Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2390222

1527-1900

Kavin Dayanandan Paulraj,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Idelber Avelar and Christopher Dunn have edited a fascinating book. Studies of citizenship have blossomed recently, and this collection follows that trend. At the same time, the crucial role that Brazilian music plays in the social and political sphere makes this book relevant for a variety of academic disciplines and important beyond any scholarly trend. The chapters cover ample temporal and geographic ground; 2 of the 19 chapters focus on early twentieth-century musical scenes, but the book’s main focus is the panorama of scenes that have arisen in the last 35 years along with the gradual redemocratization of the state.Significantly, Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship follows a recent paradigm shift in how scholars understand music and political participation in Brazil. Most prior writing on the topic focused on samba musicians in Rio de Janeiro or on artists from the 1960s Tropicália movement and the broader project of Música Popular Brasileira (MPB). While samba helped the populist state and urban sectors to create and negotiate the modern Brazilian nation, Tropicália and MPB provided forums for artists to criticize the military government and to offer new paths toward political participation. Yet by the 1980s, as Carlos Sandroni and Avelar both argue, MPB faced a “crisis of audience and legitimacy” amid “a growing rift between national music [MPB] and youth music” (p. 317). This youth music included genres such as pagode, forró, and sertanejo as well as Brazilian funk and rock. Despite their popularity and commercial success, these scenes were too often labeled apolitical and consequently dismissed as insignificant in the construction of the Brazilian citizenry. This volume calls that framework into question; the editors argue in their introduction that “the very distinction between ‘alienated,’ ‘individualistic,’ or ‘nonpolitical’ music, on the one hand, and musics with ‘political content,’ on the other, is now more false than it has ever been” (p. 6).Frederick Moehn suggests that as the Brazilian middle class evolved into an increasingly reactionary sector concerned with urban violence, new class-based critiques appeared through both lyrics and sound. Moehn’s chapter juxtaposes Max Gonzaga’s reflection on middle-class privilege with rapper Nega Gizza’s bold rejection of the Brazilian nation. These analyses dialogue well with Aaron Lorenz’s chapter on pagode artist Bezerra da Silva’s representations of the favela and with João Freire Filho and Micael Herschmann’s chapter on the criminalization of working-class baile funk. The book also excels in showing how musical projects overcame these class barriers. For the ideological realm, Dunn’s chapter on Tom Zé’s evolving criticism of empty, thoughtless citizenship is a good example. The three chapters on hip-hop push the analysis into the social realm, showing how the São Paulo hip-hop scene has transformed social and political relations by building social networks across urban zones, exposing inequalities, and occupying space(s). According to Moehn, these hip-hoppers found willing allies in the Gilberto Gil–led national Ministry of Culture, with its Pontos de Cultura projects geared toward promoting social inclusion.The book features delightful profiles of musical actors from across Brazil. For example, Malcolm McNee discusses activists from the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) who strive for rural authenticity in their music in order to bolster their claim to be the authentic owners of rural land. The “Tupy-Nikkeys” treated by Shanna Lorenz reinvent the cultural anthropophagy of previous generations of Brazilian artists in order to reaffirm their self-identification as both Japanese and Brazilian. Ari Lima introduces Bahian pagode dancers of various sexual orientations, who dance in “territories for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality” (p. 272). Unsurprisingly, the book also pays particular attention to musicians from Pernambuco—especially to how they integrate the folk, the modern, the regional, the national, and the foreign in their art. If Dunn and Charles Perrone’s coedited volume Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (2001) highlighted the global and diasporic links of Brazilian music scenes, this volume goes further to argue that those scenes have not only made decisive political claims vis-à-vis the Brazilian state but are also “a practice constitutive of what we understand as citizenship itself” in Brazil today (p. 7).Overall, the book fulfills its stated goal of deepening the academic trend that emphasizes “the simultaneity and the intertwining of political and music processes” (p. 27). Three-fifths of the contributors are based in Brazil, and two-fifths are based in the United States, which provides a good balance. As such, the collection serves to mark the state of the field of Brazilian ethnomusicology. One striking omission: music industries, both formal and informal, are largely ignored (with the exception of Hermano Vianna’s excellent chapter). More analyses of music industries would have given us a better appreciation of the crucial ways that economic processes also intertwine with political and musical processes. Another omission is of the recent spate of electoral successes by populist-minded singers, on one hand, and sound system executives (notably in Pará, Rio de Janeiro, and Maranhão), on the other. Perhaps these topics will be included in the next monumental book on Brazilian music by the Tulane crew. Until then, this compilation sets the gold standard.