O futuro da saudade: O novo fado e os novos fadistas (review)

Just as the last several decades have produced a new generation of fadistas with particularly broad international reach, fado scholarship has experienced a similar period of heightened activity and circulation. Recent fado scholarship has emerged out of a wide range of disciplines including musicology, history, ethnomusicology, sociology, anthropology and performance studies. Manuel Halpern's O futuro da saudade: O novo fado e os novos fadistas, one of the newest fado titles, differs from the flurry of studies produced in the 1990s and early twenty-first century in that it does not attempt a strictly academic approach and specifically focuses on what he and others have termed "novo fado" or new fado.

Halpern is a young journalist who begins his introduction with a surprising confessional hook: "I am Portuguese and I don't like fado. Am I a traitor to my country?" (21). This opener prepares readers for Halpern's dynamic, down-to-earth writing style whose occasional passages of direct address create a rhetorical intimacy which should nudge this book beyond the boundaries of special-interest and into the realm of a wider general readership. Halpern decides, a few paragraphs down, that he is not in fact a national traitor for disliking fado, but is simply a product of his twenty-something generation, a group that generally fails to identify with "traditional" fado icons such as Carlos Paredes and Amália Rodrigues. All is not lost for the purposes of his book, however, as Halpern reveals his interest in "new fado," a generation of younger singers and instrumentalists whose music "translates [traditional fado] into a language closer to our days" (21).

The stated objective of O futuro da saudade is to understand new fado through an examination of early fado production and then late twentieth century innovators, identifying "roots and indices" of change in order to pinpoint the distinguishing features of this new generation of fado protagonists (21). The first part of the book explores fado history from its nineteenth century origins to what Halpern calls the "pioneers of the nineteen eighties." The second part lays out a definitional framework for understanding what constitutes novo fado. And the third part provides a detailed, musician by musician portrait of new fado practitioners, using newspaper articles, websites, biographies, discographies, interviews and an examination of fado lyrics to assess each artist's unique style, contribution to the industry, and reception by domestic and foreign publics.

In describing the book's constitutive features, it is also important to note that Rui Vieira Nery's rousing preface raises and essentially answers in the negative, a fundamental question related to the book's contents: Is so-called "new fado" historically unparalleled in its newness? Is new fado new enough to be considered a self-contained, distinct musical moment, without precedent, and unique within fado's temporal sweep? What distinguishes new fado from other periods over the last 150 years where clusters of musicians pushed the urban ballad form into new social, musical, lyrical, political and geographical territory? Vieira argues convincingly against an exceptionalist framework, positing new fado as just another phase in the protean evolution of the form. And, on the heels of the preface, O futuro da saudade, does not present a persuasive perspective to the contrary.

Part II makes a claim for new fado's uniqueness, identifying new fado as a movement which does not spring from the collective intention of fado musicians, but rather has come to be defined a posteriori according to noticeable "points in common" among certain contemporary fadistas. According to Halpern, new fado brings together fadistas who began their careers in the 1990s and can be distinguished from fado antigo by its heterogeneity. He states, "In opposition to fado antigo which was relatively homogenous . . . new fado, as we will see, shoots off in various, almost schizophrenic directions" (96). I agree with Halpern that the term "new fado" has been in use for several years, and...