8. Maracatu de Baque Solto — Poetry
Introduction
Audio: Som da Massa, “Transcontinental Baião”
SW: I’m Schuyler Whelden.
JCV: And I’m Juliana Cantarelli Vita
SW: This is Massa, a podcast about Brazilian music and culture.
JCV: Schuyler and I are music professors and musicians. 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. Schuyler, you wanna let everyone know what we’re doing today?
SW: Sure! In this episode, we’re going to continue our conversation about maracatu de baque solto.
JCV: Exactly! If you are listening to this without listening to the last one, we’ll try to keep everything intelligible, but it might be a good idea to go back and listen through that one first.
SW: Yes, in that episode we gave some context for maracatu de baque solto, which is a music tradition from the northern sugarcane plantation region of the state of Pernambuco, in the Brazilian Northeast.
JCV: Actually, instead of going through all of that, how about we listen to a song that actually talks a bit about maracatu de baque solto?
SW: Okay. This is “Maracatu do Passado” by Antônio Roberto.
Audio: Antônio Roberto, “Maracatu do Passado” (YouTube)
SW: Man, that’s gorgeous.
JCV: Agreed. We were introduced to this song by the scholar Chris Estrada, who is actually going to help us out again in this episode.
Chris Estrada: I’m Chris Estrada. I’m an anthropologist and historian. And I did fieldwork on maracatu de baque solto in Pernambuco. I think this song is really special because Antonio Roberto, who recently passed away, composed this, almost a perfect song to narrate the story of maracatu as seen from the inside out. As opposed to being explained by somebody outside of it, like myself. And I think that’s a really important thing to emphasize, because there are these narratives that are created from an emic perspective, I guess.
SW: Let’s talk through some of those lyrics.
JCV: Okay, he starts, “Maracatu com a valia / Em algum tempo passado / Não era tão divulgado / Como está sendo hoje em dia / Divulgação não havia pra maracatu rural. / Mas hoje em todo local / Virou página de manchete / No rádio e na internet / Televisão e jornal.”
SW: So in English, that would be something like “Maracatu has value / Some time ago / It wasn’t so well known / As it is nowadays / There was no advertisement for maracatu rural / But today in every place / It’s a page-one story.
JCV: I love this opening because it really speaks to the explosion in popularity that maracatu de baque solto has experienced in the past few decades.
SW: Yes. Chris talked about this, actually.
CE: So it talks about maracatu when it was principally taking place on the sugar plantations and contrasts that with how it is today. And the fact that it is now something that is celebrated. And it has publicity about it. It’s featured in the news, and on the radio, and on the Internet, and on television. And that was never the case before. It was something that was neglected by the broader society in Pernambuco, let alone in Brazil.
JCV: The region where this music emerged has hundreds of groups today, where in the past, there were only a handful.
SW: This song has many of the qualities that one would expect from a maracatu de baque solto performance.
JCV: The instrumental ensemble is composed of a snare drum, a tom-tom, a shaker, and a bell, with a trombone and trumpet on top.
SW: But the instruments don’t play with the singer. Rather, they act as interludes in between the verses.
JCV: And Mestre Antônio’s singing follows certain poetic rules regarding the number of syllables and the rhyme scheme.
SW: There are two big differences between what you hear here and what you would hear in a typical performance.
JCV: Yes, normally there would be two singer-poets, or mestres.
SW: And these mestres would trade improvised verses in a competitive back and forth.
JCV: Their improvisations happen at all-night competitions called sambadas and they follow the rules of various song forms.
SW: So that’s what we’re going to do today: break down the four primary song forms that the singers use.
JCV: We’ll listen to examples of each of the forms and break down how they work.
SW: Let’s do it!
Sambadas
JCV: Other than carnaval, the primary setting for baque solto is an event called a samabada.
CE: Sambadas are competitions between the singer-poet, or mestre, of one maracatu against the singer-poet of another one. And they are events that are always held on Saturday evenings. They start rather late—nine or ten o’clock—and traditionally they don’t finish until the sun is coming up on Sunday morning.
SW: Many, many of the small towns and cities of the area of Pernambuco called the zona da mata have their own maracatu. During sambadas, a maracatu from one town will host another group. The groups will set up a sound system in a public space and the two mestres will do verbal battle, improvising songs all night long.
JCV: And these songs all adhere to specific poetic forms.
