological linguistics to examine a cover of “Achy Breaky Heart” within the genre of Brazilian commercial country music (música sertaneja). I argue that cross‐cultural cover songs create spaces in which culturally located notions of time and place are laminated together in performance. I detail how the anthropological concept of structures of conjuncture elucidates this process. Furthermore, using ethnographic data, I argue against frequent charges that covering English‐language songs in this Brazilian context represents cultural imperialism. Instead, música sertaneja performers and fans use American country songs to make quite Brazilian arguments about gender, intimacy, the family, the past, and the importance of the countryside. These “country” arguments in turn provide a means by which to critique Brazilian urbanization and neoliberal economic reform. Acknowledgments I would like to thank members of the 2003 Society for Ethnomusicology Meetings Panel “X Conversations About One Thing: The Role of Analysis in Popular Music,” particularly Mark Butler and Derek Pardue. This article has also benefited from comments by the University of Oklahoma Linguistics Colloquium, notably Jason Jackson, Paul Sneed, Sean O'Neill, and Peter Cahn. Ana Lima provided invaluable help with translations. Finally, careful readings by Cynthia and Julian Dent have immeasurably improved this work. Notes The song from which the lyric is taken, “A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll,” was frequently performed by Donny and Marie Osmond on their variety television show in the seventies. They recorded and released the song for their 1975 record Donny & Marie—Featuring songs from their television show (1975). For more on the development of cohesive images of Brazilian national culture between 1930 and 1985, see Skidmore (Citation1967, 1988) and Vianna. Whether you cite 11% or a higher number, more like 16%, depends on whether or not you include música caipira in the total. Música caipira is unquestionably rural, and is considered by all practitioners of rural genres to be the roots of commercially successful música sertaneja. For the purposes of market analysis, however, música caipira is often lumped together with other folkloric genres dubbed “regional” by the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and its Brazilian representative, the Associação Brasileiro dos Produtores de Discos (ABPD, or the Brazilian Association of Record Producers). The decision to separate música caipira from música sertaneja is often grounded in the notion that the former is a traditional music, the latter, a commercial one. While the generic differences between the two are obvious to any listener, and emphatically marked by practitioners of both, I typically include música caipira within sales figures for rural genres as a whole, thus favoring a higher number. I do so because música caipira's sales have increased—though by no means as much as those of música sertaneja—in part due to this turn to the rural that is taking place in Brazil as a whole. I have argued elsewhere (Dent) that the performance contexts of the two genres often overlap, to the distaste of those música caipira performers and fans who find música sertaneja to be disrespectful of tradition. None of the sales figures cited take into account the tremendous importance of what I refer to as the informal musical economy—the manufacture and circulation of illegally burned copies of CDs originally produced by the major international labels operating in Brazil, EMI, BMG, Sony, Universal‐Vivendi, AOL/Time‐Warner, and indigenous Abril, and Som Livre. This informal musical economy accounted for 52% of the Brazilian market in 2002 according to IFPI and ABPD estimates. My research in the cities of Campinas and São Paulo suggests that illicit CD stands (along with kiosks selling everything from “Marlboros” to “Nikes,” called camelô) sell a somewhat higher percentage of rural genres than other genres (música popular brasileira—MPB—and “pop” being the two closest competitors, with Brazilian and International rock somewhat behind), thus making the national total for rural sales somewhat higher still. There is no data available on the informal musical economy in Brazil, a lacuna I plan to fill in future studies. My reference to Chitãozinho and Xororó as “top‐selling” is based on their record sales and the number of requests received by radio stations for their songs. Their song “Alô” was the most requested of 2000, for example (ABPD). Their record of the same name achieved triple diamond status that year for sales over three million. By “public culture,” I mean expressive culture oriented towards, and constitutive of, various publics—where publics are, in turn, defined as discursive spaces that exist by virtue of being addressed. For a definition of publics and counterpublics, see Warner, and for public culture, see Appadurai and Breckenridge. By the Frankfurt School, I mean the scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, in particular, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and, to a lesser extent, Walter Benjamin. For a history of their contribution to the study of mass culture, see Jay. In his 1996 contribution to the journal Public Culture, Erlman argues for this global sameness via what he calls “world music,” though he never defines what he means by this. One might come to his defense by saying that the sameness he argues for only takes place within a highly specific musical genre. The open‐ended nature of his argument, however, lacking just such an empirical stipulation of his object of study, would seem to underscore his hope for the broadest implications for the argument. Note that other definitions of “world music,” such as that of rock band the Talking Heads' singer, and compiler of global pop, David Byrne, have criticized the notion of “world music” for gathering too much under one label. For Byrne, “world music” means music that is defined simply by the fact that it is not from the United States and England. It thus seems likely that, despite Erlman's lack of specificity, he did, indeed, intend his “world music” to be broadly defined. More fruitfully, ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman (World Music 5) proposes historicizing the concept. Note that in Music, Modernity and the Gobal Imagination, Erlmann further defines what he means by “world music,” and retracts some of the blanket statements found in this article. Despite the way that I have employed the concept here, note that Sahlins does not restrict the notion of structure of conjuncture—which he defines as “the situational synthesis” (Islands xiv) of event and structure—to cross‐cultural encounter. Butler has explored covers as re‐enacting various codes of what he terms “authenticity” in an inter‐textual context. For more on the multiple locations of country music, see Fox and Yano. Brazil returned to democracy in 1985 after enduring military dictatorship since 1964. Despite the fact that some scholars have been advocating this kind of analysis for some time (see, for example, Nettl), others have gone so far as to call this union of musical and cultural analysis a “new field of study” (Tagg 71). At any rate, a highly abridged list of members of this group would include Askew, Bohlman, Brackett, Butler, Feld, Fox, Jackson and Levine, Middleton, Pacini‐Hernandez, Reily (Voices), Seeger, Stokes, Waterman, and Yano. There are many others. Once again, the list is long, but, abridged, includes Bauman and Briggs, Silverstein, Gal, Urban, and Hanks. The adverbs are borrowed from Silverstein and Urban. For an historical perspective on the problem of derivative culture in Brazil and the role of this problem in debates over national identity, see Roberto Schwarz, and Antônio Cândido. Both recommend historicizing the very notion of cultural imperialism in order to understand it. As noted above, the Brazilian preoccupation with imitation has been historicized ably by Schwarz. Latin American theoretician Nestor Garcia Canclini has attempted to explain aspects of cultural borrowing via the concept of “reconversion”. However, Canclini provides only sparse empirical elaboration of his concept. For a more clearly delineated treatment of cultural derivativeness, see Lomnitz. Oswald de Andrade outlines this theory of anthropophagy in a famous poem called “the Brazil‐Wood Manifesto.” In light of the sheer number of covers that have appeared on Brazilian records in the last 20 years, the popularity of this studiously inaccurate opinion seems worthy of attention as a phenomenon unto itself. Covers in Brazil are no more common now than they were 20 years ago. Author Rosa Napomuceno, though she refuses to take a position in the debate over whether música sertaneja's “urbanization” is a good thing or not, rigorously documents the presence of songs from Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay, and the United States in the early history of música caipira, from the 1920s on. In fairness to Martins, he places the music's fall from grace at the very moment of its first recording in 1929. Two important exceptions to this trend in música sertaneja scholarship are the work of Reily (“‘Música Sertaneja’”) and Carvalho, the former exploring the genre as bound up with migrant identity in a suburb of the city of São Paulo, and the latter attempting to account for aspects of the genre's popularity through analysis of transformations in the structure of the news‐media, post‐dictatorship. These works offer the beginnings of a coherent approach. The details about guitar pickups are far from elementary, as it is this guitar sound that, together with other musical features, makes the song, in a certain sense, count as country music. The other common guitar pickup, the “humbucker,” produces a much more distorted sound than the single‐coils of the Stratocaster, and this distorted sound, though not completely unknown in