Urban popular music, with all its diverse genres and styles, was a major feature of Brazilian cultural life in the twentieth century. Composers and songwriters chronicled this period, and their work translated the social experience of rapid urbanization characteristic of the development of peripheral capitalism.
José Roberto Zan and Michael Jarrett, “Popular Music and Policing in Brazil” http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bsz5b.16
The history of Brazilian pop music is a widely discussed topic. This makes sense given the rocky history surrounding it as well as its popularity outside of Brazil. One of the most widely known and focused on periods of Brazilian popular music is the time under the military dictatorship starting in 1964. The largely left leaning Brazilian musicians faced much censorship from the government as well as backlash from the populace for adopting sounds from outside Brazil. This led to a large amount of friction throughout that sphere going into the 1970’s. Among the many articles and essays discussing this period are three essays, all of which together create a broad picture of the various cultural conflicts occurring during this period.
The first of these is José Roberto Zan and Michael Jarrett’s “Popular Music and Policing in Brazil”. This article discusses the history of censorship of Brazilian pop music starting with its inception in the early twentieth century until the early 2000’s. Zan and Jarrett wrote about the political ideas behind the pop music because, in their words, “Composers and songwriters chronicled this period, and their work translated the social experience of rapid urbanization characteristic of the development of peripheral capitalism.” (Zan and Jarrett, 205). However, due to the broad period being discussed, there is some time that is not discussed in nearly as much detail. The most notable time absent in this discussion is the 1970’s, which is discussed in less than a page, and exists largely in the shadow of the important movements and events of the preceding decade.
Stephen Bocksay’s “Undesired Presences: Samba, Improvisation, and Afro-Politics in 1970’s Brazil” takes a much more detailed look at the collision of politics and popular music in the 1970’s. Bocksay himself states that “This article explores the role of the samba subgenre partido alto as a mode of resistance to modernization and the Brazilian military regime’s disfiguration of samba music in the 1970’s.” (Bocksay, 64). However, partido alto is only a subgenre of samba, which itself was no longer the largest popular music movement in Brazil despite being the most influential. Therefore, the article describes only a small part of the wider conflict with censorship in Brazil. A microcosm of the conflict, for sure, but one that is only a smaller piece of a much larger struggle.
Christopher Dunn’s “Tom Zé and the Performance of Citizenship in Brazil” takes a look at the wider conflict with censorship in Brazil. This is through the lens of a musician who straddled the worlds of popular music and the avant-garde: “In the early 1970’s, Tom Zé’s work developed in two, yet frequently interconnected directions as he attempted to maintain a presence in the market with radio-friendly pop songs.” (Dunn, 221). Tom Zé’s duality during this period makes him a perfect artist to discuss how artists molded themselves to fit the artistic landscape. Zé is known for his avant-garde approach to composing and writing, although this did make him much less popular than his contemporaries. He also was one of the many artists, prominent during the 1970’s, who hid their anti-establishment lyrics behind wordplay and symbolism, as Dunn discusses: “These references, delivered with evident irony, belie a coded identification with the social values of the regime.” (Dunn, 221). Dunn goes discusses Tom Zé’s lyrics and describes what they mean in depth. However, his discussion is limited in it’s discussion of artistic censorship out of that section. Dunn mostly discusses how Zé addresses societal issues, but is limited to that perspective. He doesn’t write about Zé’s interactions with other musicians, the government, and other specific relevant cultural figures. That makes his writing inly useful in a limited capacity when discussing the censorship during the 1970’s.
Mike Gonzalez’s encyclopedia article “Buarque, Chico b. 1944, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Writer” briefly summarizes the career of Chico Buarque. Buarque was one of the most famous examples of a Brazilian artist using wordplay in his songs to hide criticism from censors. Gonzalez describes him as someone “whose songs were marked by a subtle and poetic language which often veiled sharp social criticism.” (Gonzalez, 1). However, this is the only discussion of Buarque’s songwriting and his relationship with the broader issue of artistic integrity in Brazil in the article. It immediately moves discussing Buarque’s work in theatre afterwards, without even discussing any of his famous songs or albums. This makes sense, as the article is meant to be a brief summary of his artistic career. However, it extremely limits its usefulness in talking about Buarque’s work in any detail, much less his role in the 1970’s musical landscape.
The information given by all of the articles give a fairly detailed description of the popular musical landscape in Brazil during the 1970’s. The Brazilian military government used censorship and propaganda to push it’s own ideas while many organizations and individual artists pushed back with a variety of results. Within these groups, there were conflict over whether or not Brazilian music should embrace foreign influences and artistic conservatism. The conflict between conservatism and progressivism seems to function as an ideological throughline in all of this. Although all of these sources address this top to some extent, they fail to address this time period in depth. This project, using this collection of sources and the information they provide, seeks to fill it the most it can.
Works Cited
Gonzalez, Mike, and MIKE GONZALEZ. “Buarque, Chico.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003, edited by Daniel Balderston, and Mike Gonzalez. Routledge, 2004. https://wooster.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/routlaclit/buarque_chico/0?institutionId=4607
Stroud, Sean. “Marcus Pereira’s ‘Música Popular Do Brasil’: Beyond Folklore?” Popular Music 25, no. 2 (2006): 303–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877564.
Zan, José Roberto, and Jarrett, Michael. “Popular Music and Policing in Brazil.” In Policing Pop, edited by Martin Cloonan and Reebee Garofalo, 205–20. Temple University Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bsz5b.16.
Dunn, Christopher. “Tom Zé and the Performance of Citizenship in Brazil.” Popular Music 28, no. 2 (2009): 217–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40541428.
Bocskay, Stephen. “Undesired Presences: Samba, Improvisation, and Afro-Politics in 1970s Brazil.” Latin American Research Review 52, no. 1 (2017): 64–78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26743666.