Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
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Over time he had honed a very particular rural Pernambucan accent, and his vocal style was declamatory, occupying a space between speech and song. What began as a folklore revue eventually morphed into a visceral, screaming onslaught. Cordel became known all over Brazil in mostly college-educated and left-intellectual circles that listened to alternative commercial music released on independent recording labels. The band was lauded by critics, and its presence nationwide was growing as band members appeared on Brazilian MTV and in sertão-centered films (Deus é Brasileiro, Árido Movie). To fans and critics in Recife Cordel represented the second generation of mangue beat, a Recife-based music scene featuring a rooted cosmopolitan sound that bridged youth music and national music in the early to mid-1990s (Avelar and Dunn 2011; Galinsky 2002; Sharp 2001; Teles 1998, 2000).
Mangue beat recombined local or regional Afro-diasporic styles such as Afro-Pernambucan maracatu and coco with global pop staples such as hip-hop and punk rock. Short-lived but influential, mangue beat distanced itself from previous regionally identified musics; musicians such as Chico Science described their sounds as envenenado or poisoned, to express their disdain for traditional purism. The moves to embrace and recombine “foreign” and “local” genres within mangue beat were jarring for many in the early 1990s, since much of youth culture had maintained more of a separation between national and international styles during the 1980s. After Chico Science, the lead singer of the seminal mangue beat band Chico Science e a Nação Zumbi, died in 1997, Lirinha was widely considered the most charismatic front man from Pernambuco. Although Cordel purposely distanced itself from the mangue label, claiming its sertão heritage to be distinct from developments emerging from the mangrove swamps of coastal Recife, its fan base overlapped considerably with mangue pioneers Chico Science and Mundo Livre S/A. As Cordel’s career momentum began to build, the band moved its headquarters first to Recife and then to São Paulo and launched national and international tours.
For all Cordel’s disruptive fury, the band can be seen as carrying on a tradition. Lirinha is an important recent figure in the history of Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), because Cordel can be considered part of a lineage of “anthropophagic” popular music that dates back to tropicalismo, a late 1960s movement that sought to move away from stiff notions of Brazilian musical nationalism. Tropicalistas such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil from nearby Bahia rejected the easy coupling of particular musical styles with particular regions. Instead, they proposed that the ability to culturally “cannibalize,” or critically assimilate and cobble together, cultural inflows was central to the national character. The tropicalistas drew from the revolutionary avant-garde in cinema, art music, poetry, and art, as well as an array of Brazilian, Latin American, and global pop styles. They juxtaposed images of affluence and poverty, folklore and commercial pop, and experimentalism and traditionalism to create an absurdist portrait of the nation.
Lirinha’s apocalyptic, prophetic affect stands in stark contrast to the pointed but often playful Dadaism of tropicalismo. Nevertheless, both are concerned with the origins of Brazilian-ness and how these origins inform the present. This concern sets them apart from the majority of groups in Brazil’s increasingly genre-differentiated music industry, where recent ambitious attempts to sum up Brazil through popular music are relatively few and far between.
During the Associação Respeita Januário meeting, the term resgate—literally translatable as “cultural rescue”—surfaced several times as a point of contention in descriptions of samba de coco. The efforts of Micheliny and Lirinha, and subsequently of the public and semiprivate institutions Fundarpe (Pernambucan Arts Foundation), SESC (Social Service of Commerce), and Petrobras (the Brazilian national oil company), had led many to use the word. Yet Micheliny and Lirinha, as well as many others, felt uneasy about the process of cultural rescue. Some speakers expressed misgivings that cultural rescue implied that melodies must be documented because they were on the cusp of vanishing. Other members countered that there was indeed an urgency to their efforts to register traditional music before it was eclipsed by television, Internet, and shopping mall consumerism. It seemed unclear to those present at the meeting, myself included, how to proceed with studies of folklore without falling into what Tobing Rony calls the “taxidermic” mode of ethnographic representation, which makes “the dead look alive, and the living look dead” (Rony 1996, 126). Critiques like Tobing Rony’s are present when Brazilian scholars and musicians accuse those they consider purists of placing a culture in formaldehyde and denying its constant transformation as a dynamic, mutating form. One particularly memorable phrasing of this criticism was by the Brazilian anthropologist Hermano Vianna, who once argued that “rescue is what you do for kidnapped people, or people who have accidents,” not for musical genres (Gasperin 2000).
I believe that the misgivings expressed at the meeting can be understood, at least in part, as unease about the nostalgia that resgate arguably represents—what Svetlana Boym refers to as “restorative nostalgia” (2001). Boym splits “longing for home” into halves: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia tells a story of returning to one’s origins and is tied to attempts to reconstruct a phantom home. A celebratory notion of homeland that disavows the shame and embarrassment lurking in a nation’s past is an example of restorative nostalgia.
Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is more ambivalent and many-plotted. It is more concerned with fragments and ruins than with unity and wholeness. The themes of migration and exile are central, and the contradictions of modernity are acknowledged and explored. Reflective nostalgia is constituted by, not opposed to, uprootedness and diaspora. Whereas restorative nostalgia touts itself as truth and tradition, reflective nostalgia acknowledges itself as longing and clears a space for doubt. As Boym phrases it, reflective nostalgic can be “at once homesick and sick of home” (2001, xix).
I find Boym’s typology useful to interpret the respective efforts of musicians from Arcoverde, even though both Coco Raízes and Cordel restlessly inhabit and unsettle both nostalgias. For example, members of Cordel speak about Arcoverde as their hometown and the source of their inspiration during every performance. However, the Arcoverde they portray in their lyrics is not an idealized hometown. Instead, it is a stormy, gothic place in which a hunger riot overtakes a supermarket, and a bitter clown, his makeup smeared like blood, performs in a desperate, threadbare traveling circus on the outskirts of town.
In Arcoverde I find the two categories of nostalgia difficult, if not impossible, to pry apart. Arcoverde offers an excellent case in point of how mutually constituting these categories of nostalgia are. Over the course of this book I explore how Cordel straddled the restorative and the reflective, charting how it became entangled in a restorative project before moving toward a reflective approach to performance. I examine how its success as an “antirestorative” band nevertheless bolstered restoration by attracting fans to visit the group’s hometown. I detail the circumstances in which Cordel’s project strives to appear restorative only from a distance, so that it won’t fall from the good graces of certain sponsors.
On first glance Coco Raízes and other samba de coco performers work within the restorative mode. Closer scrutiny, however, raises questions regarding their status as well: How is a restorative project unsettled when musicians from previously excluded groups such as Afro-Brazilians seek social recognition through claims to local tradition that reiterate nostalgic narratives? The story told by samba de coco during the São João Festival is a readymade tale of rural homecoming. It is restorative and government-friendly, pitched in a register of premodern innocence. Yet what distinguishes it is that these particular Afro-Brazilian storytellers most likely wouldn’t have had a space to tell it in the sertão only decades before.
Popular Music and Citizenship
Lula Calixto once said that being valued as an artist made him feel like a citizen. He was pointing out that music was a means for him to become socially audible within his city and in Brazil as a whole. Lula made this comment in the late 1990s, at a moment of redemocratization and the expansion of citizenship in Brazil following more than two decades of military dictatorship. It was also during this time that the particular nostalgias evoked by Coco Raízes and Cordel performances began to resonate with a broader public. Popular