Não Identificado: Racial Ambiguity and the Sonic Blackness of Gal Costa

Today, singer gal costa is widely considered one of Brazil’s national treasures, a performer whose voice, musical stylings, and overall persona are lauded as essential to the legacy of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), which is itself considered one of Brazil’s greatest cultural exports. In a 2015 TV Globo television special celebrating her fifty-year career as a popular music singer and performer, Costa was declared Brazil’s greatest female singer. Affectionately referring to Costa by her childhood name, “Graçinha,” the special’s host opens by ref lecting that “Gal Costa singing is poetry.”¹ She continues to describe Costa as “extremely refined, and versatile,” a singer who “perfectly dominates technique and has one of the most beautiful voices in [Brazilian] music.” Some twenty years prior, a similar special aired on another of Brazil’s major news programs, SBT Reporter, in which Costa was likewise declared to have “one of the most beautiful voices in [Brazilian] music.”²

While such tributes to Costa’s musical legacy follow different narrative threads, most tend to arrive at similar destinations: the assertion of Costa as a central piece of Brazil’s sonic history, both at home and abroad. They also overwhelmingly tend to focus on Costa’s later career, and on the delicate and refined vocal tones that became her trademark. Beginning with her 1980 album Aquarela do Brasil, Costa has shaped both her performative and vocal character around a ballad-heavy, soft and sultry persona, taking up the lead of legendary Brazilian singers such as Astrud Gilberto and Nara Leão. Lost in these portrayals of Costa as a musical ambassador are the often contradictory, dissonant, and ambiguous performances that marked her early career. In the first decade of her career, Costa experimented with myriad musical and performative styles, borrowing from an assortment of artists and forms, both Brazilian and non-Brazilian, and often experimenting with the timbres of her voice, as well as blending and manipulating non-linguistics vocalizations, her musical accompaniment, and the technological mediations of her performance space (most notably, those of the music studio).

Costa also, in these early years, played on the vocal motifs of American blues and soul music. Whereas in her career’s very beginnings, performing both as Maria da Graça and brief ly as Gal Costa, she employed a refined, soft, and musically articulate vocal style that suited the Bossa Nova music she performed, she soon adapted a more melismatic vocal style borrowed from noted inf luences such as James Brown, whose downbeat-focused rhythm, vocal groans, and shrieks became signature features of Costa’s sound. She also began defying articulation for the sake of sonic dissonance, merging non-linguistic vocal sounds with electric instrumentation and feedback—a motif she credited to the psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Beatles. At a time when Brazilian Popular Music was notably nationalist and folk-inspired, Costa’s approach was distinctly diasporic and avant-garde.

By employing these North America and British vocal and sonic gestures, Costa participated in a transnational soundscape of diasporic blackness at a time when many Brazilian artists, social commentators, and politicians wished to move away from such markers of racial difference. These moves away from difference, and toward the now well-known myth of racial democracy, were not merely cultural, but rather had very real political consequence, particularly after the enactment of the Ato Institucional No. 5 (AI-5), a decree by the ruling military regime of Artur da Costa e Silva, which from 1968–1978 declared that all acts deemed “clearly subversive” to the “defense, development, and well-being of [the state’s] people” be punished with imprisonment and suspension of the rights of citizenship.³ The AI-5 placed Brazilian artists and musicians under close scrutiny. By the time Costa’s self-titled debut album was released in 1969, the AI-5 had already famously led to the arrest and exile of two of Brazil’s most popular musicians: Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the founders of the tropicália movement of the...