Song Forms
SW: So, Juliana, my understanding is that there are four different poetic forms that we hear in maracatu de baque solto. Is that right?
JCV: Yeah. So, we have the marcha.
SW: or “march.”
JCV: Then, samba em dez.
SW: Or “ten-line samba,” not to be confused with samba that you would hear in Rio de Janeiro
JCV: No, it’s the same word, but a different tradition. There’s also the samba em seis, which is sometimes called samba curto.
SW: So, either “six-line samba” or “short samba.”
JCV: And finally, the galope.
SW: I guess that translates to “gallop,” though I understand it’s something of a hybrid between the samba and marcha.
JCV: Yes.
SW: So, is there a typical sequence that these are performed in, yeah?
JCV: Well, my understanding is that, at most sambadas, you’ll hear marchas, then galopes, then 10-line sambas, and then finally sambas curtos.
CE: It’s not a rigid sequence, but there is an order, kind of a natural progression to them. Remember that this is an event that lasts all night long, so they could be singing marchas for an hour and a half. If that’s how long it takes, that’s how long it takes, before someone introduces one of the other forms.
SW: So, let’s start with the marcha, then. This song that we’re going to talk about is called “Estou Feliz” and it’s an example of maracatu de baque solto made in a recording studio, so there will be some concessions to the format.
JCV: Yeah. But the poetry is still there, as is the song form.
SW: One of the performers here is Barachinha, who was, for a long time the mestre of the group Estrela Brilhante. Here’s what Chris had to say about him:
CE: Barachinha has a long history with that maracatu and he was the person who introduced me to this whole universe. He’s a very soft-spoken, quiet man who has a dignity that is difficult to explain if you haven’t met him. I don’t know. The way that he carries himself… And it took me a long time to realize how just lucky I was to have been introduced to him so early on, because not knowing anything about how the poetry worked—and I still consider myself as somebody who has a lot to learn about it—I don’t think I appreciated just how good he was until I started spending more and more time with him. As somebody who was gracious enough to put up with me hanging around, asking lots of questions, taking lots of pictures.
JCV: Let’s hear a bit of the song “Estou feliz” or “I’m happy” by Barachinha and Manoel Domingos.
SW: Listen for how there are clearly two distinct voices that alternate stanzas of poetry. We’ll talk about the lyrics in a moment.
Audio: Barachinha and Manoel Domingos, “Estou Feliz” (YouTube)
SW: So, the first thing to note is the form.
JCV: Well, I noticed that the instrumental ensemble doesn’t exactly accompany the vocalists.
SW: No, they play in between.
JCV: And there is also a small chorus that repeats the first line.
SW: Right! The form seems to be: short instrumental interlude by the terno, then a solo line, which the chorus repeats, followed by two lines of verse.
JCV: Yes! That’s how most marchas are.
SW: Generally speaking, the poetry is very prescribed though.
JCV: Not in terms of what words they say—that is improvised—but in terms of how many lines they'll sing and how many syllables each line has.
SW: And it also bears noting that between the slow tempo, the long instrumental interlude, and the call and response with the chorus, the mestre is afforded a lot of time to come up with the next line.
CE: It’s like a very long, elongated period of limbering up. It’s not going to be the thing that people are talking about the next day. It’s a good time to sing very simple things about people who are in attendance, for example. Because it’s fairly easy to make a rhyme in couplet form about people who have shown up, or maybe people who aren’t there and wish they could be. And you don’t have to say anything too complicated about them, which is probably appropriate anyway, because as the night goes on, the poets are going to direct their energies at each other eventually. So I guess you could think of that first phase as being sort of more open-ended and inclusive, just sort of inviting people to participate at the level they want to engage with it.
JCV: What can you tell us about the lyrics here?
CE: This first one is from a CD collaboration between Barachinha and Manoel Domingos. And it is the first time Manoel Domingos had made a CD of any kind, so it starts out with Barachinha introducing him as someone who had already recorded several and was very well known and well respected. Although Manoel Domingos had been singing for a long time, he had never recorded before. He kind of sets it up and introduces him and they sort of greet their listeners in a way that is—It’s a different kind of performance than what you’d normally get captured on a CD. Just kind of saying, “Hey, thanks for listening. I’m glad to be on your first CD.” It’s almost conversational in a way.
