Counter-Tradition: Toward the Black Vanguard of Contemporary Brazil

10 Counter-Tradition: Toward the Black Vanguard of Contemporary Brazil GG Albuquerque In the 1930s, the first samba school, Deixa Falar, located in the Estácio de Sá neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, was experiencing a period of growth. More and more people were accompanying the carnival parade, singing and celebrating in the streets of the city. But this expansion brought an acoustic problem to the sambistas (samba players): amid that crowd, the people could not clearly understand the music that was being played and sung. In an attempt to solve this problem, the composer Alcebíades Barcelos, aka Bide, used his technical skills as a shoemaker and clothed a 20-kilogram butter can with a moistened cement paper bag, tying it to the can with wires and thumbtacks. The result was a brilliant creation: Bide had invented the surdo, a bass drum that not only solved the initial problem of acoustic demand from samba schools, but also revolutionized Brazilian popular music. Until that time, samba had a very different sound from what we now recognize as samba. A notorious example is Donga’s “Pelo Telefone” (1916). The music exhibited a slow swing influenced by rural sounds (like the maxixe) and European genres (like polka and Scottish), and was recognized as the first samba ever recorded. The polyrhythmic drums, the batucada that became the structural pillar of samba, would only flourish a little more than a decade later, precisely because of the experiments of Estácio de Sá’s musicians in the 1930s. Bide and other composers, such as Ismael Silva, Armando Marçal, Heitor dos Prazeres, Brancura, Baiano, Baiaco, and Getúlio Marinho, developed the sonic language of the urban samba in Rio de Janeiro, the samba de sambar:1 a new sonic configuration based on fast syncopated rhythms and simpler, more direct, and more effective harmonies to be sung in the streets during carnival. Using music and sound as an intensive and material writing of the black body, the musicians of Estácio de Sá founded the creative field of their own, which was recorded by the available technology of the time and distributed by the incipient Brazilian phonographic industry. An example of this new and radical sound is the “Nem é Bom Bom” (1931),2 a composition of Ismael Silva and Nilton Bastos interpreted by Francisco Alves.3 Despite the experimental procedures of Estácio’s crew, qualities like “experimentation,” “innovation,” and other terms that surround the idea of a vanguard 9781501344435_txt_prf.indd 211 05-08-2019 20:43:41 212 Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art are rarely attributed to the genre of samba. For the Brazilian cultural intelligentsia, these terms belong almost exclusively to “high culture” movements such as modernism and the Week of Modern Art, known as “Semana de 22” (Week of 22), an event almost contemporary with the Estácio samba, which gathered Brazilian artists such as Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. To samba, another world was destined: appropriated by the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship,4 samba became associated with the Brazilian ethos, a fundamental characteristic of our national cultural identity.5 This music, elaborated by the hands of blacks descended from newly freed slaves, is viewed—as are most African-derived cultures—through the musicological lenses of folklore or the paternalism of tradition, thus silencing its radical experimentalism. While the samba artists recreated daily objects and work tools from the urban daily life of the Rio de Janeiro favelas (slums), modernist artists had on their horizon of reference European modern art. Historically and politically, samba has been labeled as tradition, the archaic, the past, while modernism is identified with the vanguard, the modern, the futuristic. Well, if the vanguard is a matter of groundbreaking experimentation, why not attribute vanguard characteristics to samba, which has not ceased to change in over 100 years? I am talking about one specific genre, but this provocation goes way beyond samba. The issue here is not merely the classification of what is modern or not. I am also not interested in appealing to the legitimacy of an Afro-Brazilian cultural inventory, nor am I trying to turn it into a new canon. What I am seeking, through Brazilian black music, is an experimental exercise of a new epistemology that emerges from the antinomies of modernity and its founding racism. The domestication and non- recognition of the radical potentialities of samba comprise one of many historical deletions and processes of infantilization of Afro-diasporic expressive cultures. It is a classic example of what blackness theorists classify as epistemicide. This is a byproduct of colonialism defined by Sueli Carneiro as the “negation of black people as producers of knowledge … by devaluing, denying, or concealing the contributions of the African Continent and the African diaspora to the cultural heritage of humanity; by the imposition of cultural whitening.”6 To make experimental music black is to trigger a counter-modernity, going the