Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil

Conclusion

Conclusion When Donga died in 1974, Brazilian musicians were in the process of adapting themselves to life under the Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição (Central Office of Collection and Distribution, ecad), a central clearinghouse established by the military government in 1973 to regulate the collection and dispersal of author’s rights payments and the center of vigorous debates today. The agency was set in place with Law 5.988, a large piece of legislation meant to provide the final word on all questions related to intellectual property.1 Today, the ecad serves as an umbrella organization that coordinates, regulates, and oversees the collection and distribution of music royalties, tasks still executed on the ground mainly by the ubc, the sbacem, and newer organizations. Law 5.988 seemed to draw to a close a process of professionalization many decades in the making. But today, enforcement of author’s rights law remains still a Sisyphean task, and the ecad has done little to clarify the murky calculus that governs artists’ payments. Collecting and distributing author’s rights remains an extrastate obligation, revised by Law 5.988 to match what was, in 1973, an emerging neoliberal order. The first entry in an ecad pamphlet entitled “Important Points about Author’s Rights” explains that the organization is a “private entity—it is not a public organization.”2 Nor has the ecad significantly altered long-­ standing assumptions about music. In 2006, a law student wrote, “Unfortunately, for a large swath of society, musicians are always seen as bohemians, malandros , and even vagabundos. In other words, musicians are stereotyped as people who work with no legal responsibilities.”3 Though much has changed in the last one hundred years, in some ways the challenges facing musicians of the twenty-­ first century look a lot like those of the twentieth. We can understand today’s déjà-­ vu-­ all-­ over-­ again feeling more clearly by briefly returning to the comments that the ubc president Fernando Brant made about Gilberto Gil in 2007. By equating the ubc’s approach to intellectual property rights with modernity 245 Conclusion and civilization, Brant recycled the same rhetoric that the organization’s leadership has used since its inception. More troublesome is his reference to Gil as “the barbarian minister” and his incendiary (if confusing) comments about slavery and Afro-­ Brazilian culture. Separated by nearly a century, and triggered for different reasons, Donga’s “Pelo telefone” controversy and Gil’s embrace of Creative Commons suggest how history indeed often moves in a circular fashion. With this circularity in mind, I conclude with several final points. Race, Gender, and Brazil’s Everywhere-­ Nowhere State Between the final days of slavery and the rise of the military dictatorship, subtle tensions between musician control and agency were institutionalized via the music market and through the defense of artists’ financial interests and intellectual property rights. Songs were tracked and turned into money. Instruments were claimed, and ownership was disputed. Bodies were marked and probed, and blackness was squeezed, stretched, and skewed.The actors in all of this were rarely on level playing fields. But for the most part they were after the same thing: a stake in Brazil and the right to map their own definitions of samba, race, and nation. As Afro-­ Brazilian musicians collectively transformed themselves from human property into professionals, they rarely faced the kind of straightforward repression depicted in the punishment paradigm. More often they struggled against less obvious though hardly less onerous projects, some of which they helped construct and preserve.Through collaboration and confrontation with others, they produced conceptual maps of race, gender, and Brazil. Though the exact coordinates often varied, certain lines remained firm. Despite repeated attempts to define themselves as intellectuals and professionals, Rio’s black musicians found a surer path to inclusion and acceptance, however limited, through the embrace of long-­ standing stereotypes that emphasized the emotive, spiritual, apolitical , and anticommercial. That embrace did not necessarily mean full capitulation, but it did effectively marginalize the bolder and more radical personas and projects advanced by the likes of Eduardo das Neves, Pixinguinha , and Wilson Batista, each of whom challenged (in very different ways) popular definitions of blackness, masculinity, and malandragem. Standard depictions of Rio’s black musicians paper over internal differences—especially in terms of class and social background—and present an overwhelmingly male picture. If Neves and Batista’s entrepre- 246 Conclusion neurialism...