Audio: Barachinha and Manoel Domingos, “Estou Feliz” (YouTube)
JCV: The first line is from Barachinha. He says “Estou feliz por vim gravar com você / Peço que Deus lhe proteja no seu primeiro CD.”
SW: “I’m happy to come record with you / I ask God to protect your CD”
JCV: Then Manoel Domingos replies “Ó, Deus te peço força nesta caminhada / Eu cantando defender a minha Estrela Dourada.”
SW: “Oh, God, I ask for strength on this journey / I’m singing to defend / My Estrela Dourada”
JCV: Estrela Dourada is the maracatu that he belongs to.
SW: What a sweet, wholesome introduction. They are happy to be working together!
JCV: The next stanza, Barachinha talks about his maracatu. He says, “Estrela Brilhante lost her leader / Who died, leaving a longing / For everyone that participates.”
SW: Oh.
JCV: Manoel Domingos replies, “I also cried when I saw him in the coffin / A storm of sadness / Invaded my heart.”
SW: Well I guess I should listen to more of the lyrics before jumping to conclusions about the song’s content and tone.
JCV: Probably a good idea.
SW: But this does speak to the importance of ancestry and elders in maracatu. Though it may not be tied to the same religious tradition as baque virado, we can see that same respect here.
JCV: Definitely. Even Manoel Domingos reacts emotionally to the other group’s leader passing. As Chris said, during a sambada, the mestres might perform these marchas for an hour or so before moving on.
SW: And from there, they might move on to the galope.
CE: It is sort of a hybrid between the relaxed marcha and something that’s a bit more intense and a bit more serious and involves more complicated structure.
JCV: Let’s hear a bit of the song “Quem me enfrenta no galope,” sung by the same two mestres.
Audio: Barachinha and Manoel Domingos, “Quem me enfrenta no galope” (YouTube)
SW: Okay, a couple of things are immediately obvious to me.
JCV: Like what?
SW: Well, in the broadest sense, the structure is the same: first there is an instrumental interlude, then one solo line, which receives a choral response, followed by a different verse.
JCV: Right, but the instrumental interlude is shorter here!
SW: Yeah!
JCV: And the melodic material that follows the choral response is way different from what preceded it.
SW: That’s what Chris meant when he said that the galope had a hybrid form. The first half is much like a marcha, while the second half is more similar to the forms we’re about to hear in a minute.
JCV: Yeah, well, I’m interested in talking about the lyrics.
SW: Okay, what did you notice?
JCV: Unlike the previous song, this foregrounds the competition element of baque solto. Even the title, “Quem me enfrenta no galope”—
SW: —“Whoever faces me in the galope.”
JCV: It’s setting the listener up to hear all of the ways that mestre is going to best their opponent.
SW: Like what?
JCV: Take the first exchange, for example…
JCV: Basically, Manoel Domingos started by saying “Whoever faces me in a galope is going to have to shut up / They will get stomped by my feet. / Learning a lesson / Tied to a post / To die by my whip.”
SW: Whoa!
JCV: Yeah. And then Barachinha replies, “Whoever faces me in a galope / Will never win a sambada again. / Crazy from having lost their mind / Seeing the fans mocking them / And their ears bleeding / From taking such a beating.”
SW: Sheesh. That’s serious!
JCV: Hold on! It gets… better?
SW: Okay, go on…
JCV: Okay, so first, Manoel Domingos says, “Whoever faces me in the galope / Loses their fame and disappears / My samba beats you up / Kicks you out / Because it keeps hitting you / Until it splits your skull.”
SW: And then Barachinha replies, “Whoever faces me in a galope / Is going to learn their lesson / If you misbehave / Today you are screwed / Because I’m going use my axe / To cut off your head, foot, arm, and hand.”
CE: You notice right away that they are starting to bring out the metaphors of this sort of cartoon violent imagery of what they are going to do to each other and things like that in this challenge. They are about to throw down, basically.
JCV: This kind of hyperbolic language and imagery is pretty typical of baque solto. The mestres use it to boast about their skills and abilities. But it’s less about saying what they’ll actually do and more about showing how skilled they are verbally.
SW: Right! If you can think of 10,000 ways to dispatch your combatant physically, that means you can dispatch them verbally, and in fact, thinking of them and saying them, you're sort of doing that—verbally, I mean.
JCV: Yes, exactly. And we should note that our translation is pretty loose.
