British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Putting Mano to Music: The Mediation of Race in Brazilian Rap Author(s): Derek Pardue Source: Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Nov., 2004), pp. 253-286 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20184485 . Accessed: 18/07/2014 16:57

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Ethnomusicology Forum

Vol 13, No. 2, November 2004, pp. 253-286

Putting Mano to Music: The Mediation

of Race in Brazilian Rap Derek Pardue

In this article I demonstrate how Brazilian hip-hop participants mediate marginality

through discourses and practices of n?gritude. By taking a historical approach, I analyse the competitive processes with which S?o Paulo hip-hoppers articulate sound and story to a dynamic sense of personhood and social collectivity. The article contributes to

general theories of music and identity as well as to the present literature on the

"reterritorialization" of hip-hop culture throughout the contemporary world.

Keywords: Brazil; Hip-hop; N?gritude; Historiography

if you pay attention to what is being said in rap music, then you'll know that there is

something wrong going on out there, because rap is reality.

(CC, a resident of FEBEM youth correctional facility and a student of hip-hop street

dance, 1999)

"Reality" in the quote above indicates a complex set of conditions, including race,

class, gender and geography, that hip-hoppers mediate through the use of narration

and music. This process is one of performance and order as hip-hoppers profess a

desire to transform "reality" by opposing o sistema ("the system").1 In this manner,

local hip-hoppers emphasize the dynamic aspects of musical mediation, i.e. music

not simply as a conduit for expression but also as a mode of representation through which performers can potentially change their sense of self and suggest alternative

models of social stratification and value. In this article I focus on how hip-hop

participants understand Brazilian society as a particular kind of racialization, one that

Q Routledge I ̂ ^ Taylor & Francis Grot

Derek Pardue is currently a

Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

His dissertation, "Blackness and periphery: A retelling of marginality in the hip-hop culture of S?o

Paulo, Brazil", is the first full-length ethnography written in English that depicts Brazilian hip-hop culture and the social networks that mobilize it. Contact address: Department of Anthropology,

Union College, 207 Union Street, Schenectady, New York 12305, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online) ? 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1741191042000286211

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254 D. Pardue

motivates hip-hoppers to link sound and story to a dynamic sense of personhood and

collectivity.

Hip-hop has been one of the most influential forms of cosmopolitan youth culture

for the last decade. I use "culture" to refer to a set of practices which generates

meaning and power for a dynamic group of people. "Culture" is what hip-hoppers do

to comment on daily life or "reality" and in so doing create their own "system". In

general, hip-hop culture in Brazil is an ideology of representation and personhood

positioned in relation to a cluster of primarily national hegemonic discourses and

practices embodied in the following local terms: cordial society,2 racial democracy,3

progress4 and poverty. There are four basic elements to hip-hop, which act as areas of expression: rap

music, DJ sound production, graffiti art and B-boy/girl or street dance.5 In Brazil,

hip-hoppers are particularly aware of these four elements and stress their integration

during performance rhetoric and informal conversation. The overwhelming majority of participants in Brazil are Afro-Brazilian teenage boys and young men from the

shantytown suburbs,6 for whom style is emerging as a personal agenda. Through it, these young people conjoin individual maturity, expressive arts and empowering rhetorics of the self, community and social change. They commodify these practices and relations through their hip-hop products and make hip-hop culture in Brazil an

effective social force.

In this article I focus primarily on rap music and draw from fieldwork experience and paradigmatic lyrical and sonic "texts" to take account of competing processes of

mediation in the articulation of diasporic sensibility and general identity formation. I

am wary of the fact that lyrical interpretation tends to decontextualize rap's effective

and affective meanings (Forman 2002, 40; Kelley 1997, 16-17; Schloss 2000, 40-4). Unless otherwise marked, phrases enclosed by quotation marks refer to either

repeated conversation pieces in fieldwork or repeated parts of recorded lyrics. Simon

Frith rightly warns that content analysts "treat lyrics too simply: the words of all

songs are given equal value; their meaning is taken to be transparent" (Frith 1988,

107). However, it is my intention to analyse hip-hop critically by turning on the

very banality they themselves employ. Informed by localized experience and post fieldwork conversations with particularly reflective consultants, I aim to persuade the

reader in a methodological and epistemological fashion not unlike so many S?o Paulo

hip-hoppers. In S?o Paulo rappers propagate and create mantras that centre on

collectivity and oppositionality. In academia, social scientists create and propagate mantras of representation and explanation. Hip-hoppers and I take turns in the

iteration of the recognized essentials of hip-hop culture.

