By VICTOR MORAIS*
Commentary on the musical production of the São Paulo sambista.
“The urban music genres recognized as more authentically carioca – march and samba – arose from the need for a rhythm for the disorder of carnival” (José Ramos Tinhorão, Short History of Popular Music, P. 139).
“The problem of language is a problem of conscience that replaces the vainglorious concept of romantic nationalism. This language is not created overnight, in the same way that the conscience of Brazil has not yet reached a level that allows it to conceptualize our civilization. Even if social, economic and political aspects have already been conceptualized more precisely, this does not mean that these data are sufficient to formulate a 'Brazilian civilization'. Cinema, inserted in the cultural process, should ultimately be the language of a 'civilization'” (Glauber Rocha, New Cinema Revolution, P. 99).
1.
As far as legend goes, during a show by Johnny Alf at the Cave nightclub, then located on Rua da Consolação, the poet Vinícius de Moraes would have predicted: “São Paulo is the tomb of samba”. That the statement had neither edge nor threshing floor does not require much explanation. It turns out that behind Vinícius de Moraes' supposed placement there is a clear geographical indication: Rio de Janeiro is where samba is fully realized.
This, confirmed so many times ago, whether for historical or social reasons, seems to be confirmed as samba in Rio, a genre that is always in transformation and attentive to the dynamics of its time, unfolded into others as popular as pagode. and the funk. What was not expected was that in the midst of an equation as well resolved as this one, a São Paulo native, born in the capital, but who grew up in peripheral Poá, would appear, making the best sambas of recent times. His name? Douglas Germano.[I]
For some years now, it is true, the cultural scene of the city of São Paulo has seen a valuable new wave of singer-songwriters flourish, to the point that many people speak of the avant-garde. People like Juçara Marçal, Kiko Dinucci, Thiago França, Rodrigo Campos, Rômulo Fróes and… Douglas Germano. Yes, a sambista in the midst of the so-called avant-garde. Douglas Germanof makes a point, however, of putting himself aside: “If we meet, everyone hugs, but I don't belong”.[ii] It's curious to analyze the sound of the names listed above and compare them to those of Douglas Germano, and I don't say this to feed dyads of yesteryear, but to enhance his truly excellent work.
Let's see. in your seminal Getulio da Paixão Cearense, José Miguel Wisnik points out: “the conjugation between the national and the popular in art aims at creating a strategic space where the project of national autonomy contains a defensive position against the advance of capitalist modernity, represented by the signs of rupture launched by the aesthetic avant-garde and the cultural market[iii]. With this quotation I do not want to place Douglas Germano as a national-popular artist, a denomination trampled underfoot by the tropicalist reason that prevailed in Brazil from the 1960s until the Bolsonarist hecatomb[iv], but it seems clear to me that there is a point of distancing to justify its own placement, apart from the group.
The situation becomes even more curious when we see that Douglas Germano, who had already been recorded years before by Os originals do samba, had his first long work recorded with Kiko Dinucci at the Duo Moviola, in 2009. Douglas Germanoh inhabits the same scene as the aforementioned ones, performs with Sescs, Casa de Francisca, even participates in some projects together, but his work is out of place there. The reason I find for all these questions is the following: Douglas Germano is a sambista par excellence.
2.
From there we fall into another discussion, in which I intend to be more brief: what is samba? The genealogy I propose follows José Ramos Tinhorão and the aforementioned José Miguel Wisnik. According to Tinhorão, samba was born from the mixture of choro and maxixe, the latter in turn derived from polka, when the small group of Rio society decided to assert itself socially after the abolition of slavery in 1888.[v] José Miguel Wisnik points out that this process, whose mythological birth would reside in the collective composition (later assumed solely by Donga) of the samba “Pelo Telephone” at Tia Ciata's house, was full of its comings and goings.
