15. Forró Eletrônico

Introduction

Audio: Som da Massa, “Transcontinental Baião”

JCV: I’m Juliana Cantarelli Vita.

SW: And I’m Schuyler Whelden.

JCV: This is Massa, a podcast about Brazilian music and culture.

SW: Juliana and I are musicians and music professors. In each episode we dive into a specific genre, song, artist, or issue in Brazilian music to try to understand how it works and what it means.  

JCV: Schuyler, today is the last episode (for now) in our forró series.

SW: Didn’t we say that our last episode was the last forró episode?

JCV: Yeah, but then we made this one.

SW: Whoa. Are you from the future?

JCV: Yes. But I can’t talk about that or I might mess up the timeline.

SW: Okay, fair enough. Let’s go back in time, then, and listen to some music from the 1990s and 2000s: the genre called forró eletrônico, or “electronic forró.”

JCV: Sounds good! Jumping right in, let’s listen to the song “De Janeiro a Janeiro” by Limão com Mel.

Audio: Limão com Mel, “De Janeiro a Janeiro” (YouTube) (Spotify)

JCV: Limão com Mel was a very popular band when I was a teenager. They played giant stages and they would usually start the show coming out of a lime.

SW: Like the fruit? Like a giant lime, on stage? 

JCV: Yes, the whole band is in the lime and the lime opens, and they all come out.

SW: No honeycomb?

JCV: Not that I remember.

SW: Because the band name means “lime with honey.”

JCV: Oh. Oh, right. But no. Just the lime. Once they all came out, the show would start.

SW: So, you went to a lot of these shows?

JCV: Yes, in fact, I did. Because my friends were all into them and they would drag me to the concerts.

SW: And you were too good for this music?

JCV: Yes. I was a grumpy teenager. I liked prog rock and Dvořák symphonies.

SW: Ah, so it sounds like you were a snob.

JCV: Very much so.

SW: It’s okay. I was too.

JCV: I remember this moment when I was in seventh grade and my social studies teacher was talking about culture and how one culture is not better than another and how things co-exist. And I remember thinking, “oh, so Limão com Mel is not more important than Chico Buarque.”

SW: Oh, so that’s actually a pretty good way into this discussion.

JCV: Yes, because forró and its sub-genres are very much tied up with issues of class and how popular music might reinforce or recreate class boundaries. 

SW: In our last episode, we discussed forró universitário, which was made and consumed by middle-class university students from São Paulo, who looked to older examples of forró as a kind of “roots” music.

JCV: Forró eletrônico is kind of the opposite. Its practitioners tend to come from the same sociogeography of forró’s pioneers, which is different than forró universitário, but don’t adhere to traditional performance conventions.

SW: Yeah, as we just heard they really play with the musical qualities of forró and stretch it beyond its earlier incarnations.

JCV: Speaking of which, let’s talk about the music!

SW: Sounds good. First, let’s just acknowledge that this is not faithful to any of the classic forró dance rhythms.

JCV: No. It’s loosely connected to the baião and forró rhythms—it’s even reminiscent of a xaxado in some ways—but it’s not actually any of these in any consistent way.

SW: Right. The zabumba pattern associated with baião is:

Audio: zambumba playing baião pattern

SW: And the xaxado pattern is:

Audio: zambumba playing xaxado pattern

SW: But here, the drum set takes over for the zabumba and doesn’t play any of these.

JCV: But it’s also not just adopting a pop-rock drum pattern.

SW: No. Combining the bass and drums, we have a 3+3+2 pattern, which is common in xaxado and coco.

JCV: The fact that this rhythm is sort of forró and sort of not forró showcases how forró eletrônico musicians drew on the influence of a number of northeastern genres.

SW: Like what?

JCV: Well, there’s guitarrada, which we’ll do an episode on in the future.

SW: I can’t wait for you to teach me all about that.

JCV: I can’t wait to learn all about that!

SW: Yeah, just to give you a taste, guitarrada is a guitar-based instrumental music from the state of Pará. Guitarrada is itself a blend of some Brazilian music styles, like carimbó with other Latin American genres like cumbia.

