By HOMERO VIZEU ARAÚJO & PEDRO BAUMBACH MANICA*
Considerations about City of God, Surviving in hell e Tropical Truth
But there are millions of these beings
That disguise themselves so well
That nobody asks
Where do these people come from?
They are gardeners,
Night guards, couples
They are passengers
Firefighters and babysitters
They don't even remember anymore
That there is a swamp of the cross
That they were children
And that they ate light
They are cleaners
They swing on the buildings
They are ticket offices
Candy sellers and waiters
They don't even remember anymore
That there is a Beco da Cruz
That they were children
And they ate light.
(Chico Buarque, Cross Marsh)
1997
We are too close to the 1990s to attempt a historical assessment, but the current distance from the feeling that marked the end of the century is palpable. That mixture of exaltation yuppie with the decree of the end of history, permitted by the victory of the so-called free democratic world against communist oppression, it gave way to an apocalyptic impotence, making the weight of the absence of alternatives, imaginary or not, to capitalism felt.
In Brazil, the recent redemocratization and the stabilized economy have generated a certain euphoria in the country, despite the grim note of urban violence that was exploding, giving news of the ongoing urban disintegration. We are currently at the height of the ambiguous achievements achieved in the FHC era, combining the end of hyperinflation with democratic stabilization. Seen from afar, the democratic stage game was short-lived.
It is enough to remember Fernando Henrique's suspicious attachment to office, when negotiating in Congress a constitutional amendment that allowed his own reelection, in a procedure that was not only his, in Perry Anderson's observation: “such a decision puts him in the company of Fujimori and Menem, whose examples he followed, as yet another egotistical person full of himself responsible for degrading the legal traditions and democratic prospects of his country”. (ANDERSON, 2020, p. 48).
The economic achievements of the 1990s, according to the author in question, also encountered clear limits: “On the periphery of capitalism, the logic of the neoliberal model places any country that adopts it at the mercy of unpredictable movements in the financial market of the center; thus, FHC’s misfortunes were, to a large extent, the chronicle of a fiasco foretold. But his government was also excessively cautious and incompetent. The exchange rate was unsustainable from the beginning, overvalued for demagogic purposes, and the possibility of adopting even some modest level of capital control was not raised – something that even dependent neoliberalism still allows, and which helped to protect the Chilean economy from the terrible devastation that Brazil would later suffer. In general, the idea that the key to successfully attracting foreign capital would be deregulation and privatization to the outrage was extraordinarily naive and provincial.” (ANDERSON, 2020, p. 42)
Redemocratization from above, accommodating the most recent demands of capital with the atavistic interests of oligarchic power, in a tragicomic alliance with the center-right that had recently supported the generals, was justified as the only possible maneuver in that political period, but the price paid in terms of conformity was high for the ambitions of the PSDB social democracy. From an economic point of view, inflationary containment did indeed have an important effect on the lives of the poorest, but the disproportionate euphoria of the middle class during that period blinded them to the unfeasibility of the project, which crippled the already fragile Brazilian industry and was ineffective in the long term against the destructive dynamics of capitalism in its current phase.
While it lasted, the enthusiasm produced strong illusions, based on the hope of an end to state repression, combined with the apparent victory of market economies. The euphoria aged badly, but the dazzlement with the unprecedented consumption permitted by the pegged dollar and the equally unprecedented horizon of the guarantee of individual rights resulted in a perspective that was somewhere between progressive, critical, euphoric and conformist.
This optimism is elaborated with ambivalence in the exceptional Tropical Truth (1997), by Caetano Veloso, a memoir with a great narrative breadth and a strong essayistic tone. Moving through opposites, in the style of Tropicália, the book's prose revisits the 1960s, a time when the songwriter's generation was maturing, reflecting on cultural and political tensions under the scrutiny of the present, which alters them.
The perspective that reviews the period in part is explained literarily in the introduction of the book, commented by Roberto Schwarz: “The first pages of Tropical Truth they indulge in a show of deliberately cheap intelligence, which seeks to disorient the enlightened reader. In fact, the use of malaise as a problematizing literary resource is an originality of the book. […] The comings and goings are conducted with juggling and if they do not go so far as to exalt the superstition of nationality, they sympathize with it and somewhat lower common sense in the matter”. (SCHWARZ, 2012, p. 106-107)
Caetano Veloso enunciates numerical superstitions, prophecies about the national destiny and relativizations, on the left and on the right, of the military period, to expose and rework the social experience provided by the “lowered and inglorious horizon of victorious capital” (SCHWARZ 2012, p. 111), which at various moments is filtered by the optimism of “fine print”. The set produces some of the crucial and highly debatable passages of the book.