Taking advantage of a metaphor launched by Muniz Sodré in Samba, the owner of the body, for which Tia Ciata's house was made up of cultural screens, José Miguel Wisnik will explore the combination of samba practiced in the backyard of the house, between the ballroom and the candomblé yard, with the means of dissemination expanding at the time, above all radio, whose first broadcasts in Brazil date back to 1922.[vi]
This genre, therefore, which was born marginalized, yearns to become socially enthroned as a way to empower bodies and minds to revolutionize the established world. But the world in which he was born was also revolutionized with the emergence of the Vargas State in 1930, in a process of conservative modernization. Hence, samba begins to exercise an ambiguous relationship between power and marginality: on the one hand, the need to anchor itself in Vargas' authoritarian tutelage project, endorsing work as a supreme entity for its own survival; on the other, the rejection of this process, valuing malandragem as a defining element of the precarious citizen, subject of samba.[vii]
This conflict finally brings us – it is inevitable – to the study of Antonio Candido dialectic of malandragem, in which, when analyzing the novel by Manuel Antônio de Almeida Memorias de um sargento de milicias, points to the subject who lives between the world of order and disorder. This wandering being would inhabit the “guiltless world”, thus characterized: “People do things that could be described as reprehensible, but they also do others worthy of praise, which make up for them. And since everyone has flaws, no one deserves blame.”[viii] This space, which will have its greatest success in carnival, precisely the one in which samba will flourish, and which will put on the edge – like no one else – the diatribes listed above between the endorsement, sometimes of marginality, and sometimes the acceptance of laborism; after all, “the trickster is a potential traitor”,[ix] given that survival is above ideology.
3.
That said, let's go back to Douglas Germano. After all, this is his world. But it's not the one who consumes it – see the harsh statements in the aforementioned interview with Pedro Alexandre Sanches –, which leads to a double contradiction about the meaning of samba today. And that says a lot about Douglas Germano's samba. His two most impressive works are the albums coup de vista (2016) and Scum (2019). In the first, the introspection of who has just been defeated; in the second, the body raised for the battle of life and death. And it is precisely in the introspection of the former that we can find answers to the contradictions that afflict him.
coup de vista it is an inward record, which opposes the life drive of its predecessor, the beautiful Orí (2011), launched only online due to budgetary reasons. But as the title itself says, the blow suffered months before – the album is from October 2016 – is a matter of point of view, and it is not about denying the seriousness of the situation, but about pointing out paths, organizing ideas, to face the day ahead. And in this, the metalinguistic samba plays a fundamental role. There are several compositions of coup de vista that deal with this question, and it unfolds, as far as I can see, in another point that dialogues with the second movement of this writing: what is the role of samba in an hour of agony?
Walter Benjamin teaches us that for the tradition of the oppressed the “state of exception” would be nothing more than normality.[X] If I'm not mistaken, samba is precisely the genre par excellence of this tradition that is already used to iron and fire on a daily basis. It allows you to survive it and, as you denounce it, it allows you to hope for a paradigm of social transformation for your community (a fundamental notion for thinking about samba).
Hence, in a moment of shock, there is this radical aesthetic transformation in the work of Douglas Germano between the newcomer Orí and the inside coup de vista. The dilemma, which accompanies the complex relationship between intelligentsia tropicalist music and the cultural industry, about what to do with a genre that the tropicalistas had condemned to death forty-some years before;[xi] the anguish in relation to the loss of the power of musical creation by the popular classes (which Tinhorão denounced from an early age); despair at the alienation of the people, a direct consequence of the phenomenon of capitalist reification of the commodity fetish, noted so long ago by Lukács in History and class consciousness.[xii]
It all comes down to coup de vista. In the track that closes the album, “Lama”, originally defended by Adriana Moreira at the TV Cultura festival, the dilemma appears like this, under the reduced instrumentation of guitar and box of matches: “A samba that speaks of the things of the world / A samba that no one needs to explain. This very metalinguistic samba by Douglas Germano exposes the impasse, which must be done in terms of form, but is still not achieved due to the blow suffered. It is rather a warning mixed with desire.
