How to Organize the Movement: Caetano Veloso's Tropical Path (original) (raw)

"Beating the Leather of the First Conga": Afro-Brazilian Epiphanies in Literature and Music

Luso-Brazilian Review, 2007

Partindo do incômodo causado pelas projeções exóticas do "Brasil" no imaginário internacional, discutem-se aqui alguns momentos em que, na literatura e na música, de tempos coloniais ao presente, a "África" revela-se como topos privilegiado, a resguardar poeticamente a pureza e a crueza de uma origem a um só tempo desejada e rechaçada. Analisando, ao fim, um trecho das memórias de Caetano Veloso, sugiro que um complexo mecanismo de sublimação simultaneamente nos protege e aproxima do momento mítico original em que a mão dos africanos teria tocado o primeiro tambor no Brasil, fazendo surgir, intacta, uma África mirífica, simbolicamente tão poderosa quanto esvaziada de qualquer história ou peso.

Ten (Anti-) Theses for a Brazilian Popular Musical Aesthetic

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

This article points out some elements that can help to understand the difficulty of analyzing popular music in Brazil with the forms of analysis commonly used by classical aesthetics and philosophy of music. In addition, it indicates some possible paths for the development of a critique of national musical material. To this end, this article retrieves some fundamental questions about the history of popular music in Brazil: its triple origin (African, European and Amerindian), the influence of capitalism in the first decades of the twentieth century, the concept of ‘popular’, its connection with early lyric poetry and its multiple forms of expression. Article received: April 20, 2021; Article accepted: June 23, 2021; Published online: October 15, 2021; Review paper How to cite this article: Burnett, Henry. "Ten (Anti-) Theses for a Brazilian Popular Musical Aesthetic." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 26 (October 2021): 53-61. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i26.469

“Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities”

Ethnomusicology OnLine, 2002

Research on Brazilian music, whether by Brazilian or foreign scholars, has been dominated by the combined mystiques of tri-racial ethnicity and progressive nationalization. While at “the center” ethnography has been primarily drawn upon as a means of illustrating particular theoretical perspectives, in Brazil it is the theoretical models that are fitted to the ethnography. The predictability of the places at which Brazilian musicologists have looked in their quest for musical otherness, however, is rendered evident by the presence of a Japanese scholar's contribution.

Introduction: Brazilian musics, Brazilian identities

Ethnomusicology Forum, 2000

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Music and the poetics of production in the Bolivian Andes - By Henry Stobart

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2009

have been redefined as territories of Afro-Brazilian culture, semi-public spaces becoming places of mediation through which the axé (power, vital force) is transformed into a 'cultural value'. He insists that objects of cultural value must be known, seen, and reproduced, but in Candomblé you are not allowed to see or depict these objects. The question, therefore, is how to transform secret values into cultural values so that they become public. Sansi defines this process as the outcome of extended interaction between intellectuals and Candomblé leaders during the course of a century. Anthropologists, writers, and painters, some of whom became practitioners (and vice versa), combined the changing attitudes of both those in power and practitioners, including a definite hierarchy in which Candomblé Ketu is the accepted model, emphasizing its 'pure African' cults, while all other manifestations are neglected or even rejected. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on modern art and Afro-Brazilian culture. During the Vargas regime's search for nationalism, 'progress' and an 'authentic' Brazilian culture emerged. The popular became exotic and was given a political role. During the dictatorship, artistic elites were recognized and acknowledged as representing Afro-Brazilian art, corresponding to the accepted Candomblé houses. All others were considered as mere 'popular' artists who created works for tourists. Sansi stresses the contradiction between the innovations of contemporary modern art and the standard, hierarchic, 'traditional' concept of Afro-Brazilian art. The Orixás of Tororó exemplifies the complexity of these changes. This is a public monument, the purpose of which was to glorify African-Brazilian culture but at the same time symbolize the secret world of the orixás and the axé. Pentecostals' recent attacks see the monument and Candomblé as fetishism, the devil's work, and attempt to shake the perception of Candomblé as symbolizing national identity. The concluding chapter, 'Re-appropriations of Afro-Brazilian culture', claims that while Candomblé has now attained official recognition, religious people who once were its practitioners dispute its credibility when they turn to Protestantism. Sansi concludes that the Afro-Brazilian cultural renaissance is characterized by the 'objectification of new, unprecedented cultural values attached to objects' (p. 188). Values have changed and will continue to change, opening a route to new conflicts and transformations of values. Book reviews 175

The imaginary of Brazilian popular music

Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 2011

During the early half of the twentieth century there was in Brazil a proliferation of songs which depicted this period’s imaginary. Songs that made up the Brazilian Popular Music (MPB, Música Popular Brasileira) - name given to the ensemble of sambas, chorinhos and Carnival marchas for this period - foregrounded three themes: work, women, and money. Work is rejected, while malandragem is praised. Women are powerful, capable of either encouraging men to accomplish deeds on the streets because they are loved at home, or immobilizing them by betrayal. Money is worth less than love, but it is nonetheless a necessary good. Since it is difficult to earn enough from work, there is, at once, an increasing awareness of the importance of money and the proposal of magical solutions for minimizing its scarcity.

"Tropicalistas: A New Expression of Music and Gender Identity in Brazil"

A wave of Brazilian artists has been building for over a decade an innovative trend of music composition and production, while creating new artistic networks via social medias and digital technology. Most importantly, these new "tropicalistas," musicians, dancers, poets and actors, are addressing issues of race, gender and homophobia in Brazil1. By developing regional and trans-national communication through both globalization and "glocalization,2" this new artistic current is challenging the status quo in Brazil in several ways, among which is promoting non-commercial circuits of distribution. Inspired by the Tropicália movement of the 1960s, they have developed an informal but very coherent Brazilian Avant Garde (in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Recife) which is largely ignored by the Brazilian media and still unknown to most of the global academic world.