British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Suzel Ana Reily
Reviewed work(s):
Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization by Charles A. Perrone ; Christopher Dunn
Source: British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2003), pp. 173-175
Published by: British Forum for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036874
Accessed: 06/01/2009 19:53
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Reviews
CHARLES A. PERRONE and CHRISTO-
PHER DUNN (eds) Brazilian popu-
lar music and globalization.
Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2001. xii + 288pp, illustra-
tions, index. ISBN: 0-8130-1821-8
Brazilian popular music and globaliza-
tion, a volume edited by Charles Perrone
and Christopher Dunn, is an important
attempt to reflect on how debates regard-
ing globalization might contribute to our
understanding of popular music in Brazil
and vice-versa. The introductory chapter
invokes the song "Chiclete com banana",
which draws on two potent metaphors
for the West and Latin America to suggest
that the nature of the musical interactions
between Brazil and North America are
marked by mutual fascination as well
as economic inequality and differential
access to the products of modernity.
However, the main contribution of this
chapter is its lucid overview of the devel-
opment of popular music in Brazil, viewed
through the prism of global flows of
information and technology, conceptions
of national and regional identity and race
relations.
Following the introduction, the volume
is composed of fifteen case studies, written
by a wide range of specialists, including
literary critics, ethnomusicologists, popu-
lar music scholars, anthropologists, musi-
cologists and musicians, many Brazilians
amongst them. The case studies begin with
a series of chapters focusing on tropicdlia,
a movement led by Caetano Veloso and
Gilberto Gil during the late 1960s and 70s.
Tropicdlia re-articulated the cannibalist
project of the early twentieth-century
Brazilian modernists, which represented
Brazil as a native swallowing the "other"
to create the "self". In his contribution,
Christopher Dunn argues that tropicalist
cannibalism has served as a matrix that
resurfaces in numerous subsequent styles
of popular music in Brazil, a proposition
further developed by Frederick Moehn in
the concluding chapter of the volume.
Tropicdlia is introduced through a
spirited discussion of Carmen Miranda by
none other than Caetano Veloso, who
claims to have appropriated Miranda's
elegant use of self-parody as a way of
problematizing the simplistic image of
Brazil as exotic and sensual, an image that
has generated both pride and embarrass-
ment amongst Brazilians. It is precisely
this image of Brazil that is highlighted in
Perrone's comparative critique of the films
Black Orpheus, by French director Marcel
Camus (1959), and Orfeu, by Brazilian
director Carlos Diegues (1999), both of
which situate the Greek tragedy during
carnival in Rio de Janeiro; while Camus's
film played into - and further strengthened
- Western stereotypes, Diegues strove to
counter the idealization of the earlier film
through a hyper-realistic representation
of favela violence and vulgar sexuality,
juxtaposing it with breathtaking views of
Rio, sensual bodies and carnival.
"Mature" tropicadlia is the topic of
Rebecca Liv Sovik's contribution; she
looks at how changes in Brazil over the
BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL. 12/i 2003 pp. 173-9
174 BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.12/i 2003
past 30 years have allowed for the integra-
tion of Veloso's iconoclastic discourse on
national identity into the dominant nar-
rative. She concludes that, besides the
respectable figure into which the musician
himself has grown, he constructed a
discourse that accepts the rules of the
market but also recognizes the distinction
between the political and the artistic; in
this way, tropicadlia was able to transcend
"the conflict between economic and artis-
tic interests" (104). The tropicalist series
concludes with John J. Harvey's study of
the 1960s/70s band Os Mutantes, which
discusses how the band was discovered
in the 1990s by the North American
independent music scene. Harvey claims
that their acceptance in America hinged
precisely on their clumsy - yet deliberate
- handling of American musical motifs,
a strategy that anticipated the post-modern
aesthetic developed within alternative
rock.
From here on out, the vast majority of
studies in the volume focus, in greater or
lesser depth, on describing the specificities
of local appropriations of global trends
by Brazilian musical communities.
Furthermore, there is a very strong - and
predictable - concentration on northeast-
ern Brazil, among which six chapters deal
with Bahia alone. Not surprisingly, this
generates disturbing ethnographic redun-
dancy, which further highlights the rather
limited exploration of the theoretical pos-
sibilities raised by issues of globalization.
One is not only left unconvinced that
tropicadlia did indeed set the matrix for the
hybridizing dynamic of Brazilian popular
music, one is also left wondering to what
extent tropical cannibalism can indeed be
conceptualized as a Brazilian - rather than
a universal - phenomenon.
Because there are so many chapters in
the book, I have decided to be selective. In
my view the least predictable contribution
in the volume is Idelber Avelar's dis-
cussion of heavy metal in Minas Gerais.
