Mud and Chaos in Brazilian Music

Brazil's Mangue Beat musical movement shows us that the
dividing line between the public and the private is broken. In an
absolute way. In the conditions of poverty and misery of these
great urban peripheries in Brazil, where private life is absolutely
invaded by the public dimension, or rather by its absence.

Maria Rita Kehl

In order to look at the relation between public and private spaces in popular Brazilian music I chose the Mangue Beat movement, created by Chico Science and other young, poor musicians from the periphery of Recife.

Mangue Beat is a musical movement that is very contemporary, ideological and a little confused. Its appearance, in the nineties, is one of the cultural expressions that are produced from this no man's land that is the space between public and private in Brazil.

There has not yet been time for critical thinking concerning the entrance of these dwellers of the margins into the cultural industry, especially as far as musical creation is concerned.

We are talking, perhaps, about the third generation of the expansion of the cultural industry in Brazil. We had a first generation, the era of radio, and a second, the era of television, particularly from the seventies onward.

The third generation would thus be that of the nineties, marked by a drop in the cost of recording, that is the drop in the cost of technology both for listeners, the consumers of popular music, and for those who produce CDs and tapes, in little backyard studios.

This third generation, on the one hand, benefited from the much greater interpenetration of musical influences coming from other regions of Brazil, from other social classes and also from other countries—as was the case with the entry of American rap—reaching a young population, which without the drop in recording costs, would have been marginalized even in relation to its own mass culture, with the exception of that which is transmitted on television.

We know that what arrives via television is far from being the most interesting part of the culture produced in Brazil. It is curious that, having access to consumption and national and international musical production, this generation should maintain an attitude of reserve and criticism as far as television is concerned.

On the other hand, there exists now the possibility that these consumers from classes C & D, as the advertisers say (the lower classes) can produce creative responses originating from the diversity of musical expressions which reach them, and thus insert themselves into the mass culture. All of Brazil has come to be aware of groups, which, until now, even if they were creative, would have had at most a regional or local impact.

Music Role

Popular music, in Brazil, is a very strong and very present discursive product, perhaps the strongest in a country strongly marked by illiteracy. Popular music here assumed the function of producing meaning for life in society, for our differences, for the miseries and human riches of this country.

It is quite frequent in my clinic, when someone is trying to find a context for something that has happened in their private life, in their emotional life, for them to quote, not a philosopher, not a priest, but the verses of a well-known composer: "as Caetano says, as Chico says..."

They more often quote verses from MPB (Música Popular Brasileira—Brazilian Popular Music) than verses from other poets or literary authors. Music and cinema are constantly present in psychoanalytic offices. But music is more all-encompassing, has a greater reach; even somebody who never went to the cinema certainly has a radio and listens to music.

What is more, popular music had and has composers, principally from the generation of the seventies, a critical generation, who went to university, were from the middle class, were politicized—Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, artists who think about Brazil, as well as making music.

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi do not exactly represent critical thought; they would instead be the object of what has until today been the critical thought in MPB, an object that begins to manifest itself, to stop being an object in order to become a subject.

Moving from objects of criticism to subjects creating a language, the poor young men of the great cities of Brazil are beginning to produce a differentiated space for the expression of their experience.

Until recently the politicized composers of the middle class were concerned with poverty, exclusion, marginality, with the condition of the other, which was portrayed or denounced in their songs.

What we heard in Mangue Beat is the drumbeat, the sound of marginality itself. The sound of the other. What they produce is not exactly critical thought as far as they themselves are concerned, but rather a sort of inclusion through the word, the rhythm, and the very individual, quite aggressive beat, that is the strong mark of their presence in Brazil.

It is as if they were saying "listen, we are here on the scene". It is a not an analysis of the conditions in which they live, it is a way of including themselves in the scene.

Musical Community

Vinicius de Moraes, in his famous samba, the "Samba da Bênção," intermixes spoken passages between the sung passages. In the third and last of these passages, marked by the sweet and continuous lulling beat of the bossa nova, Vinicius de Moraes pays great homage to the black composers of samba.

