Abstract
Popular Music as Brazilian Identity Discourse: Rap as Heir to Tropicalismo
Popular music in Brazil is the most current and widely-accepted national identity discourse. The question of what a particular musical phenomenon "means about us" is common and songwriters and musicians make statements in a variety of ways: lyrics, choice of repertory and rhythms, stage design. The public is educated, for pop is to Brazilian identity as gastronomy is to the French: something on which everyone can take a reasoned position, a field in which there is high and low culture, a tradition with regional variants, practical and theoretical knowledge, widely developed talents and skills, and the habit of discernment and interpretation.
Its most important moment of recent decades was tropicalismo, a pop music movement marked by eclecticism and iconoclasm. Launched in 1967, its formative stage lasted only until the end of 1968, when the military dictatorship that had taken power in 1964 clamped down on remaining liberties and its main leaders were imprisoned. Arising at a time of great political conflict, tropicalismo sidestepped the manicheism of Brazilian protest music of the time, with its return to rural roots and discourse of denouncement of political and economic opression. It proposed an esthetic of acceptance of multiple influences, principally those of foreign pop-rock, television and consumer culture, and the "corny" musical tradition that reigned until the advent of Bossa Nova. It also adopted an androgynous and multi-racial discourse, with one main figure (Caetano Veloso) gesturing like Carmen Miranda, while another (Gilberto Gil) wore dashikis. Though brief, the movement marked the sensibility of a generation and is now an obligatory reference in discourse on Brazilian identity. It is no longer iconoclastic, of course, while its past continues to be a parameter for measuring current pop music.
What can be thought of as a successor to tropicalismo in the context of today's cultural politics? Most often understood as problems of globalization rather than imperialism, the issues that tropicalismo addressed are still present: the Brazilian self and its relationship to foreign domination; the conflicts internal to that self that are most often covered as relations of "racial democracy" between the three founding races: European, African, Indigenous; the national and international markets for cultural products.
This paper will survey the heritage of tropicalismo, as both cultural vanguard and post-utopian iconoclasm, to form a framework for understanding what may be its closest contemporary heir: Brazilian rap, which has made its mark by selling large numbers of discs using marginal publicity and consumption circuits. An expression of a new black militancy from the urban slums of São Paulo and Brasilia, rap seeks to represent the domestic Other speaking for himself - sometimes in English; it is an affirmation of the Afro-Brazilian heritage as opposed to, and not as part of, national identity discourse, in the preferred idiom of that discourse as it is produced for mass consumption: popular music. This paper will examine rap artists' understanding of their place in the market for cultural products, in globalized and national culture.
