The Color of Sound

Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil

John Burdick

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814709245
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. In this highly original account, anthropologist John Burdick explores the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene. By immersing himself for nearly a year in the vibrant worlds of black gospel, gospel rap, and gospel samba, Burdick pushes our understanding of racial identity and the social effects of music in new directions. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, Burdick shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. This deeply detailed, engaging portrait challenges much of what we thought we knew about Brazil’s Protestants,provoking us to think in new ways about their role in their country’s struggle to combat racism.

1

We Are the Modern Levites

Three Gospel Music Scenes

In order for us to begin our journey toward the deep, buried ethnoracial meanings of three scenes of gospel music, we need to begin slowly and gently, by witnessing them from the outside. In later chapters, we will encounter these scenes from the inside out; but for now, let us encounter them as shapes seen from an external vantage point—as people clustering together on- and off-stage, singing and playing their hearts out for all the world to see and hear. For now, let us be spectators and watch how these scenes came into being and how their artists look and sound when they perform. At the end of the chapter, we will take our first tentative step inside their world and begin to touch the deeper significance of what they do and who they are.

Gospel Rap in São Paulo
A Brief History of Gospel Rap in São Paulo

Paulista rap (i.e., rap from São Paulo) has lived through four main periods, each distinguished by a different lyrical theme. From 1983 to 1987, paulista rap was primarily ludic and recreational, with no political agenda. From 1988 to 1994, it became heavily politicized, with negritude strongly emphasized. From 1995 to 2000, these themes became less central, the theme of periferia took center stage, and gospel rap became a major tendency on the scene. Since 2000, paulista rap has grown more diverse, with many new styles and no clear thematic core, while the growth of gospel rap has continued unabated, influencing the lyrics of everyone else.

In the late 1960s, when Friday afternoon arrived, young men armed with vinyl records, a turntable, a pair of speakers, and an extension cord would assemble makeshift sound systems on streets across São Paulo’s vast working-class neighborhoods. These were the original equipes de som—sound teams. By the start of the 1970s, teams such as Chic Show (Macedo 2003, 12) and Black Mad were organizing bigger and better parties, playing recorded soul and Motown, US funk, and, increasingly, Brazilian singers such as Tim Maia, Jorge Ben, Toni Tornado, and Cassiano (Macedo 2003, 10; Assef 2003). The parties became a movement under the military regime’s very nose, a movement whose energy came not from a political impulse but from a black attitude expressed in posture, dress, gesture, and taste (Alberto 2009). Dancegoers let their hair grow into black power Afros; idolized Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes; wore bell-bottoms, V-necked shirts, and platform shoes; and repeated James Brown’s motto “say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud” and Jorge Ben’s “negro é lindo.” In the late 1970s, the parties settled into clubs and became paying affairs. By the end of the decade, the main distinction was between bailes soul (soul dances) for younger people and bailes nostalgia (nostalgia dances) for an older crowd. The former, organized by Chic Show, took over the Palmeiras sport club; the latter found homes in Clube Homs and Casa de Portugal (Felix 2000). Indoor dances required a certain polish. “Everyone had to dress up,” recalled Dexter, now a major Christian rap artist. “We all had to put on our best clothes: fine shoes, silk shirts with designer labels, black hair cuts that were really finely cut and expensive.”