JCV: Guitarrada is sometimes called instrumental lambada because it has a lot in common with the genre of lambada, which we’ll discuss a little later. This is Mestre Vieira, one of the pioneers of the genre:

Audio: Vieira e Seu Conjunto, “Rei da Lambada” (YouTube) (Spotify)

SW: You can hear that heavy accent on the 4th beat of the measure and the bass pattern is kind of similar to what we hear in Limão com Mel.

JCV: Yeah, the bass outlines the chord progression kind of like the forró eletrônico example.

SW: Yeah, though the bass here plays a slightly different rhythm.

JCV: Yeah. And another major influence would be axé, a musical genre from the state of Bahia. Here’s the mega-hit “O Canto da Cidade” by Daniela Mercury:

Audio: Daniela Mercury, “O Canto da Cidade” (YouTube) (Spotify)

SW: Aha, there’s that 3+3+2 pattern in the bass that we heard in the forró eletrônico example. But also there is something in the vocal delivery that seems relevant.

JCV: Yeah, forró eletrônico singers, like Ângela Espíndola who’s the lead singer on this track, tend toward the less intimate performance style. They are showing off their pipes, if you will.

SW: It’s kind of the opposite of the forró universitário style we talked about last time.

JCV: I think that’s fair. Okay, so the rhythmic patterns have diverged from the classic forró rhythms. What about the instrumentation?

SW: Well, we already noted that there is a drum set, instead of—or maybe in addition to—the zabumba.

JCV: Yeah, it’s hard to hear a zabumba, but I can easily imagine one on stage.

SW: And there is also the bass, which basically—

JCV: Oh…

SW: Sorry, which has been standard in forró ensembles since at least the 1970s.

JCV: The primary forró instrument, the accordion, is still prominent here.

SW: Yes, it’s the lead instrument for sure.

JCV: But it’s layered with synthesizers.

SW: I have to imagine that, even though accordions are loud, they really can’t compete with electronic keyboards in terms of filling arenas and big spaces with sound.

JCV: Definitely not. An accordion is ideal for being notes  enough to accompany dancing in a medium sized un-amplified room, but this music is on a different scale.

SW: And if axé is one of the influences, we can certainly draw another parallel there.

JCV: For sure. There are definitely synthesizers in axé.

SW: One remnant of the traditional forró ensembles that is audible is triangle.

JCV: But it’s layered with the hi-hats from the drum set.

SW: Indeed. Again, this seems to be connected with the scale of the music. Triangles aren’t as loud as drums.

JCV: Nor are they as easy to amplify.

SW: Another quality of this music that seems to be connected to this scope and scale is the structure of the song. Notice how the drums play dramatic fills leading from and to different sections of the song.

JCV: Right. Even though you do hear zabumba flourishes in forró pé-de-serra, they don’t reach these epic proportions.

Audio: Luiz Gonzaga, “Baião” (YouTube) (Spotify)

JCV: Now, we’ve talked a lot about melody and harmony in this forró series.

SW: For example, in our last episode, we noted that the mixolydian mode that characterized the harmony of so much forró in the mid-twentieth century seems to have been mostly swapped for a pop-rock harmonic sensibility in forró universitário.

JCV: Well, in the examples we’re sharing today, we’re also not really hearing the harmonies associated with traditional forró. 

SW: No, this song uses, for the most part, a major scale. It’s another way that it differs from the earliest rural manifestations of the genre.

JCV: You can hear that seventh in the melody [sings]

SW: Yup.

Lyrics in Forró Eletrônico

JCV: Listeners who don’t speak Portuguese are probably wondering what this song is about.

SW: Yeah, let’s get into that.

JCV: The first stanza is, “Quero você por inteiro, só pra mim / Vem amor, vem ligeiro, me seduzir / Não dá pra dividir com ninguém, é só meu o teu amor / Vai ser marcação cerrada, aonde você for eu vou.”

SW: Oh I have to translate this.

JCV: Yes.

SW: Thanks a lot. “I want all of you, just for me / Come my love, com quick, seduce me / It won’t do to share you with anyone, your love is just for me / I won’t leave you alone, where you go, I’ll go.”

JCV: Hmm.