In the wake of euphoria, 1997 also marks the maturation of peripheral culture, which sophisticatedly reworks the reverse of redemocratization and economic stability: the brutality of everyday life in peripheral neighborhoods in full disintegration, victims of police violence, drug wars and modernized economic misery.
The year is remarkable, with the release of Surviving in hell, of Racionais MCs, and of City of God, by Paulo Lins, with Hell and God appearing in the titles of works of great impact and success, which is perhaps no coincidence. If there is no reason to force the argument by trying to find analogies, it is symptomatic that the two works by black authors about the outskirts are from the same year, with Surviving talking about the poor outskirts of São Paulo, while the neo-favela Cidade de Deus is in Rio.
If Paulo Lins's book explores the dilemmas of criminality from the inside, with its armed, drug-sniffing young gangsters who are involved in drug trafficking, Racionais at various points in the album denounce drug trafficking, robberies and criminal life in general, with its sequence of sexual abuse and appeals to intoxication, whose dynamics make up the framework of social exclusion, economic plunder and widespread incarceration. In other words, Paulo Lins narrates the accelerated and lethal dynamics of drug trafficking in detail, with black kids killing and dying quickly and frequently, which brings the book closer to police and action films (not surprisingly, the success of the film adaptation).
The book's vigorous prose, to my best knowledge, produces an ambiguous effect in which the denunciation of violence and poverty is accompanied by a certain celebratory euphoria of transgression, combined with humor and the effects of emulating popular language. In Surviving in hell There is some humor, very sober and bitter, and the songs as a whole are far from being jocular. In the entire São Paulo album, perhaps not a single scoundrel is recorded, while the alleys and streets of the novel contain a gallery of types that range from the scoundrel to the pimp, from the freeloader to the sucker, not excluding the possibility of an accumulation of roles.
At the center of conflicts and shootings involving loose animals and police is drug trafficking and control of drug dens, which is a business to be organized and managed, including debit and credit entries; in this sense, drug traffickers are young entrepreneurs struggling to fit into the commercialization of Brazilian society, with capitalist competition reproduced within the poor community.
In Roberto Schwarz’s essay on the novel, there is an accurate assessment of the procedure: “The interviewer and the researcher – professionals linked to the field of emerging social innovations, the so-called “emerging trends” – helped the artist invent his scheme, to which they gave a certain literary precariousness, but also a very recent and cutting-edge note. They are so many signs of the times, which give modernity to the construction. With great artistic flair, the worker, the scoundrel, the loose-lipped, the coquette, the conceptual boys and the police define themselves in relation to each other, and not separately. These are functions, partly old, of a new structure in formation, on the cusp of the present, to research and guess. It is within this structure that the characters evolve, distinguish themselves or move to opposite positions, ensuring fine relevance to the fictionalization. Even raw, the material of the observations – still smelling of field notebooks – creates complexity almost immediately: there is the boy who prefers to listen to the bandits’ conversations than to pray with his father at the Assembly of God. There is the loose animal who dreams of a fool's life for the love of a beautiful black woman. Another declares that "becoming a fool in the construction industry is never a good idea." This same man, shortly after, becomes a believer and gets a job at Sérgio Dourado: faith 'started to dispel the feeling of revolt against the segregation he suffered for being black, toothless and semi-illiterate'. The relational world created by the game of positions is at the intersection of the logic of everyday life, imaginative literature and the organized effort of self-knowledge of society." (SCHWARZ, 1999, p. 207)
Now, far from aesthetic distance, for the Racionais, drug trafficking and its murderous entrepreneurship are something to be fought against and, ultimately, exorcised from the community. Forcing the point a bit, much of the rap, with its appeals and warnings, tries to promote a kind of liberation of the periphery ravaged by the impetus of consumption without funds. The implicit dialogue is internal to the periphery, talking to the monetary subjects without money (in Robert Kurz's formula) in the Brazilian situation, who, between unemployment, precarious and humiliating employment and the seduction of goods, are always on the verge of transgressing and being caught up in degradation and violence, from which in part derives the importance of the theology of survival.
