Notes on the Historiography of Música Soul and Funk Carioca
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HAOL, Núm. 23 (Otoño, 2010), 99-106 ISSN 1696-2060 NOTES ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MÚSICA SOUL AND FUNK CARIOCA Carlos Palombini Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected] Recibido: 20 Junio 2010 / Revisado: 8 Julio 2010 / Aceptado: 13 Julio 2010 / Publicación Online: 15 Octubre 2010 (Versión en lengua inglesa del artículo publicado en la revista OPUS: a revista da Anppom, vol. 5, n. 1, 2009, pp. 37-61 Abstract: A critical survey of the history of Rio unwanted attention to the bailes and triggering de Janeiro bailes funk and their music in their responses from the repressive apparatus of the relations with African North-American musics military dictatorship and the national and the emergence of black pride in Brazilian intelligentsia alike), the Black Rio dances used popular music. to attract each weekend from five hundred Keywords: Baile funk, música soul, black soul, thousand to one and a half million black or bailes black, hip-hop, black music. black-identified — that is, poor — youths from the Rio de Janeiro periphery4 to dance to the ______________________ sounds of James Brown and other soul brothers in big bailes promoted by equipes de som “And the rarities of the soul heyday, the most (sound teams) that were the local equivalent of curious offshoots of a curious phenomenon — the Jamaican sound systems of the sixties and works like Tim Maia's Racional — are sought MCs hosting Bronx block parties in the after and treasured as the keys to understanding seventies, some of them reaching an attendance a different Brazil, one whose contours and of as many as fifteen thousand5. When electro mysteries were barely glimpsed before it and Miami bass replaced funk and soul as the disappeared.”1 Rio unperson's soundscape of choice one decade later, the anthropologist Hermano Vianna lso known outside Brazil as baile funk estimated that seven hundred bailes were taking (funk dance), the music Brazilians call place every weekend in the greater Rio area, A funk carioca (Rio de Janeiro funk) each attracting from five hundred (a failure) to derives not directly from African North one thousand (the average), two thousand or American funk but from a variety of hip-hop even ten thousand funkeiros (funk carioca known as Miami bass. The name “funk” has funksters), adding up to at least one million stuck to the music because of its roots in the young people every Saturday and Sunday6. funk/rap fed bailes funk (funk dances) of the Eight years later, DJ Marlboro estimated that eighties2, which in turn relate to the soul/funk every week in the Rio de Janeiro state eight fed bailes black (black dances) of the hundred bailes were congregating each an seventies3. According to the journalist Lena average two thousand funkeiros, amounting to at Frias, who named and disclosed this scene on least one and a half million youths per each the pages of the big press in 1976 (thus drawing week7. © Historia Actual Online 2010 99 Música Soul and Funk Carioca Carlos Palombini Fig. 1: Baile black revellers as photographed by Almir Veiga for Lena Frias's 1976 feature impersonating the bravado of an Afro- The appropriation and resignification of Brazilian suburbanite in the Europeanized African North American musics by Brazilian artists is as old as the recording industry itself. capital of the nation. In the process, a cakewalk George Washington Johnson's “Laughing has turned into the Brazilian counterpart to a Song”, the biggest selling record of the “coon song”. 1890s8, appeared in the southern hemisphere as early as 19029. Recorded on disc under the In 1961 the LP Os anjos cantam, by Nilo title “Gargalhada” by Eduardo das Neves with Amaro e Seus Cantores de Ébano, announced words by Vagalume10 in 1906, it remained on the soul crazy of the early seventies with the Brazilian Odeon catalogue for eclectic repertoire, doo-wop arrangements and approximately a quarter of a century. But Platters-like vocal styles. On 18 March 1965, whereas Johnson, an African North American, the epochal appearance of Clementina de Jesus caricatures the behaviour of a black man in the musical Rosa de Ouro13 evoked the according to white stereotypes, Neves, an utmost blackness of Afro-Brazilian religious African descendant, mocks bootlicking, which chanting and “had for Brazilian popular music he presents as a widespread trait of Brazilian the importance that presumably corresponds in society. In the process, a “coon song” becomes Anthropology to the finding of a missing a lundu, as “Gargalhada” was consistently link”14. marketed. On the other hand, Kery Mills's 1897 “At a Georgia Camp Meeting”, a On 24 June 1967, in the first anniversary of cakewalk of worldwide renown11, appeared in Wilson Simonal's TV-show, recorded live for Brazil under various guises in the earlier the