Furthermore, I historicize n?gritude and hip-hop in the Brazilian context into four

"moments". I connect hip-hop's major narrative and aesthetic components to the

long-standing overarching themes of periferia as a socio-geographical concept and

n?gritude as a diasporic and potentially resistant racial discourse. I argue that such

keywords become particularly salient upon consideration of the current divide in

local hip-hop culture. Namely, over the past five years a new trend called "rap

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Ethnomusicology Forum 255

positivo" has emerged within hip-hop and stands as an alternative to the more

prevalent umarginaF7 hip-hop. I conclude the article with an analysis of "positive

rap" in relation to periferia and n?gritude. It is in the present moment that hip

hoppers join blackness and universal spirituality in contradistinction to the extreme

locality of periferia reality.

Race and Rap: Ethnomusicology Walks Gingerly

Understanding hip-hop's constructions of "reality" gives key insights into persistent and unresolved issues of authenticity, especially as it relates to music and race. During 2002 an interesting debate occurred among members of the Society for Ethnomu

sicology list serve population concerning the definition and analytical value of terms

such as "black music". The positions taken during this virtual conversation reflect the

recurring uncertainty about race as it relates to musical practice. As Philip Tagg

explained almost 15 years ago, the musical content of what have been labelled "black",

"Afro-American" and "European" musics overlaps to such an extent that, as

musicological tools of analysis, the labels are worthless. Yet, in my opinion, there

are particular "articulations" of sound that practitioners uphold in musical

communities as stylistic distinction. These articulations refer to social, historical

and political objectives, thus making the music black. The legacy of "whiteness" as

unmarked, especially in popular music performance and scholarship, motivates

"other" performers to distinguish their performances as "black", "Afro-Latin", etc. In

the US, these lines of demarcation are reinforced in media structures as music, culture and film channels continue to be organized along categories of race, e.g. BET

(Black Entertainment Television) and Black Starz Movie Network. In reference to

Tagg, Frith writes:

the difference in value judgments espoused by music analysts concerning African and

European (and "derivative") musics is still rooted in "ideology rather than musicology,"

(Tagg 1989) that is racial formations in musical practices are understood less through musical principles

as such and more via the uses of such principles.

(Frith 1996, 133)

Music, understood as a mode of human discourse, has always been intimately tied

to theories of human difference and social hierarchy. Race has been fundamental to

the "ontologies of music", that is, the very conception of what music is (Radano and

Bohlman 2000). Likewise, people have repeatedly used music to demonstrate

hierarchical differences in human capabilities with regard to sound production and

conceptualization. The problem with race and music, whether silently presumed or explicitly

deconstructed by consumers, critics or commodifiers, is that the fit never sits still

(Potter 1999). Discourses of musical authenticity, which rest on racial arguments, are

always a struggle because persuasion must come in matching cultural authority to

biological essence. The leaps are too far and it is for this reason that 'race and music'

necessarily implies ideology. Yet, scholarship, as has been well known for decades

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256 D. Pardue

now, cannot profess an end of ideology. Ideology is not the business solely of

politicians and evangelical priests. Scholars are all invested in certain larger

ideological formations through theory-making, pedagogy and other public

activity. The danger lies in engaging in ideological arguments without reflection

and debate.

To return to Tagg's observations concerning the weak hold musicology has on

the representation of race in musical understanding and explanation, I would

argue that musical principles of race involve ideological investments, because

musicians, consumers, critics and recording engineers want certain social

connections to manifest themselves in the process of musical exchange. Musicology and ideology should not converge on presumed evidence. For example, musicologists have used evidence of polyrhythm, call-and-response, and improvisation to support claims that a particular musical practice is essentially African and thus constitutes a

matrix of black diasporic musicality (Tagg 1989, 288-92). Rather, reflexive

musicology on race should concern the historical formations and pragmatic

consequences of music as social acts. That is to say, productive analysis should

consist of clarifying how participants connect a dynamic historicity of race, i.e.

conceptualizations of the past and temporality, to current daily activities and

collective organization processes through the expressive medium of music.

