This is the most comprehensive ethnography about country music in Brazil. It consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion. The book offers a deep, theoretical treatment of country music in Brazil with emphasis on performance, production, and commercialization in social and economical contexts. The introduction summarizes the theoretical framework and the forthcoming chapters. The author recognizes the existence of two main genres of Brazilian rural music: a more traditional genre known as música caipira and a more urbanized genre known as música sertaneja.
The first chapter deals mainly with the dichotomy between these two genres, looking at mediation between time and space, ideologies of the debased present and the ideal rural past, and the way practice transforms and comments upon social changes. The analysis focuses mainly on gender and maleness, kinship, and reactions towards progress and urban life.
The second chapter expands the analysis of kinship, focusing on the meaning of brotherhood, its relevance to the formation of the duo (dupla), and its role in performance, group leadership, and duties. Furthermore, the author points to brotherhood as a thematic recurrence in the songs. In the social sphere, brotherhood represents temporal, spatial, and family connections.
The boom of música caipira and sertaneja after the end of the dictatorship in 1985 was fast and radical. In the third chapter, the author shows how the popularization of these genres at the same time borrows from and influences the ideologies that reinforce the centrality of the concept of mixture to the formation of the national character. Rural music becomes an important expression of Brazilian identity and its “rurality contests the notion that Brazil is exclusively the land of soccer, samba and carnival.”
In the forth chapter, the author looks at the use of different variants of spoken Portuguese, pointing to how levels of intimacy with these genres shape different discourses that explain and define them. Using the rodeo in Barretos as an example, this chapter focuses on the interrelationship of the performances of both caipira and sertaneja music. The analysis emphasizes the boundaries created between the two genres, the metageneric practice, and the antagonism between the legitimacy of the original caipira genre and the progressiveness of the urbanized sertaneja. There is a good systematization of the differences and similarities between the two genres as far as several elements are concerned: language, instrumentation, production, sales, dress, borrowings, theme, topic, and products sold.
In the first quarter of the twentieth century the boom of the coffee economy gave rise to caipira music in São Paulo, spearheaded by Cornélio Pires. The fifth chapter presents Pires as the product of an urban environment and shows the cultural divide between urban and rural that leads to the construction of the “stereotypical peasant” present in the caipira genre. However, in reality, the “peasant” ended up being expelled from his surroundings by urban encroachment. Most of this analysis is based on the work of Antônio Cândido and José de Souza Martins. The chapter also deals with the political implications of the “Americanization” of country music whose base of influence is massive urbanization since 1940.
The transformation of music into commodity and the survival of more “authentic” forms of music presentations are the subject of the sixth chapter. The technological changes that took place in the commercialization of the music, from cassette tapes to CDs, were well incorporated in the production of caipira music. At the same time, the increase in the “offerings” of caipira songs on radio programs transformed what was in essence a mass-oriented performance into a small, family-oriented event.
Chapter 7 analyzes a show of the duo Zé Mulato and Cassiano (2000) as a form of teaching what is “authentic” in caipira music: “sentimental power, comic political savvy and superb viola playing.” The duo also uses traditional caipira dialect to preserve a sense of locality that is not divisive, but instead contributes to the common good of the nation.
In opposition to this sense of locality there is an internationalization and modernization of rural Brazilian song. The final chapter contends that the Americanization of the genre, denounced by some critics, is not total, as is evident in the work of Renato Teixeira and his use of “hick language.” This evidence is also present in a show by Zezé de Camargo and Luciano. While there was simplicity in Zé Mulato and Cassiano, there is complexity in Zezé de Camargo and Luciano, whose show is very well coordinated in order to incorporate modern technology. Within this complexity there is also contradiction: it is artificial (urban) but pretends to lack artificiality (rural). As in rodeo and soccer, sertaneja music production strives to create a cosmopolitan (not local) environment as its other face.
In its conclusion the book deals with the relationship between music and political ideology in the period of neoliberalism beginning in the 1980s. The author shows how the song “Pagode in Brasília,” sung in the 1950s by the caipira duo Tião Carreiro and Pardinho, represented the people’s enthusiasm with national growth, and now sung by the sertanejo duo Chitãozinho and Chororó, signifies disappointment with the unsuccessful progress. Nowadays, caipira music lives only mediated through urban elements. The original genre survives in the present as memory. It exists and can be brought forward but it has to “fall away forever, as Jeca weeps, ‘like water t’ the sea’.”
Alexander Dent covers a lot of ground in this study of country music in Brazil. The subject of the book is mainly the process of development and dissemination of sertaneja music in a changing environment, and not the final product (the music itself). For this reason, I would not recommend the book to someone interested primarily in the aesthetics and/or the history of country music in Brazil.
The editorial care is not as high as one might expect in a book of this quality. There are many misprints in Portuguese and some of the translations could be more polished. The dating of quotations is sometimes confusing, since the author provides the date of the edition used but not the date of first publication. The book would be enriched if all the lyrics of the songs in Portuguese were also included, giving the reader access to the original text.
The theoretical complexity of the book may make it a difficult read for the non-specialized public but, on the other hand, it is an essential read for scholars in the field.
--------
[Review length: 1068 words • Review posted on March 23, 2010]