The thing opens up in “Cansaço”: “I got tired / But who won’t get tired / Seeing it all end / Without even having started / Without even having resisted / Without even a past / And the future guarded / Who wants to guide us” . The bankruptcy of the country of the future of the Lula years announced in a sublime way. This, the motto of coup de vista, preparing the ground for resistance, finding a way to denounce the spoliations: “My samba is not about lamentation / It is much more about torment” (coup de vista). “My samba is a blind eye / It ends where it wants to start / My samba is bad in the head / My samba even limps to walk”. There is even more for Jesus in “Zeirô, Zeirô”, prophetic in relation to the dominant religious fundamentalism in the peripheries of the country and its Christian denial of the doctrine of Christ.
Putting all this together, coup de vista he makes use of a sophisticated program of resistance to the progressive and liberal tendencies of that moment, without sounding backward.[xiii] Two songs are significant in this regard: “Canção para ninar Oxum”, also recorded by Juçara Marçal in his emblematic “Encarnado” (2014), and “Maria de Vila Matilde”, which appeared on the most important album, in terms of aesthetics and dissemination. , from the new São Paulo scene, “Woman at the end of the world” (2015), by Elza Soares. If the first cherishes the defeated entity – “Cry no, Oxum / Why, cry” – the second proposes a paradigm shift in relation to violence against women, but without going into identity details. After all, the samba community is above the identity community and it takes union between its members to overcome the wounds often exposed by the blameless world, our poison remedy.[xiv]
In the same interview with Pedro Alexandre Sanches mentioned above, Douglas Germano comments on the relationship between his song “O que se cala”, recorded by Elza Soares in God is Woman (2018) and the rise of identitarianism in the cultural tribes of the left (liberal? Tropicalist? Postmodern?): “… something completely against identitarianism, but identitarianism absorbed it in its favor… because all the questions I ask go there in the opposite way. I start with 'why separate?/ why disjoin?/ why just shout?/ why never listen?'. These are questions that would be directly aimed at the instances of power, not between us. If we don't realize that everyone is in the same boat, that we have to close and join together against something that is bigger, against this absurd capitalism that throws everyone into this objectification, there will come a time when I will be alone in a square, in the bald square, claiming my recognition. The song was originally going to be called 'Lugar de Fala', but they decided not to”.[xv] I reinforce that the analysis must be carried out with a view to cohesion in the samba community, which in turn is seen as national, and not as an endorsement of the myth of racial democracy, so dear to the tropicalistas and whose relationship has yet to be studied.
4.
This is because what bothers Douglas Germano is not a question of identity but of class. This perception that samba has cornered itself, that the best sambistas of a generation are consumed by the country's cultural elite in exquisite spaces inaccessible to those for which it was originally intended, worries Douglas Germano. After all, it is as if samba had ceased to be samba without the life drive of the populations that they were, along with the evolution of capitalist modernity, exchanging the resistance samba for the integrated samba, which would later unfold in the integrated pagode.[xvi] (Parenthesis: this dilemma was magnificently explored in the feature film Short journeys into the night, by Thiago Mendonça: the cynicism of intellectual scholars in dealing with sambistas; the need to make samba in a foreign space because that is, after all, what is left of the audience; the criminalization of the genre that insists on making itself exist by the forces of coercion and police supervision, which see idleness, anti-work attitudes in samba, which is still true. All this is in Thiago Mendonça's film[xvii]).
All concerns that take to the limit the tension in the work of Douglas Germano when the rise of the extreme right in the country is placed as reality. The answer to the impasses of coup de vista tries to be given, with success I would say, in Douglas Germano's great album, Scum (2019). There is no introspection here, the body is empowered; or rather, the bodies, in the plural. The community will give the voice and tone of resistance, after all, they are masters at it. I would like to base my analysis on two of the most significant sambas from Scum, album dedicated entirely to answering coup de vista, with the exception of “Tempo Velho”, the track that closes it and which I will comment on later. I'm talking about the first two tracks: “Àgbá” and “Valhacouto” (partnership with none other than Aldir Blanc).
