From Mud to Chaos E-Book

José Teles

• Herausgeber: Edições Sesc SP
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Coleção Discos da Música Brasileira
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 162

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Celebrating the album's 25th anniversary, the journalist and critic José Teles reviews the trajectory of the record that transformed Brazilian music by inserting its "satellite dish" of samples and heavy guitars into the popular rhythms of Pernambuco: Da Lama ao Caos (From Mud to Chaos) by Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, released in April 1994. A music columnist at Jornal do Commercio in Recife since 1987, Teles was an eyewitness to the birth of the album and the manguebeat scene, headed by Chico Science & Nação Zumbi and Mundo Livre S/A. In the book he interviews musicians, producers, managers, record label executives, designers, photographers and journalists to retell the story and behind-the-scene details of the record that put Recife – the "fourth worst city in the world" according to a 1991 UN report – at the center of the Brazilian cultural scene of the 1990s. The book is the first volume of the Brazilian Music Records series. In Teles's words: "Contemporaneity was starting to show its face, coming from the least expected quarter. Until then, musical movements in Recife had sprung from the city's middle class or elite. The exception stemming from the city's outskirts, which was never really a movement, was frevo, born from the people but already gentrified by the 1960s. The movement that emerged to 'contemporaneize' Pernambuco music was a metaphor of the mangrove swamp, the crab men, who gathered their arsenal of ideas on Rua da Aurora in the downtown area of the capital of Pernambuco, in buildings located in a stretch that can be viewed as an emblem of the city's stagnation." Further on he continues: "No one could imagine that this group, which called itself "crabs with brains", played to small audiences and exchanged ideas in trendy bars, would smash boundaries, borders and frontiers to reinvigorate Pernambuco culture, influence Brazilian music and achieve international recognition." The group's guitarist, Lúcio Maia, states to the author in the book: "I think Da lama ao caos is a great album, better than Afrociberdelia [the band's second album], because Chico, I, Jorge, Gilmar, everybody had an entire lifetime to think about it". The Brazilian Music Records series, published in Portuguese and English, is edited by the music critic Lauro Lisboa Garcia.

Leseprobe

My thanks to all who contributed to this book in one way or another. To the groups Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, Mundo Livre S/A and everyone who helped make the musical scene of Pernambuco in the 1990s. Special thanks to Marcelo Pereira, from Jornal do Commercio, who followed the manguebeat story from the very beginning, Paulo André, for the details about the album, Liminha, for the interview in Nas Nuvens studio, Gorete França (Chico Science’s sister), Thammy Dantas, the biggest fan of Chico Science and Nação Zumbi I’ve ever met, and Rafaella Sabino, who organized and digitized my (relentlessly disorganized) files. To Lauro Lisboa Garcia for the invitation and to Sesc São Paulo for its contribution to Brazilian culture.

The city of Recife decreed 2004 the “Chico Science school year”. I was invited to write a biography, which was called O malungo Chico [Comrade Chico]. About 35 thousand books were distributed in the municipal school system of the capital city of Pernambuco. The book helped consolidate Chico Science’s presence among teenagers on the city’s outskirts. I met several people who read it and became his fans. I hope this book about the album Da lama ao caos plays a similar role. Chico Science lives!

CONTENTS

PRESENTATION Danilo Santos de Miranda

PREFACE Lauro Lisboa Garcia

_1 WHAT’S THAT SOUND COMING FROM RECIFE?

_2 LOUSTAL, LAMENTO NEGRO & MANGUE

_3 THE COUNTRY OF MANGUEBEAT

_4 A CIDADE, A PRAIEIRA, MANGUETOWN, RISOFLORA...

_5 FROM MUD TO CHAOS

ALBUM NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As an artistic expression and form of knowledge, music offers fertile ground for human observation, time and imagination. A vast territory of experiences, ranging from the songs of native peoples to religious and classical music, from modinha, lundu, maxixe and choro to pop, rock and electronic music via samba, bossa nova, baião and xote, musical creation has proved to be one of the most fertile, present and striking cultural manifestations of Brazilian life.

Supported by the history, heritage and symbolic worlds of different peoples that came together in Brazil, the love for music was reflected in the interest with which the country’s modern and urban life welcomed inventions such as the phonographic record and the radio. It was a time when male and female singers, and musicians of all styles became popular idols, and young composers wrote songs and carnival marches that would endure across the decades.

This pathway of musical creation is the guiding thread of the present series, Brazilian Music Records. Edited by the journalist and critic Lauro Lisboa Garcia, it features in each volume the story of a striking album in the history of Brazilian music, whether for its aesthetics, social and political issues, influence on public behavior, artistic innovation or market reach.

