Contemporary Carioca: Technologies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene by Frederick Moehn (review)

In July 2012, the Brazilian daily O Globo published an article about the “new Brazilianists”: music scholars who are pushing their field in novel directions by moving beyond the familiar cast of characters (Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, and others) and genres (samba and bossa nova) that have dominated scholarly production for decades. Frederick Moehn’s recent book was among the works profiled by O Globo and is a great example of the exciting things that are happening as the “new Brazilianists” till fresh ground.

The text is divided into five chapters (plus an introduction, conclusion, and two appendices), each of which focuses on a musician or band based in Rio de Janeiro. None of the artists—Marcos Suzano, Lenine, Pedro Luís e A Parede, Fernanda Abreu, nor Paulinho Moska—are enthroned in the scholarly canon, though each, to varying degrees, is well known and well received by listeners. In discussing each, Moehn engages frequently with scholars from outside Brazil, especially Louise Meintjes (Sound of Africa!), who, like Moehn, is interested in the often-overlooked dynamics and exchanges of the recording studio.

In the studio, on tour, and during interviews, Moehn’s artists find Brazil’s musical and cultural paradigms to be both limiting and inspirational. Chapter one features a photo of Suzano’s old, beaten-up pandeiro (a rough equivalent of the tambourine) attached to a jumble of wires, a microphone, and foot pedal effects (p. 29). The photo is jarring, even blasphemous, to those who believe in a strict separation of traditional and modern, acoustic and electric, national and international. To Moehn, the photo is a vivid metaphor for the kind of fluidity and dynamic mixture and exchange that has informed Brazilian music for centuries. Pedro Luís tells Moehn that Brazilians are “terrible about fitting into a [single] category” (p. 13). The program for a Lenine show in France echoes similar themes, describing his music as “a fundamentally Brazilian act, a cultural cannibalism, the definitive form of the mixture” (p. 56).

Nearly all of the artists who Moehn interviews reference racial mixture and cultural anthropophagy and, like many before them, link their work to Oswald de Andrade’s famous “Cannibalist Manifesto.” As self-fashioned heirs of Andrade, these musicians struggle to break free of what preceded them, using electronic and digital innovations in groundbreaking directions. But their constant references to cannibalism and mixture are also indicative of the enduring strength of tropes about Brazil’s ostensibly unique propensity for racial mixture and the digesting and refashioning of foreign influences. Moehn lets the reader decide how to interpret this dynamic and the questions that arise from it: is the mixing taking place in contemporary carioca studios fundamentally different from the music being produced elsewhere? More to the point, is Brazilian cultural anthropophagy really all that different from examples of appropriation and mixture in other postcolonial American settings?

Critics, fans, and scholars will surely have their own strong opinions about this, just as they will have different feelings about the fact that the artists featured in this outside-the-canon exploration are, like many ensconced inside it, white and affluent. Regardless, Moehn’s work is important because it brings to the table fresh, interesting material that he analyzes with a nice combination of ethnomusicological and anthropological insights and frames. Present and future “new Brazilianists” will do well to follow his lead by examining the multiple processes that go into making music and studying artists who, for one reason or another, have received little scholarly attention.