In “Àgbá”, a song for Exu, the motto of the album is given, the active action: “Yesterday a stone fell outside / That the caster will only throw now / It is up to him to transform, it is up to him to get going / (Ê ê Àgbá , ê Adaguê, ê Elebô)”[xviii]. It's time to transform the world, take advantage of the disorder to, from the carnival opening, establish a partying and powerful nation, which does not allow the victory of what had then won. This perception of denunciation and transformation is wide open in “Valhacouto”, classical and popular samba at the same time, as only the combination of two great feats Douglas Germano and Aldir Blanc could produce. The structure of the song takes place in two movements, which alternate and repeat until the end. The first part, with Douglas soloist, denounces the “scum” that “made weapons become laws” and that would have started in Germany – in the live shows presented in 2019, pre-pandemic, images of Nazi Germany appeared on the big screen.
But it is precisely in the second portion that the genius of “Valhacouto” is concentrated. It is the best definition, together with the song “Lembranças que Guardei” (Juçara Marçal / Fernando Catatau / Kiko Dinucci), recorded in Delta Estacio Blues (2021), on the aesthetic matter of understanding and engaging in resistance to Bolsonarism – and beyond[xx]. It is a rare samba that manages to situate those who listen to it in a box at an opera house, in a clear indirect to the class outline that stuns Douglas Germano's work in relation to those who consume it, that is, at the limit, the radicals of middle class[xx].
Lyrics, choir, and Douglas's solo all sing together, instruments in turmoil: “I want dances on the ruins / From the realms of darkness / Laugh, laugh, the circus has begun to lick / I want to drink on street corners, pray, rhymes / But I will need you”. It is one of the most beautiful stanzas and with the best arrangement of recent times: make your heart go out of your way. Dancing over the ruins of the country of the future (“Here everything looks like it was still under construction / And it’s already a ruin” – Caetano Veloso, “Out of order”). Dancing in times of destruction, dancing to build something new out of what no longer exists. Making fun of those who insist on perpetuating a farcical, Machadian sociability – “the circus has begun to lick” – and enjoying the new time in the world. Resistance here is tricky – “I want to drink on street corners, pray, rhyme” – and collective – “But I'm going to need you”. The lyrical song surrounding this entire section synthesizes class conflicts in Douglas Germano and nudges the listener: what are you going to do now[xxx]?
All this makes Scum a heavy, Benjamin-like record of the “new barbarians” in the article “Experiência e poverdade”. Talking about the avant-garde after Tropicalism makes everything more difficult because it becomes institutionalized and often tends towards uncriticism. The opposite of our object, which maintains a radical commitment between advanced aesthetic form and critical intervention in everyday life. This is the connection between Douglas Germano and the so-called “vanguardists” from São Paulo. And behold, surprisingly, its closing turns to the past, to the little things of everyday life. What happened. “Old Time”. The melody is pleasant, the lyrics are reminiscent, the reminiscence of a memory, gratitude for being alive in the face of institutionalized horror. “I don't even know anything / My voice is the wind / And I whisper time / For you to look”. “I almost saw nothing, no / I felt it inside / But the thought / You can't lock it”. “Do your good path and remember / That the most beautiful world is only found in tiny stones”.
For Douglas Germano, “Tempo Velho” works “to wrap up and to transform all that crap into something lighter, to deliver a little hope. You have to have that radar too, many times it will give someone something they already know, they are already tired or turn to music exactly to forget a little. Get there and run into it again”[xxiii]. Perhaps this explains the nearly five million streams of the song on Spotify at the time of writing this text.
