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Copyright by Sandra Lea Olsen 2014 The Report Committee for Sandra Lea Olsen Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Taking the Lid Off the Black Rio Movement and Música Soul: The Shifting Terms of Race and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Robin D. Moore Sonia Seeman Taking the Lid Off the Black Rio Movement and Música Soul: The Shifting Terms of Race and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro by Sandra Lea Olsen, B.Music Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Music The University of Texas at Austin December 2014 Acknowledgements This project was a truly collaborative effort. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Robin Moore. Thank you for your guidance, patience, and support, without which this project would not have come to fruition. Also thank you for challenging me to make connections across literatures, disciplines, and musics. A big thank you to my second committee member Sonia Seeman for all the productive conversations, for being a true pedagogue and role model, and for encouraging me to stay focused on the task at hand. Thank you, Darien Lamen, for introducing me introducing me to Tim Maia’s music, for getting me started on this project, and for advocating for me the whole way. And thank you to Caroline O’Meara, Charles Carson, and Veit Erlmann for enriching my graduate experience and for encouraging me to stretch the boundaries of my creativity and intellectual rigor. I would also like to acknowledge my friends and colleagues for keeping me honest and for being my writing buddies. Thank you very much Iris Sandjette, Jane Mathieu, Leonardo Cardoso, Andrés Amado, Brian Griffith, Tania Camacho Azofeifa, Cory LaFevers, Viviane Santiago, and Alec MacIntyre, for sharing your expertise, experience, and friendship with me. Also, thank you, Brook Shelly, for reading through drafts, for talking through issues with me, and for bringing a smile to my face. Finally, thank you very much to my family: to Ana and Santi for calling me on my faulty logic and for reminding me not to take myself too seriously; to my dad Gary your thoughtfulness, for helping me edit my abstract, for tech support, and for talking at all hours; and to my mom Claudia for your help proofreading and for your undying support and love. iv Abstract Taking the Lid Off the Black Rio Movement and Música Soul: The Shifting Terms of Race and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro Sandra Lea Olsen, M.Music The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Robin Moore In this project, I situate the Black Rio movement and Brazilian música soul within a history of representations of black Brazilian masculinities in music. I do so in order to trace changing conceptualizations of race and citizenship in 1970s Rio de Janeiro. I seek to move beyond the existing literature which judges the Black Rio movement on its political expediency while ignoring its historico-cultural context. That is, prior works tend to pit black soul musicians and dancers against the mostly-white, middle-class intellectuals who have historically made determinations about black Brazilians, and in doing so these works have judged the Black Rio movement a political failure. Instead, I focus on the agency asserted by black Brazilian musicians and dancers in representing themselves and in creating alternative places for the enactment of their identities in opposition to the normative expectations of Blackness and standards of masculinity. v Beginning in the 1920s and the 1930s, expectations for black masculine behavior were tied to restrictive, demeaning representations of the malandro in samba music and of afrobrasilidade in Carnaval celebrations. These representations were influenced by changing attitudes towards race in the context of national consolidation and the propagation of the myth of racial democracy, which recognized racial difference while not recognizing extant racial inequality. Entrenched modes of thinking and normative modes of being were adamantly challenged by soul musicians and dancers in the 1970s. Through the adoption of U.S. funk and soul music and strong masculine imagery associated with the Black Power movement, black Brazilians appropriated and resignified international symbols in order to forge a new black identity. In doing so, soul musicians and dancers carved alternative spaces for themselves, and renegotiated the terms of their inclusion in the Brazilian nation. This paper considers the shifting place of Blackness in Brazil through an analysis of visual, aural and lyrical representations of Blackness in music and in the critical reception of that music. I argue that funk and soul music played a key role in destabilizing the restrictive notion of afrobrasilidade held by mainstream Brazilian society, enabling new ways of being both black and Brazilian. vi Table of Contents List of Figures ...................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 1 Terms and Definitions .................................................................................... 5 Music, Cultural Rights, and the Formulation of Brazilian Citizenship ......... 7 Representing Malandragem and Black-ness ................................................ 16 Why Black Masculinities? ........................................................................... 18 Methodology ................................................................................................ 21 Chapter Outline ............................................................................................ 25 CHAPTER 2: A HISTORY OF REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK MASCULINITIES FROM VADIAGEM TO MALANDRAGEM ...................................................................... 27 Introduction .................................................................................................. 27 Nationalism .................................................................................................. 28 The Myth of Racial Democracy and Brasilidade ........................................ 31 Black Masculinity in Samba Songs ............................................................. 34 Carnaval and the Struggle for Cultural Rights ............................................. 50 CHAPTER 3: DESENLATANDO BLACK RIO: M´USICA SOUL, THE NEGOTIATION OF MASCULINITY AND THE FORMATION OF PLACE ............................................ 60 Introduction .................................................................................................. 60 From the Nation to the City--Shifting Spaces and Shifting Citizenships .... 63 Brief Portrait of Música Soul and Black Rio ............................................... 67 Lena Frias and the Voices of the Press ........................................................ 75 Academicians Have a Field Day .................................................................. 85 Pushing Back--Creating Black Places and Black Identities ......................... 94 The Negotiation of Masculinity on the Televised Festival Stage .............. 100 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 111 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 117 vii List of Figures Fig. 1. Ivan Lins sporting soul style at the piano, Jornal do Brasil, 11/23/1970 .. 68 Fig. 2. Photographs from article featuring Tim Maia, Jornal do Brasil, 11/23/1970. ...................................................................................... 70 Fig. 3. “The dances, in various suburban clubs, can reunite up to 15 thousand soul supporters,” Jornal do Brasil, 7/17/1976 ................................. 77 Fig. 4. Above: “At Pinheiro Shoes, in Madureira, up to 500 pairs of colorful platform shoes are sold every week.” Below: “Stages of the complicated black greeting ritual," Jornal do Brasil, 7/17/1976 ..... 78 Fig. 5. “A vehicle for communication between Blacks, not a black movement,” Jornal do Brasil, 7/17/1976 ............................................................. 79 Fig. 6. “’Black’ Protest is the Source of ‘White’ Revenue," Jornal do Brasil, 6/14/1977 ......................................................................................... 84 Fig. 7. “To the fierce sound of James Brown, Afros, loud clothes and ivory necklaces stir in sways and contortions through the basketball courts of the Zona Norte,” Veja, 11/24/1976 ................................... 98 viii Chapter 1: Introduction There was no doubt in our minds that this music was worth studying. Why wouldn’t someone study the music of Brazilian artists like Tim Maia and Ed Motta? At the time, I was a teaching assistant for the Music of Brazil course at the University of Texas at Austin. Some 20-odd undergraduate students and I were listening to the professor lecture on black Brazilian artists who had incorporated musical genres from the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s, particularly soul, funk, and disco. The instructor and I had already discussed the hard time we were having conveying the stakes of cultural appropriation to a group of young people who had grown up with digital technologies, music software, iTunes, and were accustomed to compiling playlists and legally and illegally downloading