THE BRIEF AND CONCISE HISTORY OF MOVIMENTO BLACK RIO. c1500 – 1981.
Aaah, Brasil. So tropical. Sea, Sunshine, Samba, and Slavery.
The fourth right there is a salient and sobering salt for the rim of your caipirinha, to drink in slowly, whilst you enjoy the first three on that list.
For all intents and purposes, Brazil was born from the systematic importation, subjugation, and exploitation of human cargo. Having slogged and exhausted the ready supply of the Tupi Indian population who were indigenous to the barely born South American state, the Portuguese turned to Africa for their free enforced labour.
The insidious trading in human flesh to South America that was needed to maintain the supply of ostensibly Sugar, to the new world, started apace in the 1500s, and would not abate till the mid-1800’s when Slavery was eventually, reluctantly abolished.
Of the nigh on 12 million people stolen from their African homeland, shipped across the Atlantic and forced to toil with no regard for any of the basic human rights, all people should by instinct, deserve from birth, a massive 40% ended up in Brazil.
A number that is nearly ten times that of North America.
Nothing quite erases that legacy and no amount of colourful Carnival Samba and photo-ready white beaches can paper over the blood spilt to make this country what it is today.
The barely concealed tension is always bubbling just beneath the surface when you visit Brazil, even today, and every so often this sulphurous past bubbles to the surface and bursts with a tired plop, spreading it’s muddy meniscus lazily on the surface. Like the crocodile whose eyes are the only visible part of it’s huge and dangerous mortal nature to be seen as it slides silently through the inky waters of the Amazon, what is just beneath the surface is callous and disregarding and ready to snap.
In Rio De Janeiro the malignant figure of Christo Redentor, himself a Black man, but now white, in whose name the blood of Millions of African slaves was spilt, looks on in supposed beneficence. Generously in part helping to maintain the countries tourist economy, as well as gamefully maintaining the number of Instagram love hearts and the blissfully ignorant levity of the nearly 6 million foreign visitors Brazil now receives every year. Foreigners arriving this time though, of their own free will.
Being born Afro-Brazilian into this environment, with epigenetics, the genetic inheritance of generational trauma, just another unseen and unacknowledged weight on an already tiresome and struggle heavy life ahead of you, does not bode well if one were to expect the dignity, equality or future that every single person who is popped out onto this spinning rock in the sky rightly deserves.
But, in 1959, Sérginho Roberto Serafim was born anyway.
Sérginho Meriti, who took his new name from the municipality of São João de Meriti where he grew up, was born into a musical family. His Father an accomplished Guitarist and his Mother a singer and composer of religious hymns. Music was his protector, his salvation, and his blood. Samba, of course, was in his blood, for Samba IS the music of Brazil.
Samba, although not in name is actually the music of Africa. Brought over on those hellish ships, unbeknownst to them, the Portuguese slave traders were importing the foundations of what would become centuries later, a powerful worldwide marketing campaign. The strong traditional rhythms used in Camdomblé ceremonies by the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin, the Maracatu and Batuque, that were Bantu rhythmic traditions originating in the Congo and Angola, are in various forms, the backbone of every Samba ever played. Bar maybe one or two, almost all the traditional percussion instruments used in Samba are also from west African shores too.
In 1932, Getúlio Vargas, one of the most progressive dictators Brazil has ever had in its long parade of despicable despots, decided that it was about time Brazil got the attention he thought it deserved. He wanted foreign respect for one thing, and he also wanted their money. Hoping to promote Brazil as a cohesive, culturally syncopated country with a strong past and tradition all of its own, Vargas drew up the plan for Brasilidade, a national identity the rest of the world could swallow. It shouldn’t lean too heavily though on the Portuguese side of things, because after all, the Portuguese in Portugal had that covered. It needed to be unique to this continent. The past he felt could not be hidden, for one thing, it was everywhere one went, so rather than hide it why not embrace it like it was an intentional part of this great Brazilian history. Tradition if you will, as a national notion, neither invented or designed, just there all along like a part of the furniture.
He figured that this past could be co-opted and polished and regulated, and would serve his nation-building very well indeed, if it was sanitised, highly stylised and strictly controlled. And so the plan to reshape the world’s idea of Brazil began.