“Tempo Velho”, although inserted in the dictates and contradictions of the environment in which it circulates, operates with the wise mourners, with the tiny pebbles of peripheral popular traditions, marginalized, who one day dreamed, thinking with Tinhorão, of asserting themselves nationally as a symbol of the country, were deprived of their original form and distorted by dark transactions. If, on the one hand, this explains the fascination of the new generations of intellectuals with popular culture – traditional or not –, it is also a message that these epistemologies continue to be the best answer to face the hard times Brazil has experienced since then. . And it should be remembered that Scum it is a pre-pandemic record, which only confirmed its apocalyptic-messianic character.
5.
It is precisely this point, between the end of time and redemption, a bridge to another moment, that instigates Douglas Germano. His concern to popularize his work without losing aesthetic consistency, demonstrated in high party (2021), his last album, in partnership with the Batuqueiros and Sua Gente, when he resorts to the samba of the high party, the most resistant among all types of samba, given that it is collective (precisely at a time when we saw ourselves separated from each other by the pandemic distancing), is something really to be appreciated. An artist's conscience.
This punctuation leads us to resume the apocalyptic-messianic character of samba, beyond its work, entity of redeeming singularity of the country in Antonio Candido's “world without guilt”. According to José Miguel Wisnik, Brazil would be a drug, for which, depending on the dosage, the results will be like medicine or poison: “This world has a wide reach in a Brazilian popular cultural history underlying the development of samba, and it will lead to the other side , as we have already said, in João Saldanha's writings about Garrincha.
In a de-idealized way and without major moralisms, this culture enjoys the privilege of not taking the masquerades of power too strictly and of maintaining a considerable margin of slack in the face of strict productivist appeals”[xxiii]. It is precisely this ability to swing and dribble that guarantees his apocalyptic-messianic ability. Fernando Novais, commenting on the Brazil roots by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, predicted a powerful synthesis of the work: “(…) either we modernize ourselves, and we cease to be what we are; or we remain as we are, and we do not modernize”[xxv]. An impasse that is revealed in Douglas Germano's samba – after all, there was modernization, but when it comes to uneven and combined development, gaps were left along the way and it is on them that our hopes should focus – and which condenses into a central entity of culture Brazilian, from Glauber to Caymmi, which leads to Douglas Germano: the sea.
Though high party close with “Minas Gerais não tem mar / Jaci e Maré Cheia” (the latter that had already been recorded in Orí), which could question the redemptive power of the sea, it is precisely the first song from Douglas Germano's solo album that summarizes my perception: “Orí” – “In Orí there is a sea / And Orí made a sea / To deliver you / Go to browse". It is clear that we have to go sailing – it is imperative – to find that salty sea – and dreamed of – that can redeem us. But we know, thanks to a sacred entity, that he exists, and that he can save us.[xxiv]. If so, Douglas Germano is the certainty that the sea that São Paulo does not exist, and that it is from its swing that we have to rise from this tomb in which we were placed. [xxv]
*Vitor Morais is a history major at the University of São Paulo (USP).
Notes
[I] It is clear that the mystery of samba paulista has historical ballast, see the wide range of sambistas who captured the moment of broad population growth – that is, the development of capitalist modernity – contrasted with the loss of the provincial aura of São Paulo. Adoniran Barbosa on one end and Paulo Vanzolini on the other represent this duality of samba from São Paulo perfectly. It turns out that between them and our object for years on end…
[ii] SANCHES, Pedro Alexandre. Douglas Germano, the man in the bubble. farofafá, 26.Aug.2021. Available in: https://farofafa.com.br/2021/08/26/douglas-germano-o-homem-na-bolha/#:~:text=O%20artista%20paulistano%20Douglas%20Germano,%C3%A1gua%20fervendo%20se%20voc%C3%AA%20se..
