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Epilogue
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Epilogue Everyone played. Many of our leaders out there, the majority of them, played guitar and, in that other time, were musicians. What I mean is that we had an attitude like they have in Brazil: to be someone you have to play soccer or you have to sing—to be known, to be on top. So, many of our leaders out there, I won’t cite names, also dedicated themselves to music. Even people with degrees left medicine to go play music, meaning that music gave you much more, it brought you fame and it brought you money. So they abandoned other arts and in that period everyone was a musician. Today no. They want to be politicians, ministers in parliament, and I don’t know what. And why? Because music has no expression . . . Today music has lost its expression, the politicians muffled music and we want to reactivate the situation. Because music is a part of what’s good. It is a nutrient for any people, from any society. —Chico Coio, February 15, 2002 I don’t completely agree with Chico Coio on the state of Angolan music. Young Angolan musicians have produced some mordant lyrics that punctuate infectious if not necessarily complex beats. And some young artists, in particular Paulo Flores, have gone acoustic and reinvigorated the semba of yesteryear . But while Coio says Angolan music has, in his words, “no expression,” he also says much more than that, pointing to a connection between music and politics. If in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was both financially and socially lucrative to be a musician, today financial and social lucre is reserved for political elites and those connected to them. Indeed, the penury in which some of the best musicians of the late colonial period now find themselves often gave me pause. Their economic conditions are related to the change from a centralized economy to a market-driven one in the early 1990s. Coio bemoans not only the economic frailty and low social standing of many musicians but the poverty of today’s musical content. When he says that “the politicians muffled music,” Coio refers to the time in the postindependence 190 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. period when the state created a politicized environment in which expression was constrained, musicians censored themselves, and trova was promoted over semba. By 1992 the state had stopped supporting music altogether. As Carlos Lamartine put it: “Hoje cada um puxa a brasa para a sua sardinha” (today each person grabs charcoal for his sardine—in other words—today each person fights to cook his own fish). In this way, an opening of the economic market and, to a more limited degree, a relaxation on the limits of what can be said has been accompanied by a restriction on who can speak, since access to the public sphere is largely a function of liquidity. If Angolan music today has “no expression,” that deficiency has less to do with content, with lyrics and instrumentation, than it has to do with context. In the late colonial period what made music vital to nation was the conjuncture: the combination of content, venues, people, the broader political climate (anticolonial war and the euphoria of independence), economic changes, and the technological and commercial development of communications. This is not to say that music is no longer important or interesting. Trenchant social critiques still predominate in lyrics, but the music scene has changed and its dynamism has waned because the elements that created the former context have fallen away. One symptom of that disarticulation is the change in venues and the kinds of music played there. When I arrived for the first time in Luanda in November 1997, the city offered a plethora of discos but only one pricey venue, Xavarotti, had live music. Disc jockeys dominated the discos and parties of the city, playing a mix of music as cosmopolitan as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Discos and parties were always packed with young and old alike as people danced into the wee hours. But otherwise, these discos had little to do with the clubs of yesteryear, which were just that: a thing of the past. Although I did not know it at the time, the absence of live...