country, is more closely associated with rock and roll. For those unfamiliar with the sound of distortion, it may be thought of as a kind of growling that surrounds the basic guitar tone—a series of somewhat unpredictable grumblings and screamings elicited by a collaboration between amplifier and pickup. I thank Terry Shelton for details of his instrumentation—a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar through a Boss solid state pre‐amp, and a Legend amplifier—as well as other details about his playing on this track (interview by the author on May 26th, 2004). This sentence contains several technical terms. “Reverb” is short for reverberation, and is an effect that can be placed on top of any recorded sound to give it a sense of echo—symbolically placing space around whatever is being played or sung. The effect is essential to many genres of music. Compression is another effect, which does precisely what its name would suggest—compressing the frequencies in a recorded sound—often described as “squashing” it, pushing the high frequencies down, and the low frequencies up. “Panning” means placing a given sound in the left or right speakers, or stereo channels, during mix‐down. Equalization refers to use of a graphic equalizer to emphasize or de‐emphasize certain frequencies, an equalizer being a powerful tool that can entirely transform a recorded sound by breaking it into component frequencies for selective manipulation. Chitãozinho and Xororó's first big hit was 1982's “Fio de Cabelo,” or “A Little Strand of Hair.” Each of their albums sells more copies than the last. Their biggest hits have come from their most recent 2002 album Festa do Interior (Celebration of the Backlands). There are two notable examples of this “remaining half” principle—where a successful solo performer represents the remaining half of a previously existing dupla in which the other member passed away. The first is solo performer Daniel, once of dupla João Paulo and Daniel. João Paulo died in a car accident in the early nineties. Best‐seller Leonardo, once of dupla Leandro and Lenoardo, lost his brother to cancer in the summer of 1998. It is of course quite true that not all duplas are made up of brothers, and that not all pairs have chosen to look identical. Note, in this regard, Milionário and Zé Rico (Joe Rich & the Millionaire), who were famous in the late seventies and early eighties. Milionário wears extremely curly long hair, a bushy beard, dark glasses, and a web of gold chains at his neck, while Zé Rico is clean shaven, and wears a Mexican poncho and ten‐gallon hat. These two still harmonize in parallel thirds, however, and they are considered somewhat past their prime. Despite the presence of duplas who fashion contrasting appearances within the pair, the overwhelming majority of duplas today, including ultra‐popular Chitãozinho and Xororó, and Zezé di Camargo and Luciano, dress in almost identical clothes, and emphasize the fact that they are brothers. Indeed, the emphasis on visual sameness has increased in the nineties, making Milionário and Zé Rico appear somewhat obsolete. I thus argue that despite the transformations in visual aesthetic of some música sertaneja duos of the past, the dupla‐form is crucial to the genre. For a broad reading of the decreasing importance of kinship in Latin American society between 1750 and 1929 (both as blood, and as fictive kinship via god‐parenting), as well as the increasing importance of voluntary forms of association that would come to supplant kinship, see Voss. The duo form involves, most often, brothers, but also, on occasion, sisters, father and son, or uncle and nephew. It signals “country” in other geopolitical locations as well. Note the significance of the brother duo in Peru, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Columbia, and Mexico (see pieces by Scruggs, Crook, Gradante, and Romero in Schechter). Note, also, that a duo of brothers indexed the country in the United States in the early 20th century, c. 1930 (Altman). In all but the American case, the brother duo has continued to mark “countriness” into the early 21st century. Indeed, as I argue in the conclusion, these covers must be considered within the context of multiple musical borrowings, not just from the United States. Though the album from which this track is drawn does contain one other American‐influenced piece—a square‐dance number seasoned with banjo—other borrowings include the Gypsy Kings, Julio Iglesias, and the Paraguayan rasqueado in 3/4, a long‐time standard song‐form in música sertaneja (see below). This smooth harmonica tone, with plenty of vibrato, is sharply distinguished from the kind of distorted and growling tone typical of most electric blues harmonica playing. John Frow remarks on this quality of the supernatural as manifested in Elvis's Weberian charisma. Note, as mentioned briefly above, that emoção (literally “emotion” in English) also connotes the idea of excitement in Portuguese.