The condemnation of consumption, moreover, has a strong ethical accent of Christian reference, which is already indicated by the cross on the album cover, not to mention the biblical verses in the epigraph. Although it is emphatic Christianity, it is still Brazilian — with healthy syncretic pragmatism in the last rap with narrative ambition, “Fórmula mágico da paz”, Mano Brown gives the lyrics: “I have a lot to be thankful for // I thank God and the orishas // I reached twenty-seven / I am a winner, you know, bro? // I thank God and the orishas.”
The contrasts between the works are eloquent and partly fall back on the comparative cliché between the drizzly São Paulo and the wonderful and transgressive city of Rio, which relativizes our argument here, but the dark and widespread degrading poverty erases much of the contrast and highlights the similarities, lighting a beacon that is also a sign of the times.
Surviving in hell
Thinking about the layout of the album Surviving in hell,[I]The raps are framed by a religious mix between Catholic and Afro-Brazilian, with an opening and closing around one of Jorge Ben's most extraordinary songs, “Jorge da Capadócia”. Apparently, it goes back to a macumba point requesting a closed body to Jorge, a warrior saint, and to his counterpart in the Afro-Brazilian pantheon, Ogum. At the beginning of the song, the reference is explicit: “Ogunhê!// Jorge joined the cavalry/ And I am happy because I am also part of his company.”
At the end of the album, the rap “Salve” is accompanied by the melody and recurring arrangement of “Jorge da Capadócia”, which is equivalent to closing the body to review the violent reality of the outskirts, giving a liturgical air to the structure of the album. Emphasizing the gospel recipe to the sound of Jorge Ben, “Salve” ends like this:
I believe the word of a dark-skinned, curly-haired man
Who walked among beggars and lepers preaching equality
A man named Jesus
Only he knows my time
Hey, thief, I'm getting out of here.
Peace
With his body closed by Ogum, a dark and curly Jesus is greeted, a preacher of equality within the framework of a gospel of survival, from which arises a syncretic and committed profile to be displayed by the “marginal pastor”, to use the provocative formula of Acauam Silvério de Oliveira, in the sober essay that introduces the book of letters of the Surviving: "In Surviving in hell, the figure of the authoritarian teacher from the first albums gives way to the stance of the marginal pastor, the one who aims to “achieve peace through violence” (“Diary of a Prisoner”) carrying an “old Bible, an automatic pistol” and “a feeling of revolt” (“Genesis”). Unlike the teacher, with a distant outlook and master of the truth, the marginal pastor welcomes and guides his brothers through the valley of shadows based on the divine word, collectively constructed by the entire community of brothers. While the teacher’s objective is to transmit his truth, the pastor wants to save the souls of his lost brothers, freeing them from the hands of the devil, closer and more destructive than one can imagine […]. The discourse is one of acceptance and welcome, but also of rigor, because the salvation of the soul depends on the subject’s commitment to walking “in the right way”. (OLIVEIRA, 2018, p. 31)
In an attempt to name the perspective that organizes the raps, Acauam proposes a figure characterized by an ethical horizon filtered by evangelical Christianity and by the disposition of marginalized populations to revolt, which, ultimately, frames the album as a “theology of survival,” ritualistic and consciousness-raising. Curiously, he then configures himself, as a narrating rapper, as an armed marginal pastor within an album in which the extremities are closed by Umbanda and Catholicism. The contrast between the evangelical characterization proposed by the critic and the explicitly Catholic elements of the album is not explored, but it is interesting here to emphasize how much the discursive authority of the rappers in the album is constructed by a religious mixture with the elaboration of a lived experience that seeks to present itself as real, blurring the separation between the author and the singing voice.
On the other hand, in the rap group, the normative disposition to shape the possible fraternity of the brothers, in the terms of Maria Rita Kehl (2000), does not seem to point to any minimally stable collective practice. There is no neighborhood association, community center, school, etc. that organizes the protest or contestation, which reinforces the abstract nature of the appeal to the brothers spread throughout Brazil. They constitute the youth raffled off by capital and clustered in peripheries and slums that are segregated around urban centers that receive the destitute but necessary crowds to provide poorly paid services, most of which are informal and precarious. Here we would be on the verge of resuming a synthesis of the language of the PS, with blacks, poor, peripheral people, and many of them imprisoned, confirming the most fatal pathologies of Brazilian society, ranging from deep-rooted racism to segregation and extermination.
