This engaging study of two musical groups from the city of Arcoverde, Pernambuco, a city often described as a gateway to the sertão or storied Northeastern interior, provides the reader with a clear-eyed vision of the varied uses of tradition in today’s musical scene within Brazil. The author focuses on Coco Raízes (a group with a strong African component signaled by its use of the musical/dance form samba de coco) and the Cordel do Fogo Encantado (an increasingly iconoclastic band that mixed regional themes with angry references to the urban favela) with an eye to the ways in which the two diverge, collide, and overlap. Both groups were in the public eye in the first decade of the twenty-first century—Cordel emerged in the mid-1990s and disbanded in 2010, leaving Coco Raízes to play on into the present. However, though both made a point of utilizing folk and popular cultural forms linked to the past, their transformations of these forms into present-day pop music varied considerably.
The book expands upon Svetlana Boym’s division between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia in its contrast between Coco Raízes’ more nostalgic reworking of folk material and Cordel do Fogo Encantados’s increasingly animated attempts to modernize this material through the use of more experimental sounds and protest themes. Daniel Sharp emphasizes the frequent contradictions within this binary by stressing the personal as well as musical differences between the two groups. He also highlights their attempts to respond to a shifting, post-authoritarian moment in Brazilian society in which artists and musicians sought—and still seek—to register momentous, if partial, social, political, and economic transformations. The exceeding difficulty that both groups’ names pose to any sort of direct translation (they are literally “Roots of the Coco Music and Dance Tradition” and “Story [or String] of the Enchanted Fire”) stems in part from regional histories and connotations that resist easy equivalencies. That the author does not even try to render these in English speaks volumes about the depth and complexity of their Brazilian roots.
Sharp’s simultaneous sympathy for the musicians and his attempts to resist being drawn into their ideological and personal battles is one of the book’s primary strengths. In part an ethnographical project whose difficulties he openly discusses, the study is also a history of changes that go far beyond the two groups. As a result, the music serves to illustrate larger historical dramas without losing sight of its peculiarities as an art form with a longstanding identity-formation role in Brazilian culture. The contradictions on which the author focuses—Coco Raízes’ use of Afro-Brazilian musical forms as emblems for a part of the sertão with relatively little black influence, Cordel’s emphasis on violence and injustice in ways that suggest urban, as opposed to semi-rural realities—give the study much of its appeal. So does the author’s eye for everyday details that help readers to visualize a reality with which they may have little or no firsthand familiarity.
While Sharp clearly knows his material, not all of his readers will have his depth of background. As a result, the book would have benefited from the addition of a map and a chronology that stressed the links between major historical events and the evolution of the group. A list of the chief players in this drama with a brief note about their roles and relationships to one another would have been similarly useful to readers without prior knowledge of the groups. As it is, the book is suitable for use with students—who are all but certain to enjoy the links between Sharp’s explanations and specific musical compositions—but will require considerable additional explanation of some of the recent changes in Brazil.
As a whole, the book represents an appealing contribution to the growing literature on the uses of tradition and a revealing portrait of how and why different cultural entities attempt to co-opt or transform musical forms whose significance goes far beyond their artistic attributes. The study offers an illuminating view of the uses of the music and of individual and collective memory in the construction of a new—if stubbornly “traditional”—Northeast.
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[Review length: 676 words • Review posted on September 15, 2015]