Co-option, cultural resistance, and Afro-Brazilian identity: a history of the pagode samba movement in rio de Janeiro.

Lauded by popular composer and scholar Nei Lopes as "the most important musical phenomenon of the 1980s in Brazil" (1993, 7), the pagode trend represents a major turning point for the contemporary urban samba, Brazil's most famous musical genre. Although samba is an Afro-Brazilian expression nourished largely by the black and mulatto working-classes in Rio de Janeiro (McGowan and Pessanha 1991, 28), the genre's constituent communities in that city (and throughout Brazil) have long experienced a co-option of their music by Brazil's dominant classes. This situation has facilitated the abandonment of some of the samba's most traditional elements in the name of commercial success or other motivations. In particular, the Brazilian intelligentsia's tendency to regard traditional black Brazilian expression as a relic of the past, irrelevant to the more pressing concerns of modernity (and thus of internationalization), has deeply affected the samba and other Brazilian art forms (Lopes 1993, 6-7). Yet, ever since the genre's inception in Rio around the turn of the century, many samba musicians have countered co-option and its economic, social, ideological, and musical ramifications with a strong show of cultural resistance; the pagode current of the 1970s and 80s is exemplary of this legacy of resistance.

Based on the informal, communal gathering of musicians (pagode), the movement was generated spontaneously in Rio's working-class suburbs in the mid-1970s partially as a response to the commercialization and corruption of the city's escolas de samba, or samba schools (large-scale, organized carnival parade groups). The resultant style blended traditional elements of the samba that had been somewhat neglected up to that point with a modified instrumentation and a modern, innovative sound. As such, the pagode phenomenon captivated a diverse Brazilian audience which included members of the nation's largely white middle class. At the same time, it asserted a traditional Afro-Brazilian identity that countered the pervasive internationalizing trend in Brazilian popular music--which has impacted Rio's music industry particularly since the 1970s (Lopes 1986, 93).

In the mid- to late- 1980s, the "rootsy" pagode style of samba and its accompanying event (the informal samba gathering) were popular throughout Brazil. But by the early 1990s, a new, more commercialized samba wave--also called pagode--had replaced the older style in the media. Today, the traditional pagode is confined mainly to black and mixed-race working class neighborhoods where, despite its marginalization in the media, it still enjoys a vigorous appeal alongside the new pagode and imported black musics.

This article attempts to show how the two idioms known as pagode form divergent sonic and ideological perspectives: one of a national, tradition bound Afro-Brazilian cultural lineage (the older pagode), and the other, of an internationalized black Brazilian aesthetic (the new pagode). I examine both movements, with an emphasis on the earlier one, in light of co-option, cultural resistance, and Afro-Brazilian identity, while also touching upon questions of race, class, and authenticity. (1) I contend that the history of the pagode reveals the struggles Afro-Brazilians face in asserting the samba tradition in the mass media and wider society, while also exemplifying the tenacity and renovative character of that tradition.

A History of Pagode

Origins and A History of the Original Movement

Curiously derived from "pagoda" (an Asian temple), the term pagode (pronounced "pa-GOH-gee") literally means "fun," "joke," or "merrymaking" in Portuguese (Lopes n.d., 51). However, in the parlance of the carioca (native of Rio de Janeiro), and of urban Brazilians in general, the word has also long meant an informal, communal gathering of sambistas (samba practitioners) as well as the samba music played at such an event (ibid., 56). Some well-known musicians even claim that during the slave era the term was used to mean a party on the slave plantations, although I have not encountered written historical evidence to back this assertion. (2)