Racionais speak from the outskirts and address their internal audience, paying little attention to the city that is hostile to them, and which in turn is repudiated by them. Walter Garcia (2004) approaches this hostility with the disposition of someone who “sings with their head held high, as if they are ready to retaliate against everything” (p.172). “Revide” is perhaps the exact term for the rappers’ attitude towards the social situation, condensing one of the important tensions of the 1997 album: the absence of a political horizon, in a broad sense, is compensated by a posture of revolt, with profound effects on the Brazilian peripheral imaginary, ensuring the permanence of the album in the symbolic repertoire of contemporary marginal culture.
Weighing all the factors together, there is something in the normative horizon that structures the album, this kind of rigorous but syncretic religious appeal, emergency but abstract, something not very obvious. The violence that shortens the lives of the brothers is not analyzed in its internal links, as it partially operates City of God, being represented from a desperate appeal for life, for the interruption of violence.
In other words, the religious fraternity does not really exist, and could not exist, hence the album's somewhat exasperated pace, ending with the conclusion “Our law is flawed, violent and suicidal”, from “Fórmula Mágica da Paz”. Note that it is not the exclusionary law of Brazilian society where the tension is concentrated, despite being assumed, but the internal law of the periphery, which seems to be threatened more by the war between the brothers than by the militarized police extermination.
“I hear someone calling me”
The rap “I’m hearing someone call me” occupies the fourth track of Aboutexperiencing. It is sung in the first person by a criminal in death throes, after being shot at the behest of his former partner in crime. Accused of having committed some mistake, breaking the codes of solidarity of crime, he reviews his trajectory in the face of death, defending himself from the accusation while trying to make sense of the motivations that led to his imminent death.
A relevant fact is that, unlike what happens in practically the entire album, here there is no openly stated advice or warning about the dangers of crime and drugs; there is no space in this remembrance for the advice, between fraternal and aggressive, common to all raps, making it necessary to find the moral conception at play in the very composition of its plot.
It is a rap with a confessional tone, let's say, which brings complexity to the album as a whole by abolishing the conative device, to recall Jakobson's functions (MENDES, 2020), a conative function that is supportive and internal to the community that emerges between the provocative accounts and characterizations of peripheral blacks.
The title itself, the story of “Tô ouvido alguém me chama” (I’m hearing someone calling me) refers both to an abstract someone, a kind of death call, which will be the rap’s chorus, and to the narrator’s death scene. The first voice we hear is an anonymous, ironic and brutal appeal: “Hey, man, Guina sent this here for you!”, when the present is suspended and Mano Brown’s voice enters, along with the shrill beep of a heart monitor, indicating that our narrator is inside an ambulance, hanging on by a thread of life:
I hear someone shouting my name
It sounds like my brother, it's a man's voice
I can't see who's calling me
It's like Guina's voice
No, no, no, Guina is in jail
Could it be? I heard he died.
The doubt about who is shouting is followed by the association with Guina, the partner who may be in prison or dead, although the announced dispatch guarantees that he is the one who ordered the narrator's death. The shot followed by the dubious association is the starting point of the narrative, which leads the narrator to remember Guina along with his own trajectory in crime. Without any major paradox, there was a great friendship between the narrator and Guina, to the point that Guina became a sort of instructor (“My teacher in crime”). But the subject is not, curiously, trafficking, despite the ubiquity of drugs as in the rest of the album (“Smelled like hell/Vixe, without misery”), but rather robberies and bank assaults.
If we take into account that drugs are a prominent theme of the album, filtered through the warning about degrading consumption and the violence of the dispute over the enterprise, it is strange to include an 11-minute rap, without a chorus, about a type of crime that ends violently for the perpetrator, but strictly speaking does not seriously harm the rest of the periphery. Perhaps the type of adherence and understanding that the first-person narrative offers blocks the possibility of the crime in question being drug trafficking, otherwise it would be considered bad taste. Or rather, drug trafficking is unacceptable because it affects the young people of the community internally, while robbery is something more palatable as a narrative object, especially if it attacks the playboys, the bank, the hostile city, etc.