In this homage he creates something like a community of composers, particularly of the composers of samba, the black composers, a community in which he wants to include himself, as the "blackest white in Brazil". We hear the voice of Vinicius de Moraes paying homage, as if he were with the same act naming this community, creating this community symbolically.

As Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho said so well, this was not a Brazilian community; it was much more a Carioca community that in the samba by Vinicius was projected into Brazil.

And Vinicius says: "Saravá (Hail)Cartola, Pixinguinha, Nelson Cavaquinho, Saravá Sinhô, Ismael Silva, Donga, Noel, (a white composer) Lupicínio" (a gaúcho, from the south). Vinicius and Baden Powell salute the black community of the Brazilian samba.

This makes me think of one of the raps of the Racionais MC's on the CD Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), in which Mano Brown does something similar to what Vinicius de Moraes did, just in reverse.

In Brown's salute to the community of rap, the accompaniment never is the light and ironic, somewhat "blue" beat of the bossa nova; it is a sort of continuous buzzing, an electronic moan, marked by a subtle and menacing punctuation, which produces a somewhat apprehensive feeling in the listener.

Mano Brown's voice is low in both senses of the word; it has a saddened note, without shine. His long list of names does not create a community of authors, of consecrated poets; they are not names of people that he is including in this community; he is enumerating the neighborhoods of the peripheries of the cities of Brazil.

This is also not a happy salute, he is not greeting them as in the case of the happy "Saravá!" in which Vinicius de Moraes seems to be saying: "you are great composers, you are the best, and I include myself among you".

The meaning is different, it is that of a lament for the excluded. Brown begins by stringing together names of neighborhoods from the interminable periphery of São Paulo:

"Hello Jardim Japão, Jardim Hebron, Jardim Ângela, Capão Redondo, Cidade de Deus, Cidade Ademar, Peri Peri, Brasilândia, Campo Limpo, Itaquera, Cohab 1, Cohab 2... ".

Then he leaves São Paulo for other cities: "Tabatinga, Boréu, Camaragibe, Candiau..." this takes about three minutes without stopping, in which he is simply naming, one after another, the peripheries, and finally concluding with "Jorge da Capadócia", the invocation of the saint who seals the body of the poet and protects him from all evil.

Private and Public

The people of Mangue Beat come from one of these peripheries, from the neighborhood of Rio Doce in Recife. Their art shows us that the dividing line between the public and the private is broken, in an absolute way, in the conditions of poverty and misery of these great urban peripheries in Brazil, where private life is absolutely invaded by the public dimension, or rather by its absence.

If there no windows marking the transition between the house and the street in the neighborhood of Rio Doce, it is not because the windows are closed to the street, it is because the street is already inside the house. There is no true privacy, nothing that protects the subject who lives in a shack in the periphery from being absolutely invaded by the street.

The relation of one inside the house with the street is not one of contemplation. The street invades everything with its violence, filth, its indignity. The public invades the private not by its excess, but by its lack; privacy is unprotected due to the irresponsibility of the State in relation to the public space in the poor neighborhoods of the great cities of Brazil.

It is not a matter of the politicization of daily life. One does not find in the lyrics of the songs a mention of public life in the sense of a politically articulated project uniting all the community in the common space of the street or the square.

On the contrary. It is the disregard by this republic for public space, the fact that nothing guarantees to the individual that the government will assume its public responsibility for some essential aspects of life, those same ones that all politicians mention in their speeches: transportation, health, education, basic sanitation, security.

This leaves the citizen absolutely exposed to the vicissitudes of the public space. Each day he must resolve, by himself, the problems of the infrastructure of life that should be the responsibility of the government.

In this sense, in the favelas and in the mangue, the concept of privacy does not even exist as a value, since this is a bourgeois cultural value, nor as a possibility, since private life is invaded by questions that ought to be within the purview of the government.

The more the government abandons the population, the more the private dimension of the life of the wretched disappears. That is to day, public life affects the most intimate corners of what ought to be private for the subject.

A more well-known example for us in Brazil, which for decades has been a theme of music from the Northeast, is the effect of the punishing drought on individual lives. As Luís Gonzaga sings in "Retorno da Asa Branca":

"...And if the harvest doesn't spoil my plans
Mr. Vicar,
I am going to marry by the end of the year."