N?gritude or blackness is a heterogeneous set of experiences, rememberings and styles that persons create, reinvent, repeat and put to sounds, words and

moves. What makes it black is an aggregate of cultural particularities, such as the

Brazilian formation of nation around the concept of mesti?agem (racial mixture), as

well as translocal or cosmopolitan commonalities in general experience and

contemporary imaginations of community. Blackness and music is part of

what Carvalho termed a "mythopoetic" (1994, 187) articulation of identity and

aesthetics within sound structures. While certainly not fixed or even predictably

consistent, black music is a viable category because it translates personhood into an effective discourse. Black music, just as white music (though rarely named

as such), does things; it reminds those who do not feel it already that race matters.

Bastardo, one of the rappers in the group SNJ (Somos Nos A Justi?a: "We are

justice"), explains his nickname:

Bastard is a shadowy form {vulto) that lingers importantly over history ever since

slavery. Bastard is the experience of growing up in a

fragmented family without a father

figure. Without sponsorship, but with a warrior-like mother, I Bastard studied the

dictionary, the book, and the Word [of God]. Bastard is the shadow of fortitude (vulto) who is here to cause controversy.

(SNJ 2000)

The SNJ rapper reinvents his name "bastard" to represent his view of Brazil's racial

history from a critical perspective as opposed to a position of conventional

celebration.

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Ethnomusicology Forum 257

Hip-hop Culture and Racial Configurations in Brazil

Hip-hop culture in Brazil is a form of politics and pleasure, which reveals the

solidarity (uni?o) and the conflicts within the making of race and working-class blackness. As is the case throughout Latin America, in Brazil race is strongly associated with blackness while ethnicity indexes indigenous cultures and more

recent immigrant communities.9 In S?o Paulo, a metropolitan area of over 17

million residents located in the south-eastern region of Brazil, blackness as a

significant cultural concept emerged during the middle of the 20th century as

massive waves of domestic migration from north to south occurred to provide a

labour force for the intensified industrialization project. Consequently, new forms of

urbanization and racialization took place as S?o Paulo emerged as an economic and

cultural centre of Brazil and South America as a whole. In addition, the increased

access to US, Caribbean, and West African social, cultural and artistic movements

beginning in the late 1960s greatly influenced the manner in which Afro-Brazilians,

particularly in S?o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, saw themselves and conceived of music

making. The concept of n?gritude has taken hold in a number of diverse ways in

urban Brazil over the past 30 years. The "fact of blackness", to resituate Fanons

famous phrase (1967, 109-40), is in its very utterance and conceptualization remarkable considering Brazil's assimilationist society (Fontaine 1980, 133). Hip-hop culture stands at the centre of how black working-class persons apply n?gritude as

individual attitude, collective philosophy, diasporic imagination and political

strategy. The "making of race" in hip-hop culture involves becoming consciente (conscious)

and enjoying togetherness. While in the US scholars and rappers alike have

argued that hip-hop's rearticulation of the "ghetto" is a central and essential

factor in the identity formation of "nigga" (Kelley 1994; McLaren 2000; Dyson

1993; Ice-T 1991; Spice-1 1993), in Brazil the centrality of periferia has influenced the

currency of preto, negro (both meaning "black") and more recently, mano

("brother") as alternatives to traditional notions of blackness in Brazil. Part

of the "making of periferia" involved a "blackening" of S?o Paulo during the

mid-20th century as millions of domestic immigrants flocked to S?o Paulo

from the north-east. In particular, the second and third generations began to blacken the S?o Paulo periferias culturally and aesthetically through

consumption and performance. Urban Brazilians refer to this as estilo black (black

style).10 One test to gauge the relative scope of race in hip-hop culture is to track

how participants deploy race to signify more general situations of place and

condition.11 And, while significant groups within US hip-hop have succeeded

in making such articulations through the term "nigga", the expansion of race

within Brazilian hip-hop culture is best depicted as a series of ebbs and flows.

