CREATION AND COMPLICITY IN BRAZILIAN POPULAR MUSIC: anthropological look

Abstract

How can we assist the reflection on the phenomenon of popular music in Brazil to advance beyond those aesthetic categories internal to the history of music, with the objective of interweaving it with the different possible fields of perfomance and reception in the polyphonic space of representations in urban culture? The text suggests a few possible paths which can perhaps contribute to widen the theoretical field and its capacity to accept popular songs and present forms of listening. It reflects upon certain characteristics and specificities of Brazilian popular music and its permanent tension with the culture industry. To this end, it expounds briefly the ideas of Adorno with respect to the propensity to banality and homogenisation to which the modern listener would be subject in the context of fetischistic cultural commodities. It then considers the multiple uses of song, their ambiguity and discomfort in being associated to existing cultural systems. It admits the insufficiency of aesthetic and sociological criteria in understanding the mass musical phenomenon, and proposes an anthropological look in the sense of expounding and incorporating as a problem the vital question which can thus be formulated: who receives the songs and to what extent do structurally differeentiated subjects reelaborate (or not) that which, according to Adorno, they are "forced to hear?" it alludes to the idea of the indirect way (Rouanet) illustrating it with such interdisciplinary notions as that of music as a "warehouse of desires" (Wisnik), the singer as spokesman of groups and also the notion of complicity between a given social formation and its expression in a cultural product. Finally the article concludes that the complexity of the study of popular consumption music in Brazil demands not a wide generalization which suffocates the peculiarities scattered around the immense stage of expectations and beats, but, inversely, requires a crestive and multidisciplinary effort in an attempt to localize, case by case, both the expression of the finished product - its conditions of production and its aesthetic choices - as well as the discernible horizon which socially, psychically and historically prepared the arrival of certain singable forces and the types of flux and reciprocity which they engender between crestors and listeners.