"... E se a safra não atrapalhar meus planos,
quê que há, ó seu vigário,
vou casar no fim do ano".

The harvest depends on the drought, the singer can make his plans for living with his beloved if the drought doesn't get in the way, because if it does there will be no wedding.

There is no project for individual, private life in the face of the punishing drought, and we know that this is not a natural disaster—it is a calamity provoked by decades of bad public administration in the states of the Northeast.

Popular Culture Lives

To change our point of view a little, Chico Science and the Mangue Beat groups which survived his death also represent a rather recent phenomenon in Brazilian musical production, which is the fact that the cultural industry and the mass culture, instead of having destroyed peripheral popular cultures, on the contrary, made possible an unexpected inclusion of marginal expressions.

I say this because, in the seventies, when I was working as a journalist in the area of culture for several independent newspapers, our great worry was that all the regional, unique, truly popular manifestations, which were still resisting massification, were doomed to disappear, crushed by pop, and especially by American pop, through the invasion of foreign mass culture into Brazil.

Just that the opposite happened. Or rather, not exactly the opposite, because today there is a massification, a very serious descent to the lowest common denominator in the production of culture for the masses in Brazil and around the world.

But as the cultural industry itself has to nourish itself with novelties, a space for different music, which we had not foreseen, was opening up in the musical market.

Today the art produced by small groups, groups which represent a very individual regional reality, can gain access to the market rather easily. The diversification of Brazilian popular music is much greater than it would have been in the seventies, when we imagined that it would be extinguished entirely.

One example of this is the Carnaval in Bahia. It is true that most of the space in the Carnaval, at least in the media, is occupied by the trios elétricos. The TV networks fight over the rights to broadcast to the whole of Brazil a party with thousands of people from São Paulo, Minas, and Curitiba dancing the porno foolishness which is axé music, inhaling the smoke from the trucks and protected from the rest of the multitude by the strength of the arms of poor blacks from Salvador who are holding the ropes, like galley slaves, so they can earn five or ten reais a day. Even Carlinhos Brown commented on the direction of axé music, the poetic quality of which is dropping every year.

But at the same time, in the Carnaval in Bahia, there are appearing, or reappearing new Afro groups, based on the worship tradition of less well-known orixás, remembering the celebrations of slaves coming from other African nations, revitalizing the expression of cultures that were disappearing.

The singular makes space for itself within the sameness of the mass culture.

In this sense the Northeast is very rich. The traditions of embolada, of the desafios (challenges) of the players of the viola, of cordel poetry, of the rhythms of coco, ciranda, of maracatu, are very strong, and carry on a free dialog with the influences of international pop, producing an absolutely new sonority.

This liberty to incorporate and modify foreign influences is perhaps a distinguishing characteristic of northeastern popular culture, which since the sixteenth and seventeenth century assimilated elements of the Portuguese cancioneiro, producing a free translation of the imagery of the culture of the colonizing elite for the reality of life in the sertão.

There a dialogue in reverse was taking place, in which the use of some signifiers, of some strong images, taken out of their original context, caused them to acquire meanings completely different from the originals, thus creating a renovation of popular tradition.

Black Roots

These new composers and groups from the northeast affirm the tradition of the verses of the embolada, of the rhythms of maracatu, with an irony that marks the distance between the origin which was lost and the musicality of the black traditions that these young people still carry in their blood.

Maracatu is the rhythm that is most present in the music of Nação Zumbi, but it has a religious, Afro-Brazilian origin, that is not preserved in Mangue Beat. Maracatu was the name of a festival celebrated in Pernambuco by groups of slaves called "nations," that would process from the churches of the Rosary, the churches reserved for blacks, churches for slaves prohibited from entering in the others, where the whites were praying.

At the doors of their churches the blacks would play drums and do a dance simulating scenes from the Portuguese court. There still exist some "nations" of maracatu in Recife: the Leão Coroado (Crowned Lion), the Pavão Dourado (Gilded Peacock), the Elefante (Elephant)—and now, Nação Zumbi.