Not surprisingly, this brand of polish was not for everyone. The first break-dance crews were made up of kids who could not get into the clubs. They were led by Nelson Triunfo, a poor Northeasterner, who migrated to São Paulo in 1976. Rebelling against the atmosphere of the clubs, he formed Black Soul Brothers in 1982 (Rocha, Domenich, and Casseano 2001) and set up shop near the Praça da República. In 1983, Triunfo won a nationally televised break-dance contest. Interest grew in 1984 with the arrival in Brazil of the US films Breakin’ and Beat Street and Triunfo’s contract with the country’s largest TV station to perform to the opening credits of the nationally televised soap opera Partido Alto. In 1985, São Paulo’s breakers moved to the São Bento subway station, which looked like settings from the US break-dance movies. The first serious Brazilian break-dance crews developed there, such as Street Warriors, Back Spin, Nação Zulu, and Crazy Crew. “We would stand around exchanging ideas,” recalled DJ Alpiste. “We would exchange tapes and vinyl records. We would talk about the new record that just came out.” Until then, Brazilians listened to markedly unpolitical rap. Favorites included American artists MC Cooley C, Whodini, Kurtis Blow, Malcolm McLaren, and Kool Moe Dee; the Brazilians included Black Juniors, Pepeu, and Thaíde. These were all “party” rappers who rhymed not about politics but about physical attractiveness, partying, drinking, hanging out, and romance. “It was a style,” recounted DJ Alpiste. “We were fascinated by it. It had nothing to do with any kind of denunciation. It was not political. It was a continuation of the dance parties. It was a cool way to get people to dance. People would sing along with ‘Tagarela, tagarela!’”

Then, starting in 1986, as Vilmar put it, “there started to be more of a connection with the political side of things.” The end of military censorship in 1985, the acceleration of preparations for the centennial of the abolition of slavery, the growing influence of the black movement, and the mobilization around the writing of the new federal constitution thrust the issue of race squarely into the public eye. Influenced by these developments, a faction at the São Bento subway station began to focus explicitly on black identity and political commentary. Mano Brown, later to become the single most famous rapper in Brazil, recalled,

The ones who were at São Bento, because we saw that a lot of white kids had started to gravitate to us, and everyone who was there were starting to accept that, but I didn’t accept that. I started thinking that there needed to be more blacks in the movement, the movement was a black one, so there had to be blacks, and there weren’t that many. Ice Blue and I, we always had this vision: we have to have a place that is just for us, and Roosevelt plaza, because that was where the favela began, began there. We weren’t doing hip hop so much, there we were doing rap. We didn’t dance, we just rapped. (DJ TR 2007, 156)

A racially militant attitude flourished in Roosevelt Plaza. Freed from the dance-party scene and attending black movement meetings in the vicinity, the Roosevelt Plaza rappers formed the first Brazilian posse (a collection of rap groups) Sindicato Negro (Black Union) in late 1988.

Several forces solidified paulista rap’s emphasis on black politics during this period. First was the influence of Sindicato Negro. Members of the Sindicato traveled throughout the city to help found new posses. When, for example, youths in the neighborhood of Tiradentes wanted to start a posse in 1990, they invited a delegation from the Sindicato to come talk with them. From the delegation, they learned (according to one of the founders of Tiradentes’ posse) that “blacks should marry blacks and whites should marry whites.” Second was the arrival on the Brazilian market of the North American rap group Public Enemy, with its message of racial liberation, as well as of movies such as Boyz in the Hood, New Jack City, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. These influences made themselves felt in paulista rap lyrics. The early 1990s saw the release of Racionais MCs’ record Choose Your Path, on which Mano Brown’s gravelly voice declared,

Read, study, learn
Before hidden racist fools with atrophied brains
Finish you off
This is not a recent strategy of theirs
It’s been going on four hundred years
Maybe someday you’ll be proud
Choose your path
Be a true black, pure and educated
Or remain one more limited black

All my informants agreed that by the early 1990s, as Luo said, “things were really divided. You had blacks in the rap movement who would have nothing to do with whites. There were lots of groups—DMN, Posse Mente Zulu, and the Racionais,¹ who started to raise that banner. It was very strong.” By the early 1990s, “to be taken seriously you had to talk about Zumbi of Palmares,” said Preto Jay, now lead vocalist for the gospel rap group Sexto Sello (Sixth Seal). He described what he wrote lyrics about at that time: “Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, the history of blacks, trying to bring knowledge to my people.”