SW: Good point. Not only are they finding new ways to describe the violence that they will inflict on one another in the moment, but they have to follow the strictures of the poetic form, which means that they modify sentence structures to make it all work.
Samba em Dez
JCV: Let’s check out a samba em dez or “ten line samba”
SW: Okay! This is a poetic form that folks might recognize in other parts of Latin America. It’s connected to the Iberian tradition of décima poetry which is the basis for music forms all over.
JCV: This recording is a collaboration between Barachinha and Siba Veloso.
SW: Some of our listeners might be familiar with Siba Veloso, who is well known for his work with the band Mestre Ambrósio and subsequent solo career as a popular musician.
CE: Siba Veloso, who essentially apprenticed under him in order to learn everything that he knows about maracatu. I think Siba’s a very interesting cultural mediator in important ways because he’s brought attention to the artform from people like me and others who come from other countries or other parts of Brazil, even. Because this is an unknown artform to many, many Brazilians. And people will ask him, “well, how do I find out more about maracatu?” And he’ll direct them to different people, and Barachinha is one of those people.
JCV: So this song is called “Morte do Sambador.” Each singer describes what it will be like when they die, how great a legacy they’ll leave, and how much everyone will miss them.
Audio: Siba e Barachinha “Morte do sambador” (Youtube)
SW: Right away, it’s obvious that this is different by the longer verses.
JCV: Definitely. It gives the singers a long time to show off.
SW: Of the four song forms, this is the one that really highlights the poetry.
CE: I would say that is when the people who are into maracatu for the poetry—because you don’t have to be. To be involved in maracatu, you might be more interested in dancing, or carnaval. But there are many who are, as I said, fanatical about their favorite poets. That is the time when people will start to really tune in and like, okay, now they are starting to get serious.
SW: And the rhyme scheme is very consistent: ABBACCDDDC.
JCV: So it’s as if ABBA and AC/DC joined forces into a supergroup!
SW: “The Winner Shook It All Night Long?”
JCV: Ok, but seriously, it takes a lot of skill to improvise in this form.
CE: People will notice if the mestre gets a line wrong. Because the rhyme scheme of that is one of the more complicated. If a poet screws one of those up, there are going to be some people who are kind of snickering about it and maybe remembering it the next day, so. It’s held in high esteem.
SW: Yeah, something really distinctive about this art form is the way that there are certain rules and expectations that both the audiences and performers are aware of. That is not always the case. Certainly you will have a few people at, say, a Jorge Ben concert that would notice if he plays the wrong chord, but most people would not notice. All art forms have unwritten rules and expectations, but not many foreground them quite as much as baque solto.
CE: The complexity of this poetry and the foregrounding of this poetry may be something that is relatively recent in its development—as in, since the 1960s. Some of the older people I knew involved in maracatu said that they remembered when it didn’t have brass. It was just percussion; there were no brass instruments. And the mestre sang in a more loose verse, something called samba solto. And at the time I was there, there was really only one person left who occasionally would do that: this guy Mestre Dedinha, who is connected to one of the oldest maracatus in the region of maracatu from Araçoiaba. It’s kind of like the equivalent of freestyle in that it would still rhyme, it still would have some sort of structure, but it wouldn’t have all those rules. And so I became interested in understanding, well, how did that happen? How did this become something that has been so codified into this thing where, as you said, its audience is very engaged and aware of who’s doing it right? They can tell the difference between an okay poet and a really good poet and maybe one who’s just not so good.
JCV: Something else that distinguishes samba em dez is that the choral repetition is in the middle of the verse, rather than the beginning. That seems to allow the poetic form to develop a bit before being interrupted.
SW: But also there is a break for the singer to think of the rest of the verse.
JCV: Let’s talk about some of these lyrics. They’re so creative.
SW: Let’s.
JCV: Barachinha goes first here. He says, “A primeira fantasia / Bengala e apito meu / Vão colocar num museu / Pro povo ver todo dia.”
SW: He’s talking about putting his costume, cane, and whistle in a museum for everyone to see.
JCV: You can hear the ABBA form.
SW: Let’s see: fantasia, meu, museu, dia.
JCV: He plays a little with the syntax to maintain the rhyme scheme.
SW: Which shows that finding a way to say things within the structure is paramount.
JCV: For sure. Speaking of which, notice the prosody, that is, how he emphasizes the syllables in “Bengala e apito meu / Vão colocar num museu.”