In the maracatus, the slaves were enacting a nobility which was not that of the African nations, but of the court of their masters. But in this court, in addition to the figures of the king, the queen, the princes, there are also drummers, caboclos and baianas, as well as the calunga, a white cloth doll carried by the "dama do paço" (lady of the palace).

This doll bore the name of the god Calunga, an entity representing the sea for Angolans—the same sea that separated enslaved blacks from the African lands.

The maracatu of Chico Science, of Nação Zumbi, is a warrior maracatu, which eliminates the old dimension of the imagery of the court. The nobility of Nação Zumbi comes from the mud, it has the bad smell of the mangue (marsh), of the rotten side of the big city. The tradition is revived ironically.

The other appropriation by Chico Science in his poetry was from the tradition of the cordel. It is very frequent in all cordel poetry for the voice of the poet to outline an I that is its subjective expression but does not affirm itself as individuality.

An I different from the expression of a private intimacy, such as the bourgeois culture recognizes, and which is expressed, for example, in the love songs of Chico Buarque, or in the subjective expansions of the verses of Caetano. It is not the I of a poet speaking about his particular sensibility, but an I that is diluted in the things around it.

Let's listen to the verses of "Mateus Enter", a song by Chico Science the name of which is completely enigmatic for me; I don't know what "Mateus Enter" is. "Enter" refers to the "enter" key of the computer.

The force of this music is absolutely rhythmic, warlike, supporting the entry of this I that has nothing to do with the narcissistic, bourgeois, introspective I of our university tradition.

"Eu vim com a Nação Zumbi
ao seu ouvido falar,
quero ver a poeira subir e muita fumaça no ar
cheguei com o meu universo
e aterrisso no seu pensamento
trago as luzes dos postes nos olhos
rios e pontes no coração
Pernambuco embaixo dos pés
e minha mente na imensidão".

"I came with Zumbi Nation
to talk to your ear,
I want to see the dust rise and lots of smoke in the air
I came with my universe
And I land in your thinking
I carry the lights of the posts in my eyes
Rivers and bridge in my heart
Pernambuco beneath my feet
And my mind in the immensity".

In this music, it is important to note, the poet does not come by himself, he comes with his nation, as the blocos of Maracatu reincarnate the African nations which succumbed to slavery.

He arrives with his universe, which is the universe of the city: the lights of the posts, the rivers, and the bridges form part of this public body, whose feet carry Pernambuco where they go.

The "mind in the immensity" is what humanizes this I, and confers on it a dimension which extrapolates this dimension of an object among other objects.

Living Marsh

I want to pick up on this image of the "mind in the immensity" to recall that Chico Science, when he formed Nação Zumbi, issued the "Manifesto Mangue Beat" (Mangue Beat Manifesto), the symbol of which was a parabolic antenna stuck in the mud. The mud of the marsh.

The mangue or marsh has a very important metaphorical meaning for this group, as a place throbbing with life, with great biodiversity, a place that resists in a certain way urban devastation, but that is always threatened by urbanization

The mangue also represents an area of exchange, between the salt water of the sea and the fresh water of the rivers, between the sea and the earth. In this manifesto entitled "Caranguejos com cérebros" (Crabs with brains), the members of Nação Zumbi say that they are beings from the mangue who think, who have brains.

And that they are open to interchange, like a network of tubes and communicating voices that the parabolic antenna is able to capture. In this sense, you see that there is not exactly an affirmation of a national, Brazilian identity. What exists is a poetics that makes a bridge between the more regional, the neighborhood, the mangue, the favela, and the global.

The national is barely present. The sense of brasilidade, of Brazil as an imaginary unit which lends to support to identities, is lost. He is a regional subject, whose mind is projected toward the immensity, projected toward the global.

Chico Science was a poor boy from the neighborhood of Rio Doce, in Recife. He was a crabber, someone who went to bailes funk (funk dances), who later worked in a computer company, where we can suppose that the idea of a subject who exists in a "net" would have begun to take shape.

A net does not necessarily have a central reference. A net is a crossing of many references. The manifesto "Caranguejos com cérebro" ("Crabs with brains") proposes to recycle and rescue traditional rhythms of the region with the addition of pop elements, without making a hierarchy of values.