[iii] WISNIK, Jose Miguel. Getúlio da Paixão Cearense (Villa-Lobos and the Estado Novo). In: SQUEFF, Ênio/_______. Music (The national and the popular in Brazilian culture). São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983, p. 134. It is clear that feeding the dyad between national-popular and avant-garde-market is nothing more than an anachronism, after all, the moment is different, interrupted by the costs still collected from the hecatomb called 1964. I believe, however, that the goal is good to place Douglas apart from the so-called avant-garde that has agitated São Paulo's intellectual circles in recent times.
[iv] For a pioneering analysis of tropicalist reason, see ALAMBERT, Francisco. Tropical reality. In: ___. History, art and culture: essays. São Paulo: Intermeios, 2020, pp. 31 – 40.
[v] A good analysis of the formation of popular music in Brazil according to Tinhorão can be found in BASTOS, Manoel Dourado. A syncopated marxism: method and criticism in José Ramos Tinhorão. historical times, vol. 15, 1st half of 2011, pp. 289 – 314.
[vi] WISNIK, Jose Miguel. Getúlio da Paixão Cearense (Villa-Lobos and the Estado Novo). In: SQUEFF, Ênio/_______. Music (The national and the popular in Brazilian culture). São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983, p. 159. Tinhorão also addressed this topic in TINHORÃO, José Ramos. Popular music: from the gramophone to radio and TV. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012.
[vii] The term is by Wisnik in the aforementioned essay on page 161. On this duality in samba, see the famous musical controversy between Noel Rosa and Wilson Batista, which began when the latter composed “Lenço noneck”.
[viii] CANDID, Antonio. Dialectics of malandragem (Characterization of the Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant). Magazine of the Institute of Brazilian Studies, no. 8, p. 84. Roberto Schwarz will read the essay against the grain and point out that caution must be exercised with the saving potential of the singular “world without guilt”. See SCHWARZ, Roberto. Assumptions, if I am not mistaken, of “Dialectic of Malandragem”. In: _______. What time is it? Essay. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006, pp. 129 – 156. And Francisco Alambert and Tiago Ferro stated that this process is intrinsically linked to the historical moment with which Candido and Schwarz identify and, perhaps, belong: “Antonio Candido would have been one of the great interpreters of Brazil in the context of the revolution of 1930 until the Civil-Military Coup of 1964; Roberto Schwarz was one too, especially from the context of the Coup”. ALAMBERT, Francisco / FERRO, Tiago. Two critics, one week, one century. Magazine of the Institute of Brazilian Studies, no. 74, Dec. 2019, pp. 162 – 177.
[ix] Marcos Napolitano in personal communication, 17.11.2020.
[X] BENJAMIN, Walter. About the concept of history. In: ___. Selected works volume I: Magic and technique, art and politics. Essays on Literature and Cultural History. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985, p. 226.
[xi] The first person to notice this, as far as I am aware, was Pedro Alexandre Sanches in SANCHES, Pedro Alexandre. Tropicalism: the beautiful decadence of samba. São Paulo: Boitempo editorial, 2000. Sanches points out in the veloseana song “A voz do morte”, composed for the I Bienal do Samba da TV Record, 1968, to be defended by the samba in person, Aracy de Almeida, and disqualified from it for containing electric guitars in the original arrangement, the synthesis of the tropicalist ideology based on the elimination of samba as a musical genre of national synthesis (in line with Tinhorão. It is also worth mentioning that João Camilo Penna in PENNA, João Camilo. .In: DUARTE, Pedro (Org.). Unidentified object: Caetano Veloso 80 years old – rehearsals. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, pp. 189 – 215 points out that one of the pillars for Tropicalismo would be precisely to respond to the method of Tinhorão, who valued samba, but criticized the contradictions of the national-popular ideology). This discussion takes up the hypothesis launched by Caetano Veloso in 1966 in his intervention in the famous debate “What direction should Brazilian Popular Music take?” in Revista Civilização Brasileira of a certain “evolutionary line of Brazilian popular music”, in which João Gilberto and Dorival Caymmi would act as mediators of samba in the light of the new Brazilian reality of that pre-1964 moment, the Juscelino government. With the civil-military coup of 1964, the situation would change and it would be up to Tropicalismo to overcome João and Caymmi, incorporating them into the evolutionary line scheme. That this process has repressed modalities valued by Tinhorão, such as modern urban samba, is curious.