SW: Ah, it’s not how you would say those words if you were talking. If you were talking, you’d say “Bengala e apito meu / Vão colocar num museu.”
JCV: Exactly. “Bengala e apito meu / Vão colocar num museu.” The poetic meter takes precedence over the spoken language.
SW: Cool!
JCV: The poetry at the end of this verse is really beautiful too. “My wife will try / Not to die from crying / My samba is a piece of gold / In the display case of the culture.”
SW: Ah, in the end, it’s not about his cane and his whistle being in the museum. It’s about his music!
JCV: Right! Siba’s response is really interesting too.
SW: Let’s see, “At my wake, I want / Cachaça and a terno playing / And my friends drinking / Together with my bodily rest / Because I’m going to be in purgatory singing sambas and smiling. / With little more I will rise up / To my celestial father / To say that I came from the Northeast / For the Lord to hear a beautiful samba.”
JCV: These boasts are outlandish, obviously, but they are so creative. Siba transitions from his own wake, where people will be singing and playing maracatu to purgatory, where he will successfully use his skills as a mestre to gain entry into heaven.
SW: Amazing. Chris was right about these ten-line sambas, they really show off the poetry.
JCV: But, despite the elaborate verses and rhyme scheme, these are not the highlight of the sambadas. The most exciting part actually comes with last of the four song forms.
Samba em Seis
CE: The most complex, most difficult ones to sing, are the samba curto. Those are really really rapid, with hardly any instrumental break at all.
SW: This form is also called the samba em seis—
JCV: —six-line samba—
SW: In some ways, you would think the 10-line samba would be the highlight of the sambada.
JCV: But as Chris mentioned, the athleticism required to sing the samba curto—
SW: —which just means “short samba”—
JCV: —actually makes these the highlight of the evening. Listen to how Barachinha and Zé Galdino trade verses in the song “Vamos ver quem é melhor” or “Let’s see who’s better.”
Audio: Barachinha & Zé Galdino, “Vamos ver quem é melhor” (YouTube)
SW: Barachinha starts out saying “On this track of the CD / I’m going to win 10 to 1 / Because not even during a recording session / Do I want to go easy on you.”
JCV: And Zé Galdino replies, “I’ll take you in a samba curto / With only 4 lines / I say, “get out of my way” / So I can record the CD alone.”
SW: Hahaha.
JCV: I love the local flavor. He says “Eu pego,” which in Pernambuco we use all the time in so many different contexts.
SW: Like what?
JCV: Like… If I were to tell you something that happened yesterday, that someone did to me I would say, “Well, and then…”—in Portuguese, “E aí ele pegou e me falou tal coisa…”
SW: So t he terno interlude is comically short here. It seems like it’s just a little flourish.
JCV: Yeah, the singers have barely any time to think.
CE: That is why you won’t see a poet jump from the marchas to samba curto or samba cumprido because it requires being able to respond with almost no interval at all. So that instrumental break during this simpler, so to speak—the other song forms. That instrumental break serves as a time for them to be thinking about what they are going to sing back when they respond. As it progresses, that interval gets shorter and shorter to the point where there is almost none in the very end. It’s just like a few drum beats.
SW: It’s so impressive.
Audio: Barachinha & Zé Galdino, “Vamos ver quem é melhor” (YouTube)
JCV: One other thing that I want to highlight is that pretty much all of these songs have something in common melodically and that something roots them in the Brazilian Northeast.
SW: Ooh, say more about that!
JCV: Well, they all use the same scale.
SW: A scale is just a series of notes organized in ascending or descending order.
JCV: Many of our listeners are probably familiar with a major scale—that’s the one that Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of Music [sings Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do]
SW: If you count those notes, you’ll notice that there are 7 different ones before the same note repeats.
JCV: [sings 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1] A lot of Northeastern music, including everything we’ve been listening to in this episode, uses a slightly different scale from this one, which in European-derived music theory is called mixolydian.
SW: Ah, yes. The mixolydian scale has one note different.
JCV: Yes, that seventh note in the scale is a bit lower. [sings Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Te-Do]
SW: If you play all of the white notes on a piano, starting on “G,” you’ll have this exact scale.
JCV: Many traditional and popular songs from Pernambuco and other Northeastern states draw on this scale.