The remembrance begins with the narrator's assessment in favor of his partner Guina:
Bitch, that bro was awesome
Just a nervous motorcycle
Just a cool girl
Only fashionable clothes
He gave me a load of blouse
On that tape in the Itaim boutique
But without this sermon, bro, I want to be like that too.
Life of a thief is not so bad
The narrator's entry into a life of crime comes through the example of his friend. In a rap song that does not mention the favela, poverty or skin color, we can interpret the relationship between Guina and the narrator by the way his partner is characterized, as the mirroring of a poor guy in another who has self-esteem, consideration and access to goods.
The power of attraction exerted by the line-up of motorcycles, clothes and women in rhymes that echo as property, implicitly contrasting with the lack of material solutions, drives crime. The narrative interest of reiterating a commonplace within and outside rap as a sensible explanation of contemporary urban violence is shaped by the agility of the character's characterization, purified of the redundancy of the group's previous narratives.
Next comes the narration of the first bank robbery. The partnership between the brothers comes out well evaluated, despite/because of the death of a guard who reacts:
For the first time I saw the system on my feet
I was terrified, performance was excellent
Money in hand, the safe was already open
The Security Guard tried to be smarter
He went to defend the playboy's assets
It won't be possible to be a superhero anymore
The narrator's unprecedented enjoyment of power quickly slips into an indistinct commentary, as it could be from Guina or from the narrator who begins to resemble his partner, marking the revengeful defeat. The death is accompanied by the comment of someone who knows that the stolen amount would be reimbursed, which defines the zealous guard as practically a collaborator of capital. The cynical and brutal disposition modulates the desperate statement that will follow:
It won't be possible to be a superhero anymore
If the insurance will cover it…Hehe… Fuck it, so what?
Guina had no mercy
If you react, boom, it turns to dust.
My throat feels dry
And my life runs down the stairs
But if I leave here I will change
I hear someone calling me
After the dry commentary, which is somewhat effusive and drastic, comes the evaluation of the body itself and the bodily fluid that flows, indicating the wound that we will soon learn is fatal. The repetition of the title phrase accompanied by a desire to get off the wrong path reveals, in its insistence, its gravity. The narrative trick is efficient and will frame the memory of the adventurous and nefarious partnership.
The friends' partnership also includes the execution of a "Robin Hood" thief, beloved by the community and specialized in high-level crimes ("Thief, thief / And a good one / Specialist in breaking into mansions"). Intending to seize his weapons and the jewel loot, the duo invades the thief's house at night, who intimidates and provokes comparisons to the narrator. ("The guy is a nice guy, but I'm better / Here I am in the worst, he has what I want", "In the scavenger hunt he even grew up, he even ignored that I existed").
After contextualizing the reasons, the execution scene is macabre, punctuated by an omen that marks a turning point in the narrative:
Hmm…
He was addressing me
And laugh, laugh, like I was nothing
Laugh, as if it were a turn
It was in the game, my name is attitude
Once upon a time there was Robin Hood
Bad blood guy, fell with his eyes open
Like looking at me, swearing at me
I was very close and I hit the six
Guina went and gave three more
The mysterious behavior of the victim contributes to the narrator's growing paranoia, which will be followed by a cold-blooded execution, seconded by the phallic escalation of his partner Guina, shooting an already dead body. The brutality of the scene, perhaps the greatest in the group's entire trajectory, is immediately followed by the most sensitive entrance of the rap, returning from the violence to the life story of the partner, who at some point in their friendship recounted his trajectory.
Between generic/trivial explanations of the poor and violent origins to the transition to crime with an intelligent metaphor that reflects the literate formation in negative (“Far from the notebooks, much later / The first woman and the twenty-two / He took the entrance exam in the bus robbery / In a bank branch he graduated as a thief / No, he doesn’t feel inferior anymore / Hey, little guy, now I have my value”), Mano Brown’s narrative skill explores oscillations between regret and more or less modest ambition, with the agonizing narrator reaching complexity:
Thinking about it, what a waste
This happens a lot here in the area.
Intelligence and personality
Rotting behind a fucking fence
I just wanted to have morals and nothing else.