[xii] LUKÁCS, Georg. History and class consciousness. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.
[xiii] See the debate on the “Tropicalist reason” made in the aforementioned essay by Francisco Alambert “Tropical reality”. I understand that the Dilma 2 government opens up the limit of a hegemony of tropicalist reason beyond the tropicalists. When Dilma falls in 2016, so does this reason that for about fifty years kept the official Brazilian culture in terms of music static.
[xiv] The term is from José Miguel Wisnik in WISNIK, José Miguel. Poison medicine: football and Brazil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008. See especially the fourth chapter. I will return to the theme later, although it is synthesized in the second movement of this essay.
[xv] SANCHES, Pedro Alexandre. Douglas Germano, the man in the bubble. farofafá, 26.Aug.2021. Available in: https://farofafa.com.br/2021/08/26/douglas-germano-o-homem-na-bolha/#:~:text=O%20artista%20paulistano%20Douglas%20Germano,%C3%A1gua%20fervendo%20se%20voc%C3%AA%20se. Accessed on: 18.01.2023.
[xvi] The case of funk seems to be more complex. Lucas Paolillo argued, in personal communication, that there is resistance in the midst of what I see as a controlled trance. Anyway, see the already classic VIANNA, Hermano. The world funk From Rio. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1998.
[xvii] Thanks to Francisco Alambert for nominating the feature film.
[xviii] Douglas is glossing over the Yoruban proverb “Eshu killed a bird yesterday with a stone he only threw today”. Emicida, in another key, also recovers this proverb to open his “AmarElo – It's all for yesterday”. Thanks to Sheyla Diniz for remembering the proverb.
[xx] I analyzed “Delta Estácio Blues” in MORAIS, Vitor. Juçara Marçal – mourning and redemption. the earth is round, 28.04.2022.
[xx] Check out Antonio Candido's classic analysis of middle-class radicals in CANDIDO, Antonio. Radicalisms. In: _______. Various writings. Rio de Janeiro: Gold over Blue, 2011, pp. 195 – 216.
[xxx] In at least two songs by Doulgas Germano there is a class conflict transposed to a chorus conflict, between the lyrical and the popular: “You S/A” and “Valhacouto”. It is worth remembering that the choir (of the shepherd girls, of the baianas, of the high party, …) is a fundamental entity of several modalities of samba and resumes the oral traditions from which it originates. Thanks to Sheyla Diniz for remembering “You S/A”.
[xxiii] SANCHES, Pedro Alexandre. Douglas Germano, the man in the bubble. farofafá, 26.Aug.2021. Available in: https://farofafa.com.br/2021/08/26/douglas-germano-o-homem-na-bolha/#:~:text=O%20artista%20paulistano%20Douglas%20Germano,%C3%A1gua%20fervendo%20se%20voc%C3%AA%20se.
[xxiii] WISNIK, Jose Miguel. Poison medicine: football and Brazil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008, pp. 423 – 424.
[xxv] NOVAIS, Fernando A. Back to the cordial man. In: _____. Approaches: studies of History and historiography. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2022, p. 330. Also cited by José Miguel Wisnik in his book on football and Brazil.
[xxiv] I am clearly based on Ismail Xavier's interpretation of the teleological ending of “Deus e o diabo na terra do Sol” (1964), when Manuel, after Corisco is killed by Antonio das Mortes, runs in search of the sea. See XAVIER, Ismail. Sertão Mar: Glauber Rocha and the aesthetics of hunger. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2019.
[xxv] I appreciate the reading, comments and intellectual exchanges of Julio d'Ávila and Sheyla Diniz regarding this essay.
The A Terra é Redonda website exists thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
Click here and find how