Giving value to traditional rhythms does not have, in this case, the meaning that it had for the generation that came of age during the period of the military dictatorship, which sought in popular traditions some expression that might signify its difference in as far as its relation to the support of the Brazilian middle class for the dictatorship.

Here we do not have the idea of resistance, but the acceptance of one's origin as fate: if he is from Pernambuco, if he comes from this culture, it is impossible to ignore the influence of the maracatu, the embolada, the cordel. He has no desire to free himself from this, not because he is resisting other influences, but because the world to which he belongs imposes itself on him.

Continuing with this brief biography of Chico Science, it is important to emphasize that Nação Zumbi was formed due to the contact that he and other young men from Rio Doce had with the work of a sort of NGO, a community center for popular education in the periphery of Recife called Daruê Malungo.

Alternative Spaces

There, in 1991, a bloco afro was formed called "Lamento Negro" (Black Lament) that led to Nação Zumbi. This type of social interaction created by the work of various NGOs is also a recent phenomenon in Brazil.

In the face of the absence of that which the government ought to offer in the way of leisure centers, places to meet, for education, exchange of information, etc. these small projects by non-governmental organizations gain importance among the needy populations.

The importance of these alternative spaces is enormous. It can be seen that where there is this type of community work, new talent, a bloco, a band, a new artist appears.

Which proves that the vanishing of popular manifestations currently has a lot to do with the lack of spaces in which they can occur. Where a place is created, an artistic expression arises which may be weak or strong, but which is always necessary.

I am going to take a look at some excerpts from the manifesto of Mangue Beat, which is the voice of this subject who is crisscrossed by the world and at the same time very close and very far from the rest of the world.

"Emergency!
A quick shock, or Recife will die of a heart attack".

The concern here is with Recife, it is with the city, not the country.

"You don't need to be a doctor to know that the simplest way of stopping someone's heart is to obstruct his veins. The quickest way to give a city like Recife a heart attack, and to empty its soul, is to kill its rivers and fill in its estuaries. What can be done so as to not sink in the chronic depression that paralyzes its citizens? How can it regain its spirit, be delobotomized, recharge its batteries?"

From the outset the reader does not know what Chico Science is referring to, whether it is the rivers that are dying, the mangue that is dying or the intelligence that is dying. All it takes is injecting a little energy from the mud and stimulating what there is left of fertility in Recife's veins.

"In the middle of 1991 a center for research and production of pop ideas began to be generated and articulated in various points in the city. The objective is to engender a circuit of energy, capable of connecting the good vibrations of the mangues with the world circulatory network".

Mangue Folks

The circuit that is created goes from the mangue to the world. A circulation of pop concepts. Here the factory of concepts is already pop culture. There is no school here. They symbolic image is a parabolic antenna stuck in the mud.

Here is the cultural panorama captured by the mangue's antenna:

"The mangue-boys and mangue-girls are individuals interested in: comics, interactive TV, anti-psychiatry, Bezerra da Silva, hip-hop, midiotia, artismo, street music, John Coltrane, chance, non-virtual sex, ethnic conflicts and all the advances of chemistry applied in the area of alteration and expansion of consciousness".

The "advances of chemistry" are a rather explicit reference to drugs capable of "altering and expanding consciousness". As for the rest, the enumeration of the elements with which the mangue-boys and mangue-girls identify reminds one of the lyrics of a song from the tropicália era.

But I don't know if we can consider them as the sons/grandsons of tropicália, or as a symptomatic expression of the Brazil which tropicália was describing in the sixties.

This enumeration, which seems tropicalist, does not produce the effect of a saturation, of the critical nonsense typical of the tropicalist esthetic. It is creating a field of identification for the poor young men and women of his generation.

Perhaps we need to know the work of Nação Zumbi. There is a portion of a song by Chico Science called "Banditismo por uma questão de classe" (Banditry for reason of class), from the CD Da lama ao caos (From the mud to chaos), in which he repeats the refrain:

"Banditry for pure evil
Banditry by necessity.
Banditry for pure evil
Banditry for reason of class".