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258 D. Pardue

Figure 1 Remnants of slave quarters on a fazenda (plantation). S?o Carlos, S?o Paulo

State. Photo by Derek Pardue, April 2002.

Putting Mano to Music

The word mano (brother) is a ubiquitous term among hip-hoppers. It is the essence

of hip-hop collectivity, a delicate and often misunderstood process of recuperating

marginality into positivity. Mano as a concept works to transform the exclusion

indexed in the above markers ("senzala" and "C. S. Mateus") into a sense of inclusion

and distinction. As a technique of thematic foreshadowing, I introduce my argument

concerning n?gritude and music-making by historicizing one of the basic keywords of

hip-hop culture in S?o Paulo.

The historicity (a collective sense or representation of history) of mano begins with

Afro-Brazilian political activist Solano Trindade (1908-1974). My inquiry into mano

emerged from a coincidental meeting with Nino Brown, a long-time fieldwork

consultant and highly respected figure within both the soul/funk and hip-hop movements in the S?o Paulo metropolitan area, at a neighbourhood hip-hop event in

the S?o Paulo industrial suburb of Diadema in July of 1999. On that day Nino was

wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Solano Trindade on the front. He confessed that he

knew little about Trindade other than a couple of his short poems and complained about the difficulties in gaining access to his literature. Nino quickly changed the topic to Eldridge Cleaver, since he had recently finished reading a translation of

Soul on Ice.

Years before there were soul or funk movements in Brazil and decades before the

concept of hip-hop proliferated through the periferias of S?o Paulo and Brasilia,

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Ethnomusicology Forum 259

Figure 2 Ubiquitous street sign pointing towards the East Side neighbourhood (C)idade (S)?o Mateus. Photo from De Menos Crime album, 1998.

Solano Trindade talked of mano as an achievement marked by difficult and tense

negotiation. For Trindade, the Renaissance black activist from the north-eastern state

of Pernambuco, whose texts cut into the eyes and ears of his audiences through a

caustic language of reflection and critique, to circulate mano requires a labour of

forging commonality and not simply assuming it.

What have you done brother (mano) to talk so much like that?

I planted sugarcane in the Northeast

And you brother, what have you done?

I planted cotton in the southern fields

For the blue-blooded men

Who paid for my labour

With whippings and lashings That's enough, brother,

So that I don't cry, and you Ana

Tell me your life story In the senzala in the candomhl? spaces (terreiro)… .12

Whoa black man!

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260 D. Pardue

Who was it who said

That we are not people?

Who was this demented soul,

who has eyes and doesn't see.

(Trindade, from "Conversa" 1961, 40-1)

The tone of Trindade appears 40 years later in the voice of pioneering hip-hopper Tha?de. Solano Trindade remains virtually unknown in the hip-hop community.

Apparently, only those hip-hoppers who move in activist, scholarly or literary circles

are aware of Trindade's importance. Here I assert a dialogue between Trindade and

Tha?de, two leading figures of rhetoric and racialization in popular culture.

For me it's not enough to have a dominant [skin] color

No, no there's no way to escape what we are

Either you accept it or you're an eternal slave

Inside the bus, I'm gonna tell you one time

I confess I've had to count to three many a time to not go crazy

A black girl (pretinha ) says to her friend: Eeeee! Date a black guy (preto) never, not

even as a joke…

I'm right in what I say

My intention to offend you

Step off! I'm too black for you (Tha?de e DJ Hum, from "Sou negro D+ Pra Voce", 2001)

Moments of Blackness in Hip-Hop: The "Ebbs and Flows" of N?gritude

In this section I delineate four periods of rap music with respect to n?gritude. These

moments refer to historical periods of discursive trends within rap music. Of course,

there is significant overlap and there are exceptions within each n?gritude period.

Through an informal periodization I show that n?gritude is dynamic in its

formulation and I provide a more specific tracking of the force of the "racial

democracy" ideology. The critical voices of rapper Tha?de and poet Trindade are rare

and fall in and out of favour among hip-hoppers.

My analysis of the first two periods is based exclusively on documents (lyrics and

recordings) and consultants' memories. For the final two periods I offer a perspective informed by personal experience in addition to consultants' remarks, and documents.

In moments 3 and 4 I fold in more detailed explanation of the relationship between

n?gritude and periferia.

