Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa Nova and Rap - by Treece, David

2015; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/blar.12382

1470-9856

Lisa Shaw,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

Treece, David (2013) Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa Nova and Rap, Reaktion Books ( London), + 232 pp. £14.95 pbk. This most welcome addition to the existing bibliography in English on Brazilian popular music is both intellectually rigorous and a pleasure to read. It draws on some of Treece's previous work on diverse genres, such as bossa nova, samba, 1960s protest music, MPB and rap, to provide a theoretically underpinned overview of key developments since the early twentieth century. In the opening chapter, Treece urges us to relate to both the aesthetic and social dimensions of music, underlining the centrality of music-making to Brazilian society, ‘where musicality, as a multi-faceted and integrated mode of activity and expression rooted in Afro-Americans’ pluralistic conceptions of the world, really does seem to vie with textuality for primacy in people's lives' (p. 13). His overarching argument is that music is essentially how we dramatise our experience of time, and that in late-industrialising, postcolonial societies such as Brazil's, it is therefore the ideal medium for expressing the contradictory co-existence of different temporalities – the traditional and the modern, the rural and the urban, and so on. He convincingly illustrates how Brazilian musicality, with Afro-Brazilian musicality at its core, has always thrived on its creative interaction with linguistic inventiveness, thus disproving assumptions that the nation's fertile musical culture is a consequence of an impoverished literary–linguistic heritage. In his analysis of the origins of samba and the genre's evolution in Rio in the first decades of the twentieth century, Treece provides a wealth of original insights. Translating the central ethos of early samba lyrics, malandragem as ‘hustling’ or ‘jive’, a lifestyle choice adopted by real-life sambistas themselves, he relates the characteristic ginga (swinging lateral stride) of the malandro hustler to the musical phenomenon of syncopation, a prominent feature of Afro-Brazilian musical traditions. Similarly, the author's analysis of bossa nova's musical and lyrical dimensions, which are clearly explained for readers lacking a background in music analysis or the Portuguese language, produces many fresh perspectives, confirming his status as one of only a handful of experts on this genre. He convincingly illustrates bossa nova's ‘magical capacity to hold together two distinct conceptions of time and movement, and therefore two civilisational temporalities’ (p. 65), and breaks new ground by showing how the genre engages with a dialectical approach to Brazilian culture that is much more often associated with the Tropicália movement. The author goes on to illustrate how, in the context of the post-1964 military dictatorship, bossa nova gave way to protest song and subsequently the iê-iê-iê or rock of the Jovem Guarda, as epitomised by Roberto Carlos. He examines works by Carlos Lyra, Baden Powell, Edu Lobo and Geraldo Vandré against the backdrop of the political and cultural activism of the 1960s, concluding that ‘Roberto Carlos et al. were a reassuring symbol of rebellious youth that had adapted to respectable values and were capable of being loved by “heads of family”; they had been divested of its more threatening expressive features’ (p. 137). In the penultimate chapter, Treece turns to the soundtracks of films set in the city of Rio, ranging from Black Orpheus (dir. Marcel Camus, 1959) and Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1957) to Orfeu (Orpheus, dir. Carlos Diegues, 1998) and Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002). He deftly interrogates the assumption that ‘the “harder” soundtracks of the most recent films (centring on hip-hop, soul and a local Brazilian offspring of Miami bass, funk carioca, with its bass-heavy electronic beats) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and therefore truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the apparently sentimentalised depictions associated with the musical scores of the two films from the 1950s (p. 160). Finally, the author focuses on the emergence of rap, hip-hop and funk in Brazil in the late 1980s and 1990s, musical genres which are intimately associated with the black youth of working-class urban peripheries. He argues that in this period rap, a form of rhythmically intoned speech became the most fitting form of songwriting and performance for the marginalised to express the contradictions of ‘a society divided by a common tongue’ (p. 186). Tracing local rap's ‘ability to materialise the power of words in rhythmically structured time’ (p. 190) to the roots of Afro-Brazilian musical culture, Treece skilfully dismisses interpretations of Brazilian rap as a mimetic cultural import and asserts its strong links to historical factors common to the Afro-descendant diaspora of the Americas, not least the importance of spoken language and oral traditions within slave communities. In summary, this is an important work and essential reading for anyone with an interest in Brazilian popular music. It will appeal to academics, students and general readers.