This opening volume of the series focuses on the album Da lama ao caos, which introduced to Brazilian audiences the group Chico Science & Nação Zumbi. In the book, José Teles, a Paraíba-born journalist based in Recife since the 1960s, interviews musicians, producers, record label executives, designers, photographers and journalists to retell the story and behind-the-scene details of the album and budding manguebeat movement led by Chico Science’s group, which placed the city of Recife to the center of the Brazilian cultural scene in the 1990s.

Written in clear and straightforward prose, the Brazilian Music Records series is developed from the twofold perspective of appreciating musical memory and observing the echoes and reverberations of those creations in current production.

Danilo Santos de Miranda

Regional Director of Sesc São Paulo

How long does it take for an artistic work to be considered a classic? Values change driven by technological innovations and market interests, with the evolution of the species and contemporary worldviews. “The value of things is not in how long they last, but in the intensity with which they occur”, said the poet Fernando Pessoa. “What some time ago was new and young, today is old”, wrote the songwriter Belchior. What was natural and commonplace gains an aura of “vintage”. Items previously made of metal to last over a lifetime are now disposable, manufactured with industrial waste. Vinyl records and CDs have been replaced by virtual MP3 files, UBS flash drives and computer clouds.

Music travels through this kind of time. Conceptual albums are still produced, but the current speed of music consumption has revived the model of 78 RPM discs, which featured only individual recordings of singles. The fetish for the object has brought back LPs and tape cassettes. Today’s cell phones also play the role of the old portable battery radio. Disorientation in the face of excessive information sometimes leads us to the comfort of what is crystallized. And that allows us to compare poets over many calendar pages and realize that what is old may remain young, and intensity can keep up with the durability of things, since time is the master key.

We have here a modern classic that has not lost the vigor of youth: the album Da lama ao caos, by Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, the guiding star of manguebeat. The historical context, the maturation time, the range of musical influences and the consequent widespread revitalization of Pernambuco culture allow us to conclude that manguebeat was the last great movement of Brazilian popular music of national and international reach.

Bossa nova and tropicalismo still stand as the most evident aesthetic pillars of the evolutionary line of modern Brazilian music. Other important and transformative movements such as jovem guarda, clube da esquina, São Paulo avant-garde, 1980s rock, what became known as axé music (without actually constituting a movement), hip hop, Rio funk and, more recently, the sound from Pará, have made or continue making history, but manguebeat was in fact the last sign of innovation in the form of a manifesto.

By reviving the appreciation of local rhythms from a universal perspective, blended with rock and electronic music, the mangueboys led by Chico Science and Fred Zero Quatro (of Mundo Livre S/A) reclaimed for Pernambuco the interest of the public and media, opening doors to other local bands and artists, many of whom were unrelated to their aesthetics or decided to jump on the bandwagon, despite falling off. The legacy of manguebeat resonates to this day and in that sense, Da lama ao caos, produced by Liminha (a former member of Mutantes) and released in 1994, is a fundamental album.

This was the title chosen to inaugurate the Brazilian Music Records (History and Background of Anthological Albums) series, published by Edições Sesc, comprising reports in book form of albums that had a significant aesthetic impact on the phonographic market and show business when they were released, breaking boundaries and clearing the way for the emergence of other contemporary experiences and artists, and which have stood the test of time.

Stories about songs, curiosities about recordings, interviews with professionals involved, unpublished details about studio environments and various elements that resulted in the concept of each album will be detailed in these books. The narratives in the form of news stories connect past, present and future, linking important influences for a reflection on current Brazilian music and the role of these albums in this wide-ranging setting.

This volume was written by José Teles. Born in Paraíba and based in Recife, he is one of the most renowned music journalists in Brazil, contributor to publications such as Correio de Pernambuco, Jornal do Commercio and O Pasquim. He is the author of books about Quinteto Violado, Manezinho Araújo and Chico Science, besides the memorable Do Frevo ao manguebeat [From Frevo to Manguebeat], in which he offers an important historical overview of popular music from Pernambuco, starting out from Capiba, Luiz Gonzaga and Alceu Valença and culminating in Chico Science’s manifesto. He is the reporter most deeply involved in the movement’s history since its earliest days and reveals fascinating details of the creation of this pioneering album.

Lauro Lisboa Garcia

WHAT’S THAT SOUND COMING FROM RECIFE?

“There’s a young man here who wants to publicize a party they’re organizing in Olinda”, said the receptionist who answered the phone at the culture section of Jornal do Comercio newspaper in Recife. Newspapers are routinely visited by producers in search of free space to publicize one or another event. The reporter called the young man up and jotted down the details of a party called Black Planet, to be held on June 1, 1991, at a venue called Espaço Oásis, in Casa Caiada, a neighborhood in Olinda.