In this case, "reason of class" has a double meaning. Banditry can be a matter of class or a matter of style. It is worth listening to the "opening speech" of this song, which is called "Monólogo ao pé do ouvido" (Monologue in a Whispering Tone). It is a rather confusing speech:

"Modernizar o passado é uma revolução musical
Cadê as notas que estavam aqui ?
Eu não preciso delas
Basta deixar tudo soando bem aos ouvidos.
O medo dá origem ao mal
O homem coletivo
Sente a necessidade de lutar
O orgulho, a arrogância, a glória
Enchem a imaginação de domínio
São demônios os que destroem o poder
bravio da humanidade.
Viva Zapata! Viva Sandino!
Antônio Conselheiro, todos os Panteras Negras
Lampião, sua imagem e semelhança.
Eu tenho certeza: também eles cantaram um dia".

"Modernizing the past is a musical revolution
Where are the notes that used to be here?
I don't need them
Everything just has to sound good.
Fear leads to evil
The collective man
Feels the necessity of fighting
Pride, arrogance, glory
Fill the imagination with domination
They are demons, those who destroy the savage power of
Humanity.
Long live Zapata! Long live Sandino!
Antônio Conselheiro, all the Black Panthers
Lampião, his image and resemblance.
I am certain that they also sang one day".

Chico Science does not need the "notes that used to be here", the notes of the past, to make his musical revolution. Without them, he can still make everything sound good.

But his "revolution" does not break with all of the past; he recognizes a dimension that surpasses the individual, speaks in the name of a "collective man" whose ancestry is based on a rather fantastic sort of ideological miscegenation.

He names his antecedents, who range from the revolutionaries Zapata and Sandino, to the messianic monarchist Antônio Conselheiro, from the Black Panthers to Lampião, who perhaps might have put various humble ancestors of Chico Science himself to the sword.

What these men have in common is their marginal condition in relation to power, even though some were victorious in their struggle. They are together in the same manifesto because, as the music says later,

"Acontece hoje, acontecia no sertão
quando um bando de macaco perseguia Lampião.
E o que ele falava outros ainda falam
`eu carrego comigo coragem, dinheiro e bala'"

"It happens today, it happened in the sertão
when a bunch of monkeys chased Lampião.
And what he said, others still say
`I carry with me courage, money, and bullets'".

"Courage, money, and bullet" are what link the imagination of Chico Science to the memory of his idols.

Savage Revolution

It is not easy to decide if he is quoting the men full of "pride, arrogance and glory" who destroyed the savage power of humanity, or if he is naming those who represent the savage power of humanity. The absence of irony here draws the attention.

This discourse is read with a certain solemnity, like a manifesto that is calling for some confused type of revolution, or at least for resistance in the name of these figures who perhaps represent the "savage power of humanity".

Another song which is important as a illustration of my reflection concerning the absence of a representation of private life in this imaginarium is "Manguetown", which is on the second CD from Nação Zumbi called Afrociberdelia:

"Estou enfiado na lama
é um bairro sujo
onde os urubus têm casa
e eu não tenho asas
mas estou aqui em minha casa
onde os urubus têm asas
vou pintando, segurando as paredes do mangue do meu quintal
manguetown
andando por entre os becos
andando em coletivos
ninguém foge ao cheiro sujo
da lama da manguetown
andando por entre becos
andando em coletivos
ninguém foge ao cheiro sujo
da lama da manguetown
andando por entre becos
andando em coletivos
ninguem foge à vida suja dos dias da manguetown
esta noite sairei
vou beber com meus amigos
e com as asas que os urubus me deram ao dia
eu voarei por toda a periferia
vou sonhando com a mulher
que talvez eu possa encontrar
ela também vai andar
na lama do meu quintal
manguetown

"I am stuck in the mud
it is a filthy neighborhood
where the vultures live
and I don't have wings
but I am at home here
where the vultures have wings
I am painting, holding up the walls of the mangue of my backyard
Manguetown
Walking down the alleys
Going in vans
No one flees the filthy smell
Of the mud of manguetown
Tonight I will go out
I will drink with my friends
And with the wings that the vultures gave us one day
I will fly through all the periphery
Dreaming of the woman
That perhaps I might find
She will also walk
In the mud of my backyard
Manguetown"

Once again, note that the beat is aggressive and the musical construction is not melodic. It is not yet a spoken poem, as in the case of rap, but the musicality is reduced to two or three minimal, contained, that only open up a little in the refrain.