opposite way of modernity and its philosophical tradition. This process, as we shall see, insists on the devaluation of black knowledge—after all, the idea of the black as fundamentally nonhuman and devoid of soul and intellect ideologically legitimized slavery and colonialism, and has been a part of modern Western thought since its inception. On the other hand, experimental music developed and enclosed itself as a canonical paradigm with its own rigid, orthodox, and exclusivist way of thinking about music, form, and sound.7 Given this situation, Brazilian black artists from different regions of the country and different musical scenes have developed new technical procedures, and aesthetic and ethical philosophies about the sonic, which point to a particular type of artistic experimentalism. A Brazilian black experimentalism movement has little or no interest in establishing connections with electroacoustics, musique concrète, or noise music, although, eventually, it might appropriate its methods. I am talking about a decentralized and disconnected collective of artists whose works demonstrate a 9781501344435_txt_prf.indd 212 05-08-2019 20:43:41 Counter-Tradition 213 certain refusal of the institutionalized and embedded practices of formal experimental music. Often, these artists are not even worried about “creating new musical forms.” Therefore, to think about black experimentalism in contemporary Brazilian music is to break the consensual establishment of “avant-garde” as a musical genre and the conception of the vanguard as a fetishized artistic novelty, instead treating it as an invention of new and sensible forms of life—a construction of other epistemologies, other ways of perceiving and creating music. In a way, it is a parallel to what songwriter Tom Zé calls procuratividade. This word results from merging the Portuguese verb procurar (to search) with the noun atividade (activity), resulting in a “poetic way to refer to a continuous experimentation, refractory to any external interventions, especially coming from corporations.”8 In any case, it is thinking about the relations between art and life in the postcolonial process and the context of the genocide of the black population.9 The work of Rio de Janeiro’s God Pussy (aka Jhones Silva) provides an indication of the path of Brazilian music. With more than 200 albums released, including solo works and collaborations, God Pussy takes the experience of harsh noise to political levels, dealing with themes such as racism, animal cruelty (on the album Vivisecção, 2018), indigenous peoples (Nativos, 2014), warmongering, and social inequality (Guerrilha, Infância, Adolescência e Morte, 2011). According to Jhones, since the beginning the purpose of his project has been political—even before any musical intention: “God Pussy was created amidst the need for manifestations: artistic, cultural and non-conformist. The work maintains a posture of confrontation and intention of propagation of the chaos, not aiming at the musicality, but the elaboration of a conception and reflection for a determined subject.”10 When asked about his references, he mentions samba players Cartola, Jovelina Pérola Negra, and Bezerra da Silva, and rapper Eduardo Taddeo of the rap group Facção Central. These references are made side by side with those to icons of the black resistance like Malcolm X, Panteras Negras, Zumbi dos Palmares, and Carlos Lamarca, one of the leaders of the armed struggle against the military dictatorship established in the country in 1964.11 A significant album in his extensive discography is L’Arte dei Rumori (2009), dedicated to the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo and his manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). God Pussy creates this homage by using soundscape recordings from his work environment: the metallurgical workshop from where he makes money to survive. In this way, God Pussy expands Russolo’s notion of noise as a basic quality of musical poetry into a field of politics, becoming a manifesto on how sound is an instrument of domination and a signifier for unhealthy working conditions experienced by fellow workers. This ethos is reinforced by a willingness to avoid any dichotomy between what is considered musical and non-musical, preferring an “anti-musical” praxis that fully engages with noise.12 Another pertinent example is Negro Leo (the artistic persona of São Paulo-based singer, guitarist, and composer Leonardo Gonçalves). His album Niños Heroes (2015) was constructed from a singular approach to the procedures used in experimental music. First, hours and hours of free improvisation were recorded in the studio with a band. Afterwards, Negro Leo listened to, selected, and cut excerpts from these 9781501344435_txt_prf.indd 213 05-08-2019 20:43:41 214 Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art recordings and then wrote lyrics for these small fragments of noises and melodies. This process blended improvisation, popular chanson, and operations of montage, collage, and edition similar to musique concrète approaches in service of creating a noisy Brazilian music.

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