Show it to my brother
For the guys from the hood
A car and a scheme mine
Some money would solve my problem
Self-pity is condescending and seeks to soften the brutality that the character refuses to give up, after identifying to some extent with someone with intelligence and personality. The pathetic outburst will come next, accompanied by the regretful recognition that one is on a path of no return (“Now it’s too late, I could no longer / stop everything, or try to go back”).
The indicated paranoia, but without any apparent reason (“I was going crazy, I couldn’t sleep anymore”) accompanies the increasingly violent and degraded dynamics of the life of crime (“I needed to calm the adrenaline / I needed to stop taking cocaine”), combining with anticipatory dreams of guilt, which foreshadow the narrator’s death (“I dream every morning / of a child crying and someone laughing”, “I dreamed that a woman told me, I don’t know where / that an acquaintance of mine (who?) was going to kill me). The self-awareness of the dead end and the desire to change is framed by a religious appeal that accompanies it (“Does God still look at me?”).
The resumption of the dying and agonizing commentary comes together with the memory of her brother, who functions as a double for Guina. Having followed the right path, the brother builds a family and enters college (“He must be by now / Very close to graduating / I think it’s law, advocacy / I think that’s what he wanted / Honestly, I feel happy / Thank God, he didn’t do what I did”), contrasting with the initial images of the “professor in crime”. The separation from the family is a clear sign of explanation, as a possible appeal for community in the face of violence.
The last assault narrated contrasts with the two previous ones in every way:
They called me to rob a gas station
I was broke, it was August
About three-thirty, in broad daylight.
Everything was too easy, there was only one guard
I don't know, there wasn't time, I didn't see it, nobody saw it
They shot at us, a kid fell
I promised myself, it was the last time
Damn, he was only sixteen
While initiation into crime was accompanied by a mixture of pleasure and terror, now we have only a horror that is barely described, without irony. While murder was celebrated before, now it is an underage boy who loses his life, to the narrator's despair. The desire to stop is specified with an implicit connection to his brother (“No, no, no, I want to stop / Change my life, go somewhere else / A decent job, I don't know / Maybe I'll go back to school”), the only other male figure to share reference with Guina.
Immediately afterwards we have revealed the central conflict of the narrative, from which the narrator's situation arises:
Sleeping at night was difficult for me
Fear, bad thinking
I still hear laughter, crying, voices
The night was long, very neurotic
There are some crazy people behind me
What is it? I don't even know
He says Guina is in jail and I'm the one who snitched
Who of all people, me of all people, look, look
That I always held the police reports
No, I'm not stupid, I know what it's like
But I don't have the money that these guys want.
Greater than fear, what I had was disappointment
The betrayal, the scoundrelism, the treason
My allies, my brothers, my partners
Wanting to kill me for money
A serious offense in the sociability of crime, snitching is treason punishable by death. The narrator denies it until the end, but there are hints of ambiguity that arouse distrust in relation to the narrator, who seems to pretend not to understand at various moments. Resignation, we now know, is accompanied by the recognition that death is inevitable (“Dead man, snitch, without being / Fuck it, let it happen / There is nothing else to do”).
The final scene, almost like a suicide, is accompanied by a kind of epiphany:
That night I decided to go out
It was too hot, I couldn't sleep.
I was going to take my cannon, I don't know, I decided not to
It's quick, there's no precision
Lots of kids, few cars, I'm going to get some air
I've finished my cigarette, I'm going to the bar [So, what's up, and that one over there?]
I'm slow, I'm slow
There are some cheap ones that you can't tell
That has great value and you don't see it
A tree in the square, children in the street
The fresh wind on your face, the stars, the moon
The rap’s ending is pathetic; the killer is a “new kid with a scared face” who carries a gun that was a gift from the victim/narrator to Guina, the .380 taken from the thief who was murdered at the beginning. The last lines evoke more than four shots, preceded by the opening phrase “Hey, bro, Guina sent this here to you!”. The narrator continues with the same hope for change, which we now know is a fatal wound, involved in the circular violence of the crime (“I want to live, I can’t be dead / But if I get out of here I’ll change / I hear someone calling me”). Soon after, the sound of the heart monitor stabilizes.