SW: Yeah. It’s that kind of song. She continues, “Quero você de Janeiro a Janeiro / Eu vou pegar no seu pé / Quero você meu homem, pra ser sua mulher / Quero suas pernas em minhas pernas / Quero sua boca em minha boca / Ser teu violão tu dedilhando, me deixa louca.”

JCV: Oh, so I have to do this part?

SW: Yep.

JCV: Okay. “I want you from January to January / I’ll stay on your heels / I want you as my husband, to be your wife. I want your legs intertwined with my legs, your mouth on my mouth / To be your guitar that you are fingering, make me crazy.” 

SW: That guitar line is really explicit in English.

JCV: It is. But it’s not as bad in Portuguese, actually. It’s a little poetic.

SW: It’s both a sexually explicit song and one that upholds certain Catholic-derived, heteronormative values.

JCV: Right. She’s expressing her desires both to be a wife and to be satisfied physically. 

SW: For example, later she talks about the man “making her a wife”—fazer mulher.

JCV: Which, because of the nature of Brazilian Portuguese, can also be heard as “making her a woman.”

SW: These lyrics are pretty typical of forró eletrônico.

JCV: Yeah, when we were teenagers, we thought the lyrics were really cheesy, but at the same time they gave us a chance to express some ideas that were sort of “out of bounds.”

SW: Yeah. It’s an interesting combination of rebellion and reinforcing traditional gender roles and such.

JCV: Yeah, that captures it.

Background of Forró Eletrônico

SW: Now that we’ve introduced forró eletrônico—

JCV: —and I’ve told embarrassing stories from my adolescence—

SW: —let’s go over a little more of the history of this genre.

JCV: Great. So, this genre began in the 1990s.

SW: Just around the same time that university students in São Paulo were developing the forró universitário sub-genre we discussed last time.

JCV: Yes. But different from forró universitário, forró eletrônico is more associated with the Northeast of Brazil. 

SW: As we’ve just heard, practitioners have not been shy about making modifications to the traditional ensemble.

JCV: Because the most popular forró eletrônico bands perform on large stages for large crowds and can have a dozen musicians on stage at a time.

SW: And the genre referents come not only from previous iterations of forró, but from other genres, like axé and guitarrada.

JCV: In addition to Limão com Mel, who are from the state of Pernambuco, we’re going to highlight two bands from the city of Fortaleza, which is the capital of the northeastern state of Ceará.

SW: Yeah. Let’s start with Mastruz com Leite.

JCV: Mastruz com leite is a drink made from milk (leite) and mastruz, which is an herb found in the Brazilian Northeast. It’s something one drinks to alleviate flu and cold symptoms.

SW: So are all forró eletrônico bands named after food and drink?

JCV: No, not all of them, but there is a trend. There’s also, for example, Caviar com Rapadura, which is caviar with brown sugar.

SW: Wow. Well since Mastruz com Leite, the band, is known as the mother of forró eletrônico, maybe subsequent groups followed their lead.

JCV: Maybe.

SW: Anyhow, here’s Mastruz com Leite with the song “Meu Vaqueiro, Meu Peão.”

Audio: Mastruz com Leite, “Meu Vaqueiro, Meu Peão” (YouTube) (Spotify)

JCV: In a lot of ways, this is similar to the other example, in terms of the rhythms and the ensemble.

SW: There’s a saxophone here, which we didn’t hear before, but otherwise, it’s pretty similar.

JCV: The obvious difference is that this is a live recording.

SW: Yeah. It really reminds me of being at a concert in Brazil. The crowd seems to know all of the lyrics. 

JCV: Absolutely, yeah. It should give everyone a sense of what the context for forró eletrônico is.

SW: You know, live recordings are often more popular than studio versions of songs in Brazil.

JCV: It’s something that I grew up with, so I hadn’t thought about it, but it’s true. Live recordings of popular songs are often the definitive versions.

SW: I don’t know if this is because they capture the energy better, or for some other reason, maybe having to do with the recording industry?

JCV: Maybe. You know, this is a topic we should probably devote an entire episode to it in the future.

SW: Noted. 

JCV: Alright, now, can we talk about the lyrics?

