| |
|
Mmm. Where do I start? Ok, first let me subscribe to the consensus that Brazilian music is one of the most inspired and rich, and one of the most successfull in making the transition and adaptation of the seminal roots of folklore music to an urban environment. In the process, one of its representative styles, Bossa Nova, has become so refined and elegant that it was called "Brazilian Jazz" in the 60's.
In football, when talking about the brazilian team, brazilians often use the expression "the weight of the shirt", meaning the mix of myth, history and sucess attached to brazilian soccer istory, and the implicated responsability of the player sporting a brazilian
football shirt.
The same thing occurs when music is concerned. Only that (some would say, similarly to what happened with the level of brazilian football) brazilian music has changed, and while I'm not the best person to judge if it has gotten better or worse, one thing I can tell without fear of being wrong: It's by no means as powerful and impactant as it was in the past.
The new representatives of brazilian music pale in comparison with their predecessors. There are exceptions, of course, but we don't have a coalesced scene as once we had. Caught in the middle of
the digital evolution, the young artists, most of them guided by the voices of 1922* don't really know what to do, or where to go to find the new Brazilian Music. Now this approach to art, in my opinion, nearly almost wiped out of the music scene any other attempts at different methods of creating music. During the
nineties, if you weren't mixing up stuff, funk with maracatu, rock with samba etc, you wouldn't be taken seriously. I had nothing against it at the beginning, but once it became a comfortable market commodity and everyboy started doing it, I got sick of it. Haunted by
a golden past and facing the challenge of the new electronic music, brazilian music got so anemic that today people like Max de Castro (who was, not to my surprise, in a TIME cover, called "the most interesting/innovator brazilian artist of the decade") make songs that are a little bit of second-hand electronic blips with a third-rate Bossa Nova beat - of course, the foreigns love it, it was all the rage in Europe a coupe of years ago (or perhaps it still is, with Marky and Patife and all, I really can't say). They don't have to commit to it, and a fad is always a fad, even if in our case this fad is lasting since the 60's.
I consider myself enlightened enough to recognize some political patterns, in which concerns the role of Brazil in our globalised world(TM). I did my homework and those who know me know that I'm not "trying to be American or British". Please...
Speaking for myself, if I choose to have lyrics in English, it's because, frankly, they're easier to write. Portuguese words are longer, and they have sharp phonemes, whereas English words, being shorter and "rounder", fit better in the faster tempo, 4-beat structure of most pop/rock songs. Japanese samba is OK, because their word have a similitude in structure and sound with Portuguese words. By the same criteria, I don't think that samba in English would work very well. Actually, let me correct that. A talented person can make it work. I'm just saying that it's something really difficult to achieve. I know a few examples of rock songs in Portuguese that make it. When it works, it's beautiful, I tell you. When it doesn't work, it's worse than hearing fingernails scratching in the blackboard.
Another reason to have lyrics in English, for me, is that I want theat Indian kid, that Fijian kid etc to understand what I'm singing about. Where are my best chances, in the English language or in Portuguese?
Another reason is, sometimes I just think that art is art, it doesn't matter if it's a bunch of French doing zulu paintings, or Afghanistans playing rockabilly - if the artist has a conscience of his role in the scenario, and of what he is doing and why, then all criticism concerning questions of nationalism should be disregarded. But this is a veery complicated topic that I don't think I can elaborate now. But this topic is really interesting and I'll add more to it tomorrow, probably.
------
* - The year of the Modernist Week, which proclaimed that, among other things, Brazil's only role in the international artistic scenario would be as a reprocessor, never creating anything original but instead receiving the influences from outside and then mixing them up with the national artistic heritage. Like if influences weren't an integral part of the artistic process, to begin with. No doubt it was a good thing for the people with no talent, who wouldn't ever need to present any original work. It was around then that Brazil started being noticed in the artistic field. To this day, it's with suspicion that some brazilians (myself included) see the interest that some intellectuals show towards Brazil, because we see, by the topics they choose to study, and by the people they usually consider as examples of the brazilian art, that they cannot stand the idea of studying brazilian culture with the same respect and humbleness that one studies, say, the works of Goethe.
That is to say that when someone approaches European culture, it's with hopes of learning with it. That is not often the case when Europe or America approach us, but that's another thing. |
|
|
