BRAZILIAN MUSIC AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS: - Elisabeth Blin

29
and Rio de Janeiro started to celebrate the carnival with their own singing and dancing,
which raised violent protests from the local bourgeoisie.
The advent of samba and carnival took place in the late 1920s in the streets of Rio
de Janeiro, immediately succeeding its intense repression by Brazilian police. 82 The
booming popularity of samba among the black and very soon the white population spread
so massively and rapidly, that historians have called it a true mystery. 83
Later in the twentieth century, the carnival started to be viewed as a convenient
“manner of letting off the steam of social frustrations that might be directed toward
political change. 84 ” This idea was also suggested in Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus
award-winning French movie of 1958. 85 Demonstrating the political impact of Brazilian
music, the carnival is acknowledged as a “pressure valve” for the social tensions of the
country. 86 Some view the distraction of the carnival as an easy way for people to forget
about their poverty. The carnival nevertheless has remained, through the twentieth
century, the highest expression of protest music and dance, for which the poorest
82 “Brazilian whites today readily admit that carnival would not have amounted to much had it
remained in their hands. The Portuguese colonizer’s idea of enjoyment during the week before Lent was to
spray each other with syringes filled with water, foul-smelling liquids or worse. In the mid-nineteenth
century, someone came up with the only slightly better idea of beating a very large drum while a crowd
followed him around the neighborhood. Carnival life began to improve only toward the end of Emperor
Pedro II’s progressive regime, when a restless new urban elite championed the abolition of slavery, which
the emperor also favored (…) Patterned on the elegant celebrations of Paris and Venice, elaborate costume
balls quickly became the rage. ‘Carnival societies’ were formed to parade through the main streets of the
city, dressed in complicated allegorical costumes, often designed to satirize the old regime and promote the
liberal agenda” (McGowan, 36)
83 Vianna, 12
84 Browning, 144
85 Jonathan Grasse 2004, “Conflation and conflict in Brazilian popular music: forty years between
‘filming’ bossa nova in Orfeu Negro and rap in Orfeu.” Popular Music, Vol 23/3 (Cambridge University
Press), Pp 291-310, 291
86 Browning, 145