Avelar argues that, in Minas, metal stands
in opposition to Milton Nascimento and
the Clube de Esquina (Corner Club), as
viewed by a post-dictatorship generation
of impoverished middle-class urban
youth, for whom Milton - along with other
stars of MPB - stood for the respectable
New Republic, or the status quo. Whereas
the Clube de Esquina aimed to resignify
the powerful traditional Catholic legacy of
Minas Gerais inherited from the gold era,
employing its images as emblems of
renewed hope in a new political climate,
"heavy metal experienced progress already
from the point of view of its final failure"
(132), such that "the fast succession of
repetitive movements in metal's distorted
guitars emblematize the annihilation of all
extended temporalities and the apocalyptic
canceling out of time which is proper to
the movement" (133).
Livio Sansone's study of funk in Rio
and Bahia is perhaps the richest ethno-
graphic account in the volume as it
provides a clear exemplification of the
localization of a transnational style, a
process that is highlighted through the
comparative approach. Unfortunately,
though, the study is structured around an
extremely naive and outdated apprehen-
sion of debates on music and identity, hin-
dering the possibility of the author actually
finding a way of transcending subcultural
theory to conceive of - and represent - the
relation between music and identity in
truly fluid terms. It is precisely this tran-
scendence that is achieved by Osmundo de
Araijo Pinho, who discusses the reggae
movement in Salvador. He conceives of
black music as a social phenomenon,
which allows him to disregard the formal
differences between musical styles to look
at "how music unites people and promotes
a special type of communication experi-
BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.12/i 2003
enced as social communion" (197). Thus
reggae, in conjunction with a host of other
styles of black music, contributes to forg-
ing allegiances among diasporic Africans
in a world that is integrated by capitalism.
Both Larry Crook and John Murphy deal
with the Recife movement commonly
referred to as the mangue beat, but each
looks at the musical constructions of dif-
ferent musicians, namely Chico Science
and Mestre Ambr6sio, respectively.
Crook looks at how the drums and
rhythms of the maracatu de baque virado
(turned-around beat), the oldest and most
Africanized element of the Recife carni-
val, were appropriated by Chico Science
to generate the distinctive sound of the
mangue beat and how this contributed to
giving the style the "pre-modem authen-
ticity" required to make it attractive to the
consumers of "world music". Murphy, in
turn, introduces us to Mestre Ambr6sio's
self-conscious process of limpeza (cleans-
ing), in which "outside stylistic references
were removed ... in order for [the group]
to discover their own most basic musical
references" (252). In this way it became
possible for them to create a style "from
the inside out", that is, to add global musi-
cal referents to a solid base formed by
regional, traditional styles.
This is obviously a book that Brazili-
anists, popular music scholars and students
of cultural studies will find useful, though
it is more likely to be consulted for its
ethnographic content than for its theoreti-
cal sophistication. Even though it contains
16 chapters as is, one is left wondering
why some topics were so heavily covered,
while other, quite obvious ones, were not.
For example, the musical traditions of
immigrant groups in Brazil, samba schools
or capoeira abroad, or even the musical
life of Brazilian communities abroad, were
entirely neglected. These are topics that
remain open for investigation and may
provide useful keys to understanding
musical processes of globalization.
SUZEL ANA REILY
School of Anthropological Sciences,
Queen's University Belfast
s. reily @ qub. ac. uk
DAVID COOPER (ed.), The Petrie collec-
tion of the ancient music of Ireland.
Cork University Press, 2002. 280pp.
Hardcover $53.37. ISBN:
1859183018
George Petrie was bom in Dublin in 1789
and died in 1866. He was by profession a
painter, draughtsman, archaeologist and an
amateur classical musician who was one of
the leading collectors of Irish traditional
material of his day. Petrie was a great
admirer of his predecessor, Edward
Bunting, to whom he donated several
pieces, eleven of which were published by
Bunting in his third volume, The ancient
music of Ireland arranged for the piano-
forte (1796, 1809, 1840). However, Petrie
was also quite critical of Bunting's
collecting methods, stating in the work
reviewed here that harpers and other
instrumentalists, who were Bunting's main
sources, were untrustworthy because they
took "barbarous licences" with the melo-
dies by improvising (36), and that tradi-
tional singers were the "proper deposi-
tories" of the airs (36). Petrie was in some
ways progressive in his attitudes, however.
He was critical of what he saw as the
neglect by Bunting and other previous
collectors of the importance of different
versions of airs. He himself set about
acquiring as many different renditions of
airs as he could, sometimes collecting
more than fifty of one tune. The motivation
for searching out different versions seems
to have been an attempt to distil a "purer",
175