To begin with, where is this guy speaking from? He talks to us from the mud, the mangue, the chaos, and not from the privacy of his room or his window to the world:

"Estou enfiado na lama
é um bairro sujo
onde os urubus tem casa
e eu não tenho asas"

"I am stuck in the mud
it is a filthy neighborhood
where the vultures live
and I don't have wings"

That is to say: the vultures have somewhere to live, they have the house that the poet doesn't, and the poet does not have the wings that the vultures do.

"Mas estou aqui em minha casa
onde os urubus têm asas
vou pintando, segurando as paredes do mangue do meu quintal"

Walls that exist because he sustains them, "painting, holding up" the walls of the mangue which is no different than his backyard. The entry of the refrain follows, which projects the subject into the collective space of the city:

"Andando por entre os becos
andando em coletivos
ninguém foge ao cheiro sujo
da lama da manguetown..."

"Walking down the alleys
Going in vans
No one flees the filthy smell
Of the mud of manguetown"

This refrain is repeated over and over again. The mud of manguetown gets into everything, and no one can escape its filthy smell.

From here on, another value will appear in the poem. The question of sociability, which is revealed as much in rap as in the Mangue Beat movement, will be affirmed in the form of philia, of friendship.

The predominant idea here is that the space that the singer considers to be his is not the isolation of the home, but rather the point where he meets his friends; this is an idea that is very present in this type of music, in the production of these young groups from the peripheries. Thus the second part of the song says:

"Essa noite sairei,
vou beber com os meus amigos
e com as asas que os urubus nos deram um dia ..."

"Tonight I will go out
I will drink with my friends
And with the wings that the vultures gave us one day..."

Observe that the poet begins by saying that "I don't have wings", "the vultures have wings and I don't have wings". But when he goes out to drink with friends he acquires the "wings that the vultures gave us one day."

You may interpret them as wings of imagination, of daring, of happiness, whatever they may be, he does not name them. The following metaphor is sweeping as well. With the wings that the vultures gave him and his friends one day....

"Eu voarei por toda a periferia
vou sonhando com a mulher
que talvez eu possa encontrar"

I will fly through all the periphery
Dreaming of the woman
That perhaps I might find"

Here we think—ah, here is a cliché, a dream typical of the poetics that we have been analyzing up until now, of the middle class, of private life, of intimacy, etc. Here is the poet of the mangue, like anyone else, "Dreaming of the woman / That perhaps I might find". But how does he imagine this meeting?

"Ela também vai andar
na lama do meu quintal
manguetown"

"She will also walk
In the mud of my backyard
manguetown"

And here the refrain comes in:

"Fui no mangue catar lixo
pegar caranguejo, conversar com urubu"

"I went to the mangue to pick through trash,
to catch crabs, to talk with the vulture"

If he is going to find a woman, she is not at all like the idealized muses of the popular imagination; she will be stuck in the mud with him, talking with the vultures together with him, that is to say, it is not a matter of "our love and a cabin", but of conversing with vultures. And to pick through trash.

No Lyricism Here

This was the song "Manguetown". It is not easy to go far in reflecting on it because the register of this song is not reflective, it limits itself to presenting, not the intimacy of the poetic voice, but the circumstances of the existence of the subject.

This authorial I is an I invaded by the city, and every time that this image gains a poetic force, this poetic force has to do with the urban element, not with any element of intimacy, of sensitivity, which in the lyrics of traditional MPB is identified with the I of an individual psychology.

This expanding subject which is manifested in the verses of Chico Science and other Mangue Beat, which is manifested in the extremely long lyrics of rap from São Paulo and Rio does not resemble the I of bourgeois privacy unless in its authorial quality, speaking in the first person.

As in the verse by MC Rap'Hood: "Eu tô com o microfone/ é tudo no meu nome" (I got the mike / it's all about me). He is a subject with his own name who takes into his I the echoes of the collectivity to which he belongs.

The degraded public space of Brazil in the eighties and nineties makes way for a sort of territory that is at the same time terrain for subjectivity—affection, friendship, of the identifications of these young artists—and the space of the city that for them, from the poetic point of view, does not have frontiers.