The whole thing sounds somewhat didactic and emphatic, which contradicts the situation of agony and fear, but the strength of the characterization of the macabre whole is remarkable, with an ending that oscillates between self-deception and lucidity. The pleasures and emotional peaks of the criminal and transgressive trajectory are interrupted by some regret and remorse, resulting in the melancholic ending. Thinking about the position of the track analyzed within the album, we start, once again, from Acauam de Oliveira's formulation:
In a very free manner, and taking advantage of the theological suggestions on the album, we can outline the various parts of this “worship” […] We would thus have the following division: a song of praise and protection directed to the warrior saint (“Jorge da Capadócia”); reading of the marginal gospel (“Genesis”); the entrance of the preacher of conduct, explaining (or confusing, depending on the need) the meanings of the divine word (“Chapter 4, verse 3”); the moment of the testimonies of the souls that were lost to the devil, with tragic results (“Tô ouvido alguém me chama” and “Rapaz comum”); a musical intermezzo to mourn those deaths, interrupted by gunshots that start the cycle all over again; the sermon or central message (Carandiru massacre) that links the fate of those subjects to that of the entire community (“Diário de um detento”), a key to understanding everyone’s fate and a description of hell itself; examples of the devil’s way of acting within the community (“Periferia é periferia”); examples of the devil's way of acting outside the community (“What lie will I believe”). At the end, a moment of self-reflection on the limits of the spoken word itself (“Wizard of Oz” and “Magic formula for peace”) and thanks to all those present, true bearers of the divine spark (“Salve”). (OLIVEIRA, 2018 p. 33)
Discounting the ignored tension between the supposed evangelical character and the explicitly Catholic and Afro-Brazilian references, the creative suggestion of a liturgical continuity between the tracks is also a valuable formulation. Thinking about the conduct of a service carried out by a marginal pastor, the rap in question, “the moment of the testimonies of the souls that were lost to the devil, with tragic results”, would function as an example of the result of a life of crime, a warning.
The religious dimension stitches together the stories, with the cult/album being opened and closed by Saint George/Ogum, and, if the set of raps contains an explicit didactic appeal, the sober and aggressive fatalism guides the desolate landscape and nourishes resistance.
Having examined, but not exhausted, the case of transgressive and agonizing rap, it is worth revisiting the entire argument that underpins the first part of this text. In part, we propose here a temporal framework that illuminates our 1990s and vigorously refracts the market dynamics accompanied by monetary stability and democratizing measures of the years under Fernando Henrique.
Caetano Veloso's essayistic memory, with its remarkable rhetorical finish and precise and tense characterization of characters and events, revealed a writer full of resources, despite mobilizing such resources in an ambivalent movement that goes from open polemic with the left to the mythological salute of Brazilianness, from the refined examination of the cultural scene to the superstition surrounding the democratizing character of market forces.
This unequal set of events sometimes results in an informed and sharp critical effort, but it is accompanied by a blurred celebration of the variety and richness of Brazilian culture, which would be ready to establish a position that is ultimately relevant for Brazil in the group of nations. This paradoxical pride, to a certain extent the heir to the provocations of the Tropicalists, contrasts with the world of blacks, the poor and the peripheral, who found in Racionais MCs and Paulo Lins an enunciation that emerges from within the periphery and reveals tensions and disasters capable of reorganizing many of the formulas and promises attributed to the celebrated modernity. The internal point of view of the peripheral favela, which does not lack somber lyricism, even poses a challenge for the history of Brazilian literature in the late 20th century.
*Homer Vizeu Araujo is a full professor of Brazilian literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
*Pedro Baumbach Manica He is a master's student in literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
References
ANDERSON, Perry. “Fernando Henrique”. In: Brazil Apart. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
GARCIA, Walter. “Listening to Racionais MC's”. Teresa, Literature Magazine Brazilian. No. 4/5. Sao Paulo, 2004. p. 166-180.
KEHL, Maria Rita. “The orphan fraternity: the civilizing effort of rap in the outskirts of São Paulo”. In: KEHL. MR (org.). Fraternal function. New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 209-244.
KURZ, Robert. The collapse of modernization. São Paulo: Peace and Land. 1993.
LINS, Paul. City of God🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997.
MENDES, Rodrigo Estella. Dialectics of straight talk. SEDA – Journal of Letters of Rural-RJ, v. 4, n. 10, p. 138-159, March 21, 2020.
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Note
[I] The lyrics cited were compared with the lyrics book and the tracks, and the authors were responsible for separating them into verses.
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