Let’s Makes Some Noise: Axé and the African Roots of Brazilian Popular Music (review)

Despite its title, this book is less about the roots than about the branches—or better yet, about the flowering—of diasporic awareness in contemporary Brazil. It explores that topic primarily through participant observation, providing an ethno-musicological look at popular culture in the city of Bahia, and more specifically, at the music that erupted from Bahia’s annual street carnival in the 1980s to become an upstart rival of Rio-based samba in the national soundtrack of Brazilian carnival.

The story begins with a discussion of Yoruban religion and the principle of axé, a life force that flows through the everyday and spiritual worlds, binding them together. Music and dance function as fluid performances through which axé flows back and forth between those two worlds. In Brazil’s Yoruba-based candomblé religion, of which Bahia is the national focus, spirits enter and possess the bodies of their devotees in ceremonies mediated strongly through drumming and dancing. During the last two decades, young musicians of Bahia have been bringing candomblé rhythmic influences into popular carnival music. In some cases, these musicians have real, on-going connections with candomblé temples—one foot in the terriero where sacred dancing occurs, so to speak, and one foot on the trios eléctricos, the rolling musical stages that characterize street carnival in majority-black Bahia, making it a much more mass-participation event than Rio’s more famous carnival celebration. Henry spent time with these musicians, especially the drummers who animate the city’s popular carnival parade groups, the counterparts of Rio’s escolas de samba. In Bahia, the parade groups are called afoxés and blocos afro, and their animating spirit is much more Afro-centric than that of Rio’s escolas de samba. “Axé music,” now a standard marketing category nationally, is the vehicle by which these young musicians are managing to extend that spirit through the nation at large, according to the author of this book, in a process that he labels (rather awkwardly) “let’s make some noise.”

If none of this sounds very academic, it isn’t. And, in many ways, that is quite appropriate and refreshing. This is a thoroughly engaged scholar who has no interest in ascending an ivory tower. A more academic, more methodologically rigorous approach to this study, one more steeped in narrow disciplinary issues and contexts, would necessarily have been lacking in axé. The enthusiasm for Brazilian popular culture that Henry brought back from his research in Brazil spills out of every page of this book. The author’s enthusiasm is infectious, and curious readers without a specialized background in the topic will find in it something fascinating and unique: an in-depth discussion of candomblé, of carnival in Bahia, and of Brazilian popular music brought accessibly and meaningfully together in English. Even the author’s constant foregrounding of his own presence—which is hard to avoid, perhaps in the description of participant observation, but still overdone here, as when the author breathlessly recounts bumping into the famous musician Caetano Veloso at an outdoor festival—even that is likely to please the non-academic reader of this book. The author quotes what Veloso said to him (apparently one word, “alegria’) and provides a photograph of the moment. Academic specialists in the study of Brazilian popular music, on the other hand, will find little in this book that they have not read elsewhere, and they are likely to find Henry’s approach excessively impressionistic—as when, for example, in order to bolster the argument that “a variety of songs and artists have contributed to the popularization of axé music,” he offers a table listing twenty of his personal favorites tunes (p. 172).

I began the book wearing my academic specialist’s hat, but found myself grumbling so much about such matters that I took it off and tossed...