SW: Let’s see. The singer, Kátia Cilene, starts, “Here he comes on his chestnut horse / Leather hat, with the reins in his hand / His beautiful charm makes me sing / The face of a great fighter / Who works in the heat / With complete dedication.”

JCV: In some ways, these lyrics pick up on the themes of forrós past. They speak to the rural origins of forró and romanticize the cowboy.

SW: That brings us all the way back to the outfit that Luiz Gonzaga donned in the 1940s when he was codifying what it meant to be a forrozeiro.

JCV: But once again, there are specific gendered values being espoused here. The title of the song, “Meu Vaqueiro, Meu Peão” means something like “my cowboy, my ranch hand.” It’s singing the praises of a breadwinning masculine figure.

SW: And like the last song, the protagonist is a woman that commits herself to following this man.

JCV: She sings, “Oh my cowboy, my ranch hand / You conquered my heart / On the road of passion / and the rest is history / I am always where he is / At a forró party, in the pasture / anywhere / I follow my ranch hand / His strong arms, his color / Cowboy, I want to feel your warmth / In your arms I want to be.”

SW: Yeah, like the other song, the woman is pretty much defined by her relationship with the man.

Gender in Forró Eletrônico

JCV: Although, it’s worth noting that both songs are sung by women.

SW: It’s true. A lot of forró eletrônico bands are fronted by women or by at least by a man-woman duo.

JCV: Which we didn’t hear too much in, for example, forró universitário.

SW: Right. You know, until the 1960s, Brazilian popular music made a big distinction between composers and performers. There were relatively few women composers and a fairly even split among the singers. Starting in the MPB-era—in the 1960s, more or less—male composers started to become singers.

JCV: An example would be one of my mom’s favorites, Chico Buarque.

SW: Yeah, Chico came up as a composer, but became a performer. For some reason—

JCV: —probably institutionalized sexism—

SW: probably—the opposite has not been as true. There still aren’t as many women composers and women singers in the music industry.

JCV: So, the fact that women have found a voice in forró eletrônico is notable. Forró universitário follows the rock trend of having bands who perform their own songs. And that probably is, in part, behind the fact that most of the bands are fronted by men.

SW: Right. We’ve highlighted a few important women singers and composers, like Marinês and Anastácia and Clemilda, but our selection might not be 100% representative of the gender split in the genre.

JCV: Probably not. So, let’s highlight one more example of forró eletrônico today, another band from Fortaleza.

SW: Sounds good. This is the group Aviões do Forró with their song “Chupa Que é de Uva”

Audio: Aviões do Forró, “Chupa Que é de Uva” (YouTube) (Spotify)

JCV: With this song, we’ve reached the point where the musical referents to forró are really hard to identify.

SW: Yes! If the band wasn’t called Aviões do Forró, I don’t know if I would know for sure that it is forró!

JCV: The accompaniment is similar to the axé example we heard. And the trombones and trumpets have taken over the instrumental interludes that would have traditionally been provided by an accordion.

SW: And the rest of the ensemble includes drum set, bass, guitar, synthesizers.

JCV: The lead vocals are split between the two singers Xand Avião and Solange Almeida.

SW: This song showcases a slightly different lyrical style than the earlier examples.

JCV: Yes. There is a relationship implied, but there’s nothing about marriage or devotion.

SW: No, it’s much more dependent on innuendo.

JCV: I feel like we’re hot potato-ing this topic and each waiting for the other one to actually read the lyrics.

SW: Yeah. Well, the title, “Chupa Que é De Uva” means something like “suck, it tastes like grape.”

JCV: Yeah. The whole song uses fruit imagery. The first stanza says, “Come here my little cashew fruit / I’ll give you lots of affection / Give me your heart / Give me your heart / Come here my little strawberry / I’ll grab you in such a way / That I will turn you on / That I will turn you on.”

SW: The chorus is “In your mouth, I turn to fruit. Suck, it tastes like grape.” Etc.

JCV: Maybe it loses some of its charm in English.

SW: You think? 

JCV: But it’s important, because this is indicative of common themes in the forró eletrônico genre.

SW: Right. A lot of people will talk about genres like Rio de Janeiro based funk as sexually explicit, but that’s too reductive. Adult themes are more pervasive than that.