By the second half of the decade, however, paulista rap shifted from its focus on ethnoracial themes toward an interest in the periferia. The shift can be seen, for example, in changing group names. Atualidade Negra (Black Reality) had been formed in 1990; in 1995 it changed its name to Causa e efeito (Cause and Effect). “By then we were dealing with more than just black issues,” said Alex, MC of the group. “Because in ‘92 or ‘93, many groups had ‘negro’ in their title. Everyone was militant on the question of racial prejudice. But by ‘96, you saw names of groups that were different. People’s minds started opening up to the larger social question. We wanted to talk about all the poor who lived in the periphery, not just blacks.” By 1997, in Mano Brown’s own music, gone was race-first oratory; in fact, the words negro and preto were hardly present at all. Instead, virtually every track in Racionais MCs’ recording of that year defended the people of the periferia, whose color remained unmarked.²

A factor in the deracialization of Brazilian rap ideology was that by the mid-1990s, dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and São Paulo’s municipal government were recruiting rappers to assist in local projetos sociais (social projects), focusing on health, AIDS, hunger, recreation, sport, and marketable-skills building for poor youths.³ Another factor was that the posse had begun to outlive its usefulness. For roughly five years, from 1989 to 1994, paulista rappers’ world revolved around posses, collaborative associations between rap groups based in each of the four main zones of the city. On any given weekend, rap groups spent time away from their neighborhood homes, in order to rehearse and perform in places organized and sponsored by posses. But by the second half of the ‘90s, amateur rap groups were staying closer to home. NGOs and the government were offering rappers deals to perform in their own neighborhoods. In addition, as CD players became cheaper, rappers no longer depended on posses for good sound systems and recording equipment. These changes affected the content of rhymes. “In the posse,” Ton explained, “they told us to read things, the history of slavery, Malcolm X. But in my backyard, we didn’t read anything: there was no ‘cultural’ side to rap; we just rapped on what we saw. We didn’t want to rap about what they told us in posses; we wanted to say what we saw happening in our own neighborhood.”

By the late 1990s, then, as rappers came to focus their attention on their immediate environments, the theme of race, although still present, became less central than the class- and place-based theme of periferia. By the end of the decade, according to the anthropologist Derek Pardue, blackness had been “pushed aside within the general hip hop imagination” (2008, 113).⁴ It was in the latter half of the 1990s, too, that the first rap groups began to appear that were dedicated to spreading the message of Jesus Christ. The first rapper to do so was DJ Alpiste. A sound man by trade, he converted to evangelicalism in 1994 and went to work for the evangelical soul band Kadoshi in 1995. He wrote his first gospel rap that year—“Ser ou não ser”—which appeared on a Kadoshi album; he went on to make his first commercial record in 1997, which sold over thirty thousand copies. Between 1998 and 2005, Alpiste released a CD every two years and inspired dozens of other young Christian artists. In 1998, for example, a young man named Luciano formed a group named Apocalipse 16 and made a record which became one of the best-selling rap albums in the country. Luciano took on the name Pregador Luo (Preacher Luo) and became the most popular gospel rapper in Brazil.

By the start of the new millennium, the field of gospel rap was becoming crowded, with a rapidly growing number of artists making a name for themselves through CDs, concerts, and radio play (cf. Baker-Fletcher 2003). Gospel rappers were influenced not only by religion but by the secular subculture of hip hop. Indeed, evangelical rap had the same social base and circulated in the same social world as secular rap. The more successful gospel rap groups included Ao Cubo, Provérbios X, Rap Sensation, Cirurgia Moral, O Pregador, Profesor Pablo, Lito Ataiala, Tina, E-Beille, Alvos da Lei, Alibi, Resgatados do Inferno, Alternativa C, X-Barão, Juízo Final, Discípulos do Rei, Sexto Sello, Gênesis, and Relato Bíblico. A vibrant grass-roots movement of gospel rappers expanded, relying on outdoor festivals, churches, and contests. Sometimes a small amateur group would save some cash, get access to a recording studio, produce a CD, and put it into the hands of friends and family. After about 2003, some created CDs from their own computers, aided by new, easily downloadable sound-mixing programs. By 2004–2005, there were more than a hundred such amateur gospel rap groups in metropolitan São Paulo, including Profetas do Apocalipse, Território D, Faces da Verdade, Pretto, Herdeiros, Alerto Vermelho, Mano da Fé, Saqueadores, Profetas do Apocalipse, ZN/AP, Guerreiros do Senhor, Gueto em Cristo, Família Jesus Cristo, Caçadores de Almas, and Porte Verbal. There were so many gospel rap groups that they came to influence secular rap artists. The themes of Christ, God, and salvation began to appear in the 2000s more than ever before among self-professed secular rappers. Even Mano Brown was by 2005 incorporating the language of Christ into his lyrics. “I don’t think there is any question,” said Nego Chic, a well-known secular rapper, “that it is contagious. My lyrics have shifted. I would say, we are surrounded by that. With all the gospel rap, the rest of us have become ‘gospel rappers’ too.”

