Eddie

Beyond Bossa Nova

Biodiversity is hardly the only kind of variety in Brazil.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PERNAMBUCO: NEW SOUNDS OF THE BRAZILIAN NORTHEAST (LUAKA BOP)

By Peter Margasak

February 28, 2008

Marketers usually reflect back at you the things you think you know, never the things you might still be able to learn. In the States they push a picture of Brazil that’s so dumbed down you could be forgiven for imagining that people there only make samba and bossa nova. The truth is, Brazilian music is anything but simple. It took me a couple years of exploring just to get a rough idea of how mind-bogglingly varied it is, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully grasp the complex history and crisscrossing webs of influence that have shaped the innumerable genres and subgenres.

The country is huge—bigger than the lower 48—and just about every corner has its own cluster of regional traditions. In the States most local traditions have died out, and those that haven’t, like bluegrass, are no longer truly local thanks to internal migration and electronic media. But in Brazil you can still find folkloric music that’s popular in one city but an obscure curiosity in another—both because some areas remain relatively remote and inaccessible (Internet access is only about a third as prevalent there as in the States) and because many Brazilians, to paraphrase a musician I met on a 2006 visit, treasure their musical traditions and try to keep the influence of exported American pop in check. Some version of this phenomenon occurs almost everywhere, in fact—even English-speaking countries like Canada and Australia have laws requiring a certain percentage of domestically produced content on TV and radio.

The new compilation What’s Happening in Pernambuco, the seventh release in Luaka Bop’s savvy series devoted to different Brazilian styles, sheds light on the modern scene in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, especially the freaky offspring of the so-called manguebeat movement. Manguebeat exploded in Pernambuco’s capital, Recife, in the early 90s, taking its name from the mangrove swamp the city was built on. Like the tropicalistas of the late 60s, this small group of musicians—most significantly Chico Science & Nacao Zumbi and Mundo Livre S/A—embraced the Brazilian national aesthetic of cultural cannibalism, voraciously devouring music from around the globe, especially the West, and working it into new forms that were deeply rooted in vital local traditions. Both movements wanted to prove that Brazil was on the cultural vanguard, not a backwater always tagging along behind the developed world.

But when Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Ze, Gal Costa, and Os Mutantes were fusing bossa nova and samba with psych-rock and pop, bossa nova and samba already meant Brazil to much of the rest of the planet. Manguebeat mixed hip-hop and heavy metal with local rhythms like maracatu, coco, and ciranda, but at the movement’s inception those Pernambucan modes were already fading from the consciousness of people living in Recife, let alone people hundreds of miles away in Rio de Janeiro. In 1991 Fred Zero Quatro, leader of Mundo Livre S/A, wrote an essay that became manguebeat’s manifesto, lamenting the stagnation and isolation of his city’s culture to explain its borrowings from abroad. “It is not necessary to be a doctor to know that the simplest way to stop a heart is to obstruct its veins,” he said. “The quickest way to kill and empty the soul of a city is to kill its rivers and fill its estuaries. How to avoid drowning in the chronic depression that paralyzes the citizens? How to return some courage and recharge the batteries of the city? It’s simple! It’s just to inject some energy in the mud and stimulate what’s left of fertility in the veins of Recife.”

Manguebeat didn’t last long as a self-conscious movement. By 1997 Nacao Zumbi had signed to Sony and were earning international acclaim, playing in both Europe and the U.S., but in February of that year front man Chico Science was killed in a car crash. Mundo Livre S/A wouldn’t score a major-label contract for several more years and never attracted the same kind of attention, so they didn’t have the same energizing effect. They also weren’t as fiercely devoted to local traditions, often incorporating southern forms like samba. But those two groups were the spark that jump-started Pernambuco’s moribund music scene. New bands sprung up like weeds, and instead of looking to Sao Paulo, Rio, the U.S., or Europe they could look down the street.

That scene’s still going strong today: Compiled by Paulo Andre Pires, a former manager of Nacao Zumbi and organizer of the vital nordeste music fest Abril Pro Rock, What’s Happening in Pernambuco spans about a decade, with most of the material from ’04 and ’05. (It was scheduled for release a year ago but got held up when Luaka Bop had to find a new U.S. distributor.) Nacao Zumbi soldiered on after their front man’s death, releasing Fome de Tudo (Deckdisc), one of their best albums yet, this fall. And even the oldest music on the disc, like Otto’s twitchy electro-rock masterpiece “Bob,” bristles with freshness and originality.

As Philip Galinsky points out in his book Maracatu Atomico (Routledge, 2002), manguebeat created a two-way exchange: new music was inspired by traditional styles, and traditional styles were resuscitated by the attention this new music brought to them. Artists like Tine and Siba, who both appear on What’s Happening in Pernambuco, built their hybrid sounds around a mix of rural and urban traditions from and around Recife, with far less emphasis on contemporary genres; Tine favors acoustic string instruments, and Siba, who first made his name fronting the forro-oriented Mestre Ambrosio in the 90s, pumps up his songs with the brassy grind of the Carnaval music called frevo. When I visited Recife two years ago I was surprised by the respectful knowledge of traditional forms that even the youngest and most progressive musicians displayed. Andre Edipo, a guitarist for Bonsucesso Samba Clube, took me record shopping and picked out some 60-year-old frevo recordings, a few new folkloric albums Siba had produced, and an album of coco, a voice-and-percussion style more than a century old.

Siba and Tine, who flavor traditional music with touches of modern pop and dub, are the exceptions on What’s Happening in Pernambuco—most of the 13 artists here have followed the trail blazed by Nacao Zumbi and Mundo Livre S/A by incorporating traditional music into what’s basically pop or rock. Eddie add rhythmic accents from the bottom-heavy beat of maracatu to their propulsive, reggae-tinged grooves, and Cabruera tangle with capoeira music—though what sounds like a berimbau is actually a ballpoint pen rubbed across the strings of an acoustic guitar. The wildly inventive Cidadao Instigado, from the neighboring state of Ceara, mash up wild psychedelia with cheap electronic fuckery, the wiggy 70s rock experiments of Raul Seixas, and the lowbrow romantic balladry called brega, which has been ubiquitous in Brazil since the late 60s. Even though they don’t explicitly tap into old traditions, they clearly owe a debt to the fathers of manguebeat for their liberation from the dominant strains of Brazilian pop.

Otto, Cidadao Instigado, and Nacao Zumbi have all moved to Sao Paulo within the past several years, looking for bigger audiences and more industry exposure, but the northeast is still the same hotbed of creativity that nurtured their music. I’m glad Luaka Bop has made it easier for listeners outside Brazil to get a taste of these sounds, even though it’ll be hard for them to take a bigger bite—in the U.S. at least, most of the records from which these tracks are drawn took some digging to find even when they came out. Maybe a few more compilations like this will whip up some interest in less well-known Brazilian music—I’m not holding my breath, but that seems like the best way to convince stateside labels to invest in making it more available here.   

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