SW: So that’s a distinguishing feature. People would recognize this melody as “Northeastern”. Maybe even Pernambucan.
JCV: Yes, definitely.
SW: At the risk of comparing everything to samba—
JCV: —it’s kind of your thing—
SW: I’ve done well not to, so far!
JCV: True.
SW: But anyway, most carioca samba (that is, samba from Rio de Janeiro), wouldn’t do this. That music tends to rely on the harmonic movement implied in the major scale—or the minor scale, but that's a different story— which is really not present here.
JCV: No. Some theorists might call this “modal” because it sticks to that primary note (in this, G) rather than having a bunch of harmonic movement.
SW: Maybe we could show how it works in this song?
JCV: For sure! You can really hear it in the first line [sings “nessa faixa do CD”]
SW: On the syllable “xa” you can hear Barachinha sing that seventh scale degree, the note that marks that mixolydian scale.
JCV: Then Barachinha continues down the scale, making it clear that he’s really singing the G mixolydian scale.
SW: When he gets down to the root note, he repeats it, when he says, “A você”. This strikes me as characteristic of this music, at least compared to something like samba.
JCV: Watch it.
SW: Okay, I’m done.
JCV: There are other aspects of the melodic style—connected to this mode or scale—that are also characteristic of this region, but if you want to know about that, you’ll have to listen to some upcoming episodes about the music of the festas juninas.
SW: Oh I want to know that!
JCV: Well, listen to those episodes then!
SW: Will do.
JCV: Ok.
“Maracatu do Passado”
JCV: Now that we’ve heard all of these forms, let’s go back to the song “Maracatu do Passado” by Antônio Roberto and discuss some of the imagery and commentary he provides.
SW: Great! I wanted to mention that this disc was actually produced by Siba Veloso.
JCV: Yeah. That goes to the “cultural mediator” role that he plays.
SW: This song is nearly nine minutes long, so we won’t go through it line by line, but let’s listen to a few highlights.
JCV: Okay, there are few verses that I was hoping to discuss.
SW: Great, show me!
JCV: Let’s start where we left off before.
Audio: Antônio Roberto, “Maracatu do Passado” (YouTube)
SW: So he starts, “Em alguns anos atrás / Maracatu se encontrava / Como outros sempre brigava.”
JCV: “Some years ago / Maracatu’s situation / Was one of constant fighting.”
SW: And then he notes that things have changed…
JCV: “Mas hoje não brigam mais / Acharam um caminho de paz e muita boa vontade. / Porque hoje na verdade / O que vale é fantasia / Talento e sabedoria / Perfeição e qualidade.”
SW: “But today the groups don’t fight anymore / They found a path of peace and goodwill / Because today, in truth / What matters is the costumes / The talent, and the wisdom / Perfection and quality.”
JCV: It’s a beautiful introduction, noting that the conflict between rival groups, which used to be violent, has turned to a rivalry of talent and aesthetics.
SW: It’s not without some irony, though. He is at once celebrating this new turn and making it seem like people’s values are a little off.
CE: In the way he sings it, he talks about how groups used to have conflict with each other. That was an essential component. And this is something that people do remember. And they remember it in the sung verse. And they remember it in the stories that they tell, even if they are telling stories that they heard from their father or their grandfather, because these maracatuzeiros are generational. They might be telling about how things used to be based on how they heard it was that it was all done on foot. Groups would leave one sugar engenho during carnaval. The days off works that people got for carnaval were not wasted in any way. They would spend them on the road with their maracatu and traveling on foot on the dirt roads that connected these engenhos, which are essentially like company towns. They are tied to the sugar plantation. And sometimes fights would break out if one group disrespected another, such as not lowering the bandeira, the equivalent of the estandarte. The flag of a maracatu would get—typically when a group meets another they’re supposed to lower it like in a bowing motion and acknowledge them on the road. And if they don’t, it’s like saying they are not worth acknowledging and it’s taken as a slight. So fights would break out.
JCV: This verse continues that mixture of nostalgia and critique from the last verse.
SW: So translating that verse to English, we have, “Whoever is a maracatuzeiro / From the past remembers / Bombos tied with string / Coal lanterns on the ground / The light of a lantern until dawn / But today it has energy / Everything is electrified / With a sound car / This is technology.”
JCV: Instead of the coal lanterns of the past, today we have the bull horn covered sound cars that we discussed last time.