It begins at the periphery, in the mud of the mangue, flies over the planet and projects itself into the space of the transmission from the parabolic antennas.

Discography:

Gonzaga, L. Luiz Gonzaga canta seus sucessos com Zé Dantas. São Paulo: RCA Victor, p1959. 1 record.

Racionais MC's. Sobrevivendo no Inferno. São Paulo: Cosa Nostra, p1998. 1 CD.

Morais, V. Autógrafos de Sucesso. Rio de Janeiro: Phonogram, p1974. 1 record.

Chico Science & Nação Zumbi. Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD.

Chico Science & Nação Zumbi. Da lama ao caos. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1994. 1 CD.

Discographical Notes:

¹ MORAIS, V. Samba da Benção. V. Morais. In: Autógrafos de Sucesso. Guanabara: Fontana, p1974. Guanabara: Fontana, p1974. 1 disco sonoro. Lado 1 , faixa 5.

² MORAIS, V. Samba da Benção. V. Morais. In: Autógrafos de Sucesso. Rio de Janeiro: Phonogram, p1974. Rio de Janeiro: Phonogram, p1974. 1 disco sonoro. Lado 1 , faixa 5.

³ RACIONAIS MC'S. Salve. I. Blue, M. Brown. In: Sobrevivendo no Inferno. São Paulo: Cosa Nostra, p1998. 1 CD. Faixa 13.

⁴ RACIONAIS MC'S. Salve. I. Blue, M. Brown. In: Sobrevivendo no Inferno. São Paulo: Cosa Nostra, p1998. 1 CD. Faixa 13.

⁵ GONZAGA, L. A volta da Asa Branca. Zédantas, L. Gonzaga In: Luiz Gonzaga canta seus sucessos com Zé Dantas. São Paulo: RCA Victor, p1959. São Paulo: RCA Victor, p1959. 1 disco sonoro. Lado A, Faixa 4.

⁶ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Mateus Enter. C. Science, N. Zumbi. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 1.

⁷ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Caranguejos com Cérebro. C. Science & N. Zumbi. In: Da lama ao caos, p1994. 1 CD (encarte).

⁸ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Caranguejos com Cérebro. C. Science & N. Zumbi. In: Da lama ao caos, p1994. 1 CD (encarte).

⁹ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Caranguejos com Cérebro. C. Science & N. Zumbi. In: Da lama ao caos, p1994. 1 CD (encarte).

¹⁰ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. [Monólogo ao pé do ouvido] Banditismo por uma questão de classe. C. Science. In: Da lama ao caos. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1994. 1 CD. Faixa 1.

¹¹ SCIENCE, C. & NAÇÃO Z. [Monólogo ao pé do ouvido] Banditismo por uma questão de classe. C. Science. In: Da lama ao caos. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1994. 1 CD. Faixa 1.

¹² SCIENCE, C. & NAÇÃO Z. [Monólogo ao pé do ouvido] Banditismo por uma questão de classe. C. Science. In: Da lama ao caos. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1994. 1 CD. Faixa 1.

¹³ SCIENCE, C. & NAÇÃO Z. [Monólogo ao pé do ouvido] Banditismo por uma questão de classe. C. Science. In: Da lama ao caos. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1994. 1 CD. Faixa 1.

¹⁴ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

¹⁵ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

¹⁶ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

¹⁷ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

¹⁸ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

¹⁹ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

²⁰ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

²¹ CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI. Manguetown. L. Maia, Dengue, C. Science. In: Afrocyberdelia. Rio de Janeiro: Chaos/Sony Music, p1996. 1 CD. Faixa 12.

Maria Rita Kehl is a psychoanalyst, writer and poet, the author of three books of poetry and the books of essays A mínima diferença—o masculino e o feminino na cultura. She was born in Campinas, São Paulo state, in 1951 and is a doctor of clinical psychology. You can reach her emailing mritak@uol.com.br.

Translated from the Portuguese by Tom Moore. Moore has been fascinated by the language and culture of Brazil since 1994. He translates from Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and German, and is also active as a musician. Comments welcome at querflote@hotmail.com.