JCV: In fact, another genre that exploded in popularity in the 1980s in the North and Northeast of Brazil called lambada, which is also deeply connected to forró eletrônico, shares some of these sexually explicit themes.

SW: The music scholar K.E. Goldschmitt has written beautifully about the origins of lambada and how it briefly became a global dance fad in the 1980s.

JCV: You can read about that in their book Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries, which we highly recommend. We’re also looking forward to having Dr. Goldschmitt as a guest on Massa in the coming months.

SW: Spoilers!

JCV: Well, think of it as a teaser.

SW: Oh, good call. So, musically, lambada shares a lot of characteristics with guitarrada. But the intimate couple dancing of both lambada and forró eletrônico, in which the couples dance with their legs interlaced and their hips sort of glued together, is the obvious crossover point here. 

JCV: Yeah. That suggestive dancing style is, in this song, reflected in the lyrics.

SW: Exactly. So it’s not just a question of making these, sort of, sexually explicit lyrics, but also of enacting some of the ideas expressed in the lyrics on the dancefloor.

Story Time

JCV: So, I have another story.

SW: Story time? Let’s do it.

JCV: When this song was popular and on the radio all the time, one of my aunts complained about it being disrespectful.

SW: Oh. Well, what did she say, exactly?

JCV: The song was playing and she said, “I just can’t believe that people would say such things.” And we all thought she meant the explicit content, especially given that we were all teenagers.

SW: Wait, she didn’t mean the explicit content?

JCV: No, she though the lyric was “chupa que é viúva.”

SW: O. M. G.

JCV: Yeah, that means, “suck, because she’s a widow.”

SW: Yeah. Those aren’t the lyrics.

JCV: No.

SW: But they are the ones I will sing from now on.

JCV: These are the risks with this kind of music.

SW: Yeah, it’s all fun and games until somebody’s widow gets offended.

JCV: Anyhow, let’s put some of these big ideas in context. 

SW: Great. We have the class issues. This music is mostly associated with working class people.

JCV: And that can lead to some snobbery from listeners who might judge it compared to, say, Dvořák.

SW: We don’t know anybody like that.

JCV: Nobody. 

SW: And it also calls attention to the ways that forró has persisted in its native geography in part by blending with other genres.

JCV: To the point that it can become almost unrecognizable as forró.

SW: And, of course, there is the way that the lyrics speak to and about gender and sexuality.

JCV: Right, because many of the star singers are women, their frank discussion of sexual topics can be important for other women and serve as opportunities for identification and personal growth.

SW: But the lyrics aren’t 100% transgressive. They often reflect Christian values in the midst of their double entendres.

JCV: Yes, this is something that we often find in Brazilian cultural forms, not just in the Northeast.

SW: Something we’ll discuss at length when we talk about Rio’s carnival, I’m sure.

JCV: Speaking of which, we’re not onto Rio just yet, but we have to take a break in production for a few extra weeks.

SW: Yes, these episodes take a lot of time to produce and you just moved across the country and started a new job, which as far as I know, takes time and energy.

JCV: Yup. But we’ll be back! We have episodes on coco, axé, blocos afros, capoeira, samba de roda, and many other things in the works.

SW: So keep an eye on @essefoimassa on Twitter and Instagram, where we’ll alert you as to our next episode.

JCV: And we don’t say this, ever, but if you subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, the episodes will show up automatically. And you can even rate and review if that’s your thing.

SW: Well, see you in a few weeks, Juliana!

JCV: Well, we’ll see each other sooner than that. We have a lot of work to do.

SW: Okay, until then! Esse foi Massa.

Credits

Audio: Sammy Bananas, “Transcontinental Baião (Carioca Remix)” 

JCV: Massa is written, produced and edited by Schuyler Whelden and me, Juliana Cantarelli Vita. For episode transcripts and links to further reading, please visit our website, essefoimassa.com. That’s E-S-S-E-F-O-I-M-A-S-S-A dot com. You can email us at essefoimassa@gmail.com. Follow us @essefoimassa on Instagram and Twitter. Our intro music is by Som da Massa and our outro music is by Sammy Bananas. Please join us soon as we discuss the genre(s) known as coco. Until then, esse foi Massa.