Becoming "Informed": Early Efforts at Rap and N?gritude (Moment 1)

Today hip-hop in Brazil is a form of mass culture with thousands of practitioners and

millions of consumers.13 Hip-hop culture arrived in urban Brazil in the early 1980s.

In particular, S?o Paulo and Brasilia were the early centres of Brazilian hip-hop. As

mentioned above, since the late 1960s diasporic cultural channels widened and

intensified as a result of development in informational technology, especially with

regard to media sources. These included cassettes, vinyl, magazines and Hollywood

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Ethnomusicology Forum 261

movies. By 1990 Brazilian television had established MTV Brasil and by 1998 internet

access had reached a level of functionality with regard to popular culture

dissemination and consumption.

Consequently, urban Afro-Brazilians reckoned hip-hop culture as a contemporary link in the new Brazilian category of estilo and cultura black (black style and culture).

While the first local, commercial recording of rap music in Brazil occurred in 1984

(Black Juniors, CBS), it was not until 1987 and 1988 that rappers and DJs joined forces with graffiti artists and B-boys to create a hip-hop "movement" with socially oriented objectives. Rappers in Brazil14 were known as tagarelas (babblers, yappers) in the early days, for they elaborated on the basic points of identification

– the arrival

of Brazilian hip-hop as well as "who you are and the place to be".

In addition, the years of 1987 and 1988 were important in national history: 1988

marked the centennial celebration of the abolition of slavery. A great deal of

literature, scholarly and popular, was published and the federal government and state

agencies subsidized conferences, symposiums, cultural events and other public events

to take account, at least rhetorically, of o negro no Brasil (the black man in Brazil).

Hip-hoppers began to establish a working infrastructure of performance venues

and commercial production. Just as a decade earlier, when periferia nightclub

managers hosted weekend parties featuring local funk and soul performance groups and dance troupes, a similar circuit emerged in the late 1980s with regard to hip-hop culture. Club managers employed a common strategy of sponsoring contests, which

ultimately resulted in a series of vinyl compilation recordings. The combination of hip-hop "attitude" and general style during this period of

national remembering of abolition inspired some rappers to make their own inquiries into hip-hop as a form of n?gritude. Yet, hip-hop in Brazil has always upheld an ideal

of uni?o (unity) and most early hip-hoppers, as did most Brazilians, interpreted the

centennial discussions as productive with regard to African heritage. The issues of

racism or a race-first perspective on identity were overlooked in favour of "racial

democracy".

Rapper Tha?de began as a B-boy in the mid-1980s and later joined Humberto, his

B-boy partner turned DJ Hum, as one of the pioneering hip-hop groups in Brazil.

While Tha?de grew up in Cambuci and Vila Mission?rio, periferia neighbourhoods on the south side of S?o Paulo and DJ Hum came from a more middle-class

neighbourhood of Mooca, the two came together as consistent B-boy performers in

the downtown public space outside S?o Bento subway station.

In particular, Tha?de has consistently discussed Africanity as a constitutive part of

hip-hop culture. In the excerpt below Tha?de includes deities from the Afro-Brazilian

religion candombl? and refers to his own strength in the candombl? terminology of

having a "closed body". It is important to note, however, the change in Thaide's tone

as the years progressed. In the early years Tha?de and DJ Hum were more conciliatory and tended to emphasize community-building and syncretism over direct critique as

represented in "Negro D + pra voce" above.

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262 D. Pardue

For their part, C?digo 13, a group included on the first major rap compilation

(1988) along with Tha?de e DJ Hum, and the Neps, a pioneering rap group from S?o

Bernardo do Campo, demonstrate a more conventional perspective on hip-hop as a

culture that includes the common knowledge of "racial democracy" as integral to

periferia camaraderie. The lyrical excerpts from C?digo 13 and the Neps reveal that

most rappers configured race in urban Brazil as essentially about mixture (mistura). The legacy of "racial democracy" is reinforced here as rappers reduce n?gritude to fate

and victim status. N?gritude thus loses any sort of traction as a self-sufficient

discourse; it presumably exists as a temporary problem that miscegena?ao ("racial

mixture") ultimately will remedy. With regard to sound production, the

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