From gospel rappers’ point of view, rap played a key role in their process of religious conversion. Listen to Ton:

There are a lot of rappers out there who speak the name of the Lord. But talk is cheap—you have to take a close look at their conduct. Are they obedient to the Word? You know, you can rap about God and Jesus, but then these guys go backstage, and they are drinking whiskey and smoking and committing adultery.... And they are out there in front talking of God?! Well, there were many of us who saw that hypocrisy. And each one has his own story to tell. But I noticed it about ten years ago. One after another of us, we were converting to the Lord. And I was really worried at first because I thought, “My Lord, I love rap so much. Does this mean I will have to give it up?” And the Lord spoke to me and said, “No, Ton, use this art to spread my good news.” That is what he said. That was the Holy Spirit speaking to me. I even thought for years that I would have to wear a suit and tie out there as I rapped, but little by little I realized that God doesn’t care about that. So now you see a long list of these guys who had rapped as seculars, they converted, and then others in their group followed, or they went out on their own. So I think that is what happened, John—like me, lots of rappers just started converting, so we brought our faith into our rhymes.

Gospel rappers taking a stage by storm

Now these rappers see themselves as endowed with a divine mission. Listen to Nathan:

I see all this as God’s using us, absolutely. Because look, who is it that has the ear of today’s young people, the poor kid who lives in the favela? Is it the government? No. Is it the media? No. Is it these churches? No, young kids think churches are really square and boring. They say, “Why should I go there? That is not interesting.” They want to hear music. They want to move. They have energy. And God knows this, even if many of our pastors do not. So God has seen our work, and he is using us to spread the Word to these kids. I praise God for that. I see this as really the unfolding of a plan, that we are at the cutting-edge of a reaching out to a whole new generation. Without question. Every soul is precious. We go one by one. At the end of each show, I ask for those who have been touched by my words to raise their hand to Jesus, to come forth and stand up and come to the stage so we can pray over him. And God sees that we are converting many souls.

Gospel Rap in Performance

On a gusty Saturday afternoon, I travel by subway and bus from the center of São Paulo to Jardim São Jorge, a neighborhood of several thousand inhabitants nestled in the southern reaches of the urban periphery. I am going to attend a “Festival Rua Gospel,” a day-long street concert, organized by a local Assembly of God church, that promises to bring together gospel rappers from across the southern zone. São Jorge, one of hundreds of “Jardins” (gardens) in the periferia, is a neighborhood divisible into the larger, better-off buildings and homes closest to the store-lined asphalt road named Peixoto de Melo Filho, and the conjunto, the crazy-quilt of hundreds of red-clay and gray-cement homes built by their owners, set back from the main street. The main street is packed with people circulating among a pharmacy, a supermarket, a bar, a hardware supplier, a car repair shop, a toy store, and a bank, each adorned with its own vibrantly blue or yellow or red hand-painted façade. I turn into the conjunto, following directions given to me by Pretto, an amateur rapper who just produced his own do-it-yourself CD. There I am flanked by houses two and three stories high, rising above narrow alleyways, some plastered, some not, with dirty white cement columns and windows without panes, topped by satellite dishes, clotheslines, TV antennae, water reservoirs, and electrical lines. On t...