SW: Chris talked about this, too.
CE: Coal lamps, these carburetos no terreiro, which one of the older guys I spoke with a lot also remembered those coal lamps. And when fights would break out, people would actually put out those lights intentionally, so that people couldn’t see who was coming at them. And it would be chaotic and people would get hurt. This is something that no longer happens. This is by and large part of the past. And if the groups want to participate in the civic life of the towns and the carnivals where maracatu is now recognized, they can’t fight with each other. And so, they even have it in the rules of the association based out of Aliança that was formed, that if a group fights with another group, they can’t parade in carnival for the next two years. They have to sit it out. So there’s this narrative of modernization in a way, this civilizing narrative of how far the art form has come from its origins. And yet there’s also kind of a sense of something lost at the same time that something’s been gained. The emphasis is on the costumes and on the beauty of it, which is what people recognize.
SW: It’s interesting how he’s able to maintain this unresolved dialectic. He’s certainly positive on some of the changes. It’s not just this pure nostalgia trip where he’s saying, “oh, those were the days.” There’re certainly lines where he’s talking about education that people have now and things like that. It’s hard to find that kind of nuance in a song, you know?
CE: That’s a major thing that I find so compelling about the song. If you talk to people who lived through those years, they don’t want to go back to the days of living on the plantation. It’s very rare to find people who had their own roça that they could actually subsist on and have a kind of autonomous existence that could any way be thought of as a simpler, idyllic, country life. Most people were in a cycle of perpetual debt to the company store that was run by the engenho. And had to deal with the fact that sugar cane is seasonal work. And you spend a lot of the time trying to figure out how to get by the rest of the year. It’s sort of a bittersweet quality to it. Like you said, it’s hard to maintain that. And he does it for a good 10 minutes.
JCV: There are a couple more verses I want to discuss.
SW: Ah, this verse is great. In the last episode, you told us about how the tengo tengo of the caboclos used to scare you when you were little:
JCV: Between the massive colorful costumes, the eerie sound of the bells, and the weaponry, I admit that I was terrified of them when I was younger. When I saw them walking in the streets, I would ask my mom to go the other way!
SW: Well, that’s what he’s talking about here!
JCV: Yes! “Even children / Today aren’t afraid / Of seeing a tough caboclo / With his costume and his lance / They are enchanted by the brightness of the costume. / The beat of the drums / animates adults and children alike / Maracatu became a dance / For kids today.”
SW: I know he’s being playfully ironic, but I can’t help but think that it’s a good thing that this tradition isn’t out there terrifying little children.
JCV: And adults! I’m having a conditioned response to hearing that sound right now.
SW: Okay I’ll turn it off!
JCV: Thank you. One of my mom's friends was a caboclo himself, so that's not something that was so far away, but, still, I was scared. And still am.
SW: One more verse to end.
SW: I love this ending. He says, “I personally never err / With my cane or my whistle / Making beautiful music / For the caboclos to dance to / If singing is my job, I’m going to make a living singing like that / And if it’s up to me / The culture won’t collapse / Carnaval won’t end / And maracatu will never be over.”
JCV: Even though he’s not thrilled with all of the changes, he’s never giving up.
SW: That’s a nice hopeful ending in a sort of ambiguous song.
JCV: Yes.
SW: Well, that seems like a good place to stop for today.
JCV: Okay, sounds good. Let’s keep making episodes even though podcasting has changed so much since we started.
SW: Sounds good. Thanks Juliana!
JCV: Thanks Schuyler! Esse foi massa.
Audio: Sammy Bananas, “Transcontinental Baião (Carioca Remix)”
Credits
SW: Massa is written, produced and edited by Juliana Cantarelli Vita and me, Schuyler Whelden. We’d like to dedicate this episode to the late Antônio Roberto. Thank you for your music, mestre. Special thanks also to Chris Estrada. You can find more of Chris’s work at baquesolto.org. For episode transcripts and other materials, please visit our website, essefoimassa.com. That’s E-S-S-E-F-O-I-M-A-S-S-A dot com. Or you can click the link in our description. You can email us at essefoimassa@gmail.com. And you can guess our Twitter and Instagram handles. Our intro music is by Som da Massa and our outro music is by Sammy Bananas. Please join us for our next episode, which will be on the music of the festas juninas. Until then, esse foi massa.
*Photo of Barachinha by Chris Estrada.