The music would be provided by two DJs, a band and a percussion group from the neighborhood of Peixinhos. The DJs were Mabuse and Renato L, the band was called Loustal and the group was Lamento Negro. Among them only the latter were somewhat known from the carnival of Olinda, where they enlivened the revelry playing reggae, or samba-reggae.

The lean, brown-skinned lad was wearing a printed t-shirt and spoke in a studied voice, seeking to gain the journalist’s sympathy, but came across as arrogant and pretentious by claiming that he and his group “lucubrated” new sounds. It was not only to publicize the party that he had come to the newsroom of the venerable JC, headquartered in a solid, gray Art Deco building on Rua do Imperador in downtown Recife. What he really wanted was to use the newspaper to divulge the music he and his comrades had created:

The rhythm is called mangue. It is a mixture of samba-reggae, rap, raggamuffin and embolada. The name is a tribute to Daruê Malungo, a center for children and the deprived community of Chão de Estrelas1. It is our responsibility to revive the region’s rhythms and enhance them with our worldview... I have gone beyond that.

The reporter had not the faintest idea of what kind of music the lad was referring to. He asked the staff to take some pictures of the musician and returned to his desk to write a short piece, almost a note, about the Black Planet party2 and the so-called mangue rhythm − whatever that was.

The young man’s name was Francisco de Assis França, previously know by friends as Chico Vulgo and now starting to be addressed as Chico Science. For the first time he had his photo printed on a page of a mainstream newspaper of the capital city of Pernambuco. At the time he managed to get his story into JC, Science had already written part of the songs included in the seminal Da lama ao caos [From Mud to Chaos], the debut album of the group Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, released on Sony Music’s Chaos label on April 15, 1994, with a show at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro.

Produced by Liminha, the album is arguably one of the most important in the history of Brazilian popular music, triggering the turnaround of MPB at the threshold of the third millennium. Manguebeat (or manguebit) burst forth when it was believed that tropicalismo would go down in history as the last significant movement of 20th-century Brazilian culture (some experts would add the São Paulo avant-guarde of the late 1970s).

If manguebeat had emerged in the second half of the 1990s, it probably would not have spread beyond the boundaries of the neighboring cities of Recife and Olinda. The record labels would not have invested in a musical style that ran counter to the commercial blandness of axé music, pagode or sertanejo, which prevailed in the market. Not to mention that, at the time, music piracy was starting to gnaw at the structures of the multinational recording companies. CSNZ was perfect in its timing, emerging precisely when record sales in the country were hitting the roof thanks to the economic stability afforded by Plano Real, the anti-inflation program introduced during the administration of President Itamar Franco.

Chico Science & Nação Zumbi was the right band at an auspicious moment. Brazilian rock, which after ten successful years was showing signs of fatigue, was forced to share the market with axé music and sertanejo pop. The large music markets, USA, Europe and Japan, were increasingly opening up to music from peripheral countries, marketed under the umbrella term “world music”. Some groups like Paralamas do Sucesso experimented with African and Caribbean music, but, generally speaking, BRock (Brazilian rock from the 1980s), like most of MPB, revolved around itself, with scant smatterings of creativity (which recalled the country’s music scene in 1966, coincidentally the year of Chico Science’s birth).

In that year of 1966, debates had begun on the stalemate bogging down Brazilian popular music, torn between continuing the legacy of bossa nova or becoming a herald of political messages. Such discussions led a group headed by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to break with the mainstream parameters, an insurrection that would eventually culminate in tropicalismo.

MPB composers and singers started debating how to take forward the revolution launched by João Gilberto and bossa nova in the late 1950s. Brazilian popular music was regressing, abandoning the dissonant chords, the complex harmonies, the light and sunny themes. It had become almost monothematic, a trench to resist the military dictatorship that had seized power in 1964. The lyrics, generally sung to simple melodies and northeastern rhythms, preached a future of equally distributed land, work, bread and, naturally, freedom.

Part of the MPB artists felt that they were on the right track and should continue to use music as an agent of change, since federal censorship was still relatively mild. The enemy was not only the military regime, but the invasion of alien rhythms, American rock, above all, and iê-iê-iê (from “yeah-yeah-yeah”), the alienating agent infiltrated in the country. For them, the innocent youngsters who sang and danced to that song by Roberto Carlos (in garage parties) were being naively exploited by imperialism.