release of a double LP, three thousand decades of the twentieth century, one of these mostly white people sang with him his being the song “Mulato de arrelia”12. But “Tributo a Martin Luther King”: “to each black whereas a cakewalk entails an African North that's gone one more black shall come to fight American choreographic parody of white with blood or without, we also fight with upper-class behaviour, “Mulato de arrelia” songs, brother, listen to my voice, fight for shows an ethnically unspecified male singer us!” Recorded in February, the single had been waiting in the drawers of the censorship 100 © Historia Actual Online 2010 Carlos Palombini Música Soul and Funk Carioca service until June, when it was finally whites — any unsettling feelings that the released15. Three years later, soul and funk image of a white woman singing her surrender were exploding on national television with the to a black male body on prime time TV might meteoric apparitions of Toni Tornado and Trio arise being conveniently deflated by her Ternura in “BR-3”, by Antônio Adolfo and characterization as a clown. The year 1975 saw Tibério Gaspar, and of Erlon Chaves and the release of Tim Maia's ascetic first Racional Banda Veneno in “Eu também quero mocotó”, album17, the crowning achievement of by Jorge Ben. The sight of undomesticated Brazilian soul. Maria fumaça, by Banda Black Afro-Brazilian showmanship nevertheless Rio in 1977, and Tim Maia disco club, by Tim triggered a multimedia war: two years later, Maia in 1978, closed the cycle in a decidedly Tornado had been driven away from the funky manner. The contemporary cultural country, Simonal brought to court and press, however, heard the infectious sound of slandered; deeply wounded, Chaves died of Banda Black Rio as the fabrication of a Syrian heart attack in 197416. In 1971 both Marcos executive for a Yankee conglomerate18 For Valle and Elis Regina released “Black is their part, DJs of the seventies and eighties, Beautiful”, by the Valle brothers, whether black of white, saw disco as the demonstrating the acceptability of female or unfunky white thing that had killed the male blackness as a luxury item for whites by bailes19. Fig. 2: Baile funk revellers as photographed by Guilherme Bastos for Hermano Vianna's 1988 book Brazilian artists who flirted with African Sérgio Mendes, O Som Nosso de Cada Dia, American soul or funk from the later half of Taiguara, Trio Esperança, Trio Ternura, the sixties to the later half of the seventies Wilson Simonal, Zé Rodrix. Their relation to were legion, some of them hugely successful: the bailes black was none. In the same period, Antonio Adolfo e a Brazuca, Antonio Marcos, a number of Brazilian artists, one of them Azymuth, Caetano Veloso, Cláudia Telles, hugely successful, devoted themselves mostly Djavan, Dudu França, Ed Lincoln, Eduardo or exclusively to soul and funk: Banda Black Araújo, Elis Regina20, Erasmo Carlos, Eumir Rio, Carlos Dafé, Cassiano, Os Diagonais, Deodato, Evinha, Fábio, Gilberto Gil, Os Hyldon, Dom Mita, Dom Salvador e Abolição, Incríveis, João Donato, Jorge Ben, Joyce, Lady Robson Jorge, Sônia Santos, Tim Maia, Toni Zu, Luís Vagner, Luiz Melodia, Manito, Tornado, União Black. Whatever their Marcos Valle, Maria Alcina, Marku Ribas, relationship to the bailes black — and it was Orlandivo, Quinteto Ternura, Regininha, Rita likely little — it is clear that these could make Lee, Roberto Carlos21, Ronaldo Resedá, good without them. © Historia Actual Online 2010 101 Música Soul and Funk Carioca Carlos Palombini Fig 3: Baile funk as filmed by Denise Garcia in 2005 The question of the relationship between the black of the seventies have often voiced their bailes black of the seventies and the bailes contempt for today's funkeiros26 as have funk of the eighties is not a settled one. In her Brazilian hip-hoppers27. Quoting Vianna, funk remarkable study of the Renascença Clube, carioca is “the excluded of the excluded”28. where, from 1972 to 1975, Asfilófilo de Even so, Oséas Moura dos Santos, a.k.a. Mr Oliveira Filho, a.k.a. Dom Filó, hosted Noite Funky Santos, the DJ/MC behind the early do Shaft (Shaft's Night), one of the seventies bailes black of the seventies29 in the now bailes, Sonia Giacomini resorts to interviews defunct Astoria Futebol Clube, in Catumbi, with former participants to highlight ruptures begrudgingly acknowledges the kinship rather than continuities between the two between both scenes by admitting that “if there scenes22. Most people23 agree that in the later is pagode today — see the way the guys look half of the seventies the bailes were mortally and talk —, if there is funk [carioca] today — struck with a combination of factors: negative no matter how mediocre it may be —, if there attention triggered by Frias's article; hostility is rap today — but a beautiful rap, like that of of the samba world; the arrival of disco in Racionais MCs — it is all soul's fault”30.