During this impasse, Gilberto Gil traveled to Recife for a series of concerts at Teatro Popular do Nordeste (TPN) and there envisioned the light at the end of the tunnel for the dead end in which Brazilian popular music was stuck. Gil was then launching his first LP, Louvação, released by Philips. Although his songs played on the radio interpreted by Elis Regina and he featured on TV shows in São Paulo, he was far from being a MPB star. Over the three weeks he spent in Recife he got out a lot with the producer Roberto Santana and the manager Guilherme Araújo. The outgoing and communicative artist from Bahia struck up many friendships. These new friends introduced him to the fertile musical culture of the people of Pernambuco. In Carpina, in Zona da Mata Sul, they showed him the rural maracatu and its gaudy spearmen, the caboclos de lança, which Chico Science would spread to the world thirty years later. In Caruaru, he was moved by the fife band of the Biano brothers. On the island of Itamaracá he was delighted with the song and dance of Lia, who, also thirty years later, would be one of the muses of manguebeat. All that rhythmic wealth, still basically restricted to Pernambuco, was the missing piece to complete the jigsaw puzzle of ideas he wished to put into practice.

In an interview with the reporter Penha Maria published in Jornal do Commercio on May 10, 1967, Gilberto Gil practically foretold what would happen at the following edition of the TV Record MPB Festival, when the roots of tropicalismo would be planted:

Let’s not forget that the sound of the electric guitars is in the streets, the long-haired, frenzied youngsters are walking the streets and the conditioning, whether psychological or social, is a new expectation that has brought composers to a deadlock. Faced with this social conditioning of audiences, composers will be forced, due to the expectation, to direct their artistic activity taking into account the meaning of iê-iê-iê. They will have to lay down the banner of purity, because good influence is valid. I am therefore already following this trend, without leaving aside the fundamental roots of our culture, but considering the iê-iê-iê factor.

He would put the theory into practice a few months later on the stage of Teatro Paramount, playing the baião “Domingo no Parque” [Sunday in the Park] with a rock group, Os Mutantes. The rest is history.

STAGNATION

Chico Science and his comrades were not worried about the listlessness pervading MPB or BRock. They were seeking a way out of the lack of perspective affecting whoever dared to make a living from art in Recife. In one way or another, the future mangueboys had been making music since the mid-1980s, struggling in the underground, tuning into what was going on in the world through specialized publications sold in a few newsstands and at Livro 7, on Rua Sete de Setembro downtown, considered at the time the largest bookstore in Brazil, at least in size. They managed to scrape up a few rap, funk, rock and electronic music records, besides imported books.

The group was largely formed by youngsters born and raised under the information censorship imposed by the military dictatorship. They were therefore hungry for knowledge. The world was developing new tools, the great world-wide computer network was spreading across continents, bringing people and cultures together and contributing to increase cultural exchange. Those boys and girls set out to change the decadent mood of Recife, which had reached its apogee as the country’s third most important state capital in the mid-1960s, and which a United Nations body, in a 1991 study, had ranked as the fourth worst city in the world in quality of life.

Its once vigorous cultural industry, based on radio and TV, had lost momentum in the early 1970s, dominated by national broadcasting networks from the Southeast region. Artists migrated, venues became increasingly smaller. The future mangueboys and manguegirls shared with their generation the restlessness inherent in transition periods. In music, punk rock took to a kind of aesthetics of hunger, paraphrasing the filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s motto “camera in hand, idea in mind”. With punk it was “guitar in hand, a thousand ideas in mind”. Then came post-punk and rock shattered into thousands of pieces, giving rise to styles such as Seattle’s grunge of the late 1980s and bands like Nirvana, which combined heavy musical sounds with pop sensibility, making friends and influencing people.

In Brazil, BRock was giving clear signs of exhaustion. Occasional oases of novelty sprung up here and there, such as the producer Pena Schmidt’s record label Titinus, with original music tuned into what was being done abroad, created by groups like Yo-Ho-Delic and Virna Lisi. Books and records by foreign indie publishers and record labels became more accessible.

In the early 1990s, a group of youngsters from different social levels got together in an initiative to unclog the blocked arteries of Recife, which local punks and headbangers called “Recifeces” or “Sewer”, as the capital of Pernambuco was viewed in the punk/metal scene, from where came the first warning of an imminent heart attack. Several musicians that would be part of the manguebeat movement had a background in heavy metal, such as Eder “O” Rocha, of the group Mestre Ambrósio, a former member of the thrash metal band Arame Farpado.

The goal was not to revive the evolutionary line of Pernambuco or Brazilian music (to cite the famous expression used by Caetano Veloso in an article for Revista Civilização Brasileira