In times of desperate hunger, If the many and varied African Orixas (Gods) were looking favourably upon their charges, there was a stew that the malnourished slaves would scrape together from any scraps that they could scavenge from their Portuguese captors. It was generally made with black beans and pork or beef, and it was called Feijoada. It was very basic but it was delicious and filling and easily adaptable nourishment. More importantly, if it’s erroneous beginnings could be conveniently forgotten, then to Vargas’ it came under the swingeing heading of uniquely “Brazilian”, and so he declared that this would become the official National dish. Samba was instigated as the countries official Music, and because it was a hybrid of many African cultures and rhythms it was more or less, give or take a large amount of bitter truth, unique to Brazil too. The Carnival was properly sanctioned and officiated also, as the Yoruba Candomblé ceremonies when combined with a little bit of Portugues peacocking were a great visual spectacle on which to hang the clothes of a nation in the making, and on the make. For authenticity, each samba school was required by regulation to be accompanied by a wing of Baiana. The Baiana in this carnival sense was a buxom motherly figure, and keeper of the Cadomblé tradition and she hailed from the North of Brazil where the African population was at its most dense. The truth was she was simply representing the blueprint standard of government-sanctioned Brazilian Blackness. One for the postcards if you please. A folklorized figure to be used as a smokescreen for the supposed cultural unity and integration Brazil simply didn’t have.
In the times we are sitting in now, the examination and questioning of cultural appropriation is being debated and argued over more than ever before. Vargas, however, with his astonishingly mendacious invention of this portable Brazilian “culture”, that he was constructing to establish an entire country in the eyes of every person on the planet, must be the absolute Godhead at this.
A Henna tattoed middle-class white boy with Cornrows, wearing a Dashiki, Greek fisherman pants, “spiritually” high on ayahuasca, posing Tadasana and chanting Ohm, whilst enjoying “tribal” rhythms in a Kente cloth tepee in Shashamane seems like a woeful clown when held up against Getúlio’s masterclass in crassness.
Vargas’ nation creation continued, a Five-year coup enforced hiatus in 1945 notwithstanding, up until 1954 when dressed in his pyjamas, he shot himself through the chest in a Presidential strop, because a new even more heinous bunch of scoundrels wanted a go at running this game and he didn’t want to go.
The new and varied incumbents were even more controlling and Brazil was not a very pleasant place to live except for the very few. This, at the end of the 60s, was to incite a few artists to make what was to become Brazil’s most noted and lauded revolution in music, Tropicalia.
In Zona Sul, the Tropicalia movement and its music were making waves, pushing buttons and triggering warnings of dissent in the Dictatorship. It was a vocal and musical protest against a bloody and totalitarian regime and was a revolution of word and mind, rather than a revolution of self. Not to diminish the heroic and incredibly risky practice of going against a Dictatorship who would rather torture and “disappear” a person for insurrection than debate the finer points of whether or not there was valid cause to be in opposition. It’s just a fact that the tropicalia movement comprised pretty much exclusively of white and light-skinned, well educated, middle-class Carioca, who had mothers and fathers of note, and friends of influence, not to forget the extra privilege of time and money. In Zona Norte, those heady heights of comfort were beyond even nocturnal dreams. If you had been this publicly and vocally expressive of these opinions as an inhabitant the Northern districts, it is more than likely you would have been silently put to rest. Your corpse given to the putrid, overflowing rubbish heaps of the Favela, to be consumed like carrion by the slum-dwelling Vultures and Rats you lived alongside. To paraphrase another despotic Pig: all Brazilians are equal, but some are more equal than others. And so on the face of it the exiles of the Tropicalistas and the chance of another musical life in which to complain about how cold London is, might seem rather mild when compared to the very real hardships the lower classes in Rio endured every single day of their lives. A glass marble in an anus as an LP sleeve, presents more like the quasi rebellious schoolboy wit of a Banksy than a potent symbol of freedom.
Life in the Northern parts of Rio was HARD. Hard and unrelenting, and offered little to no opportunity to get out. Being black made it harder still, and the feeling of being seen as a second class citizen worthy of nothing but the lowest pay for unremitting toil with little to no reward, chimes again with the history of the nation. The tropicalia movement may have had a message that addressed the greater oppression of state censorship that indeed rung true to all Brazilians, but it did not ring true equally. Not when it came to the ingrained feeling of a deeper more merciless and debilitating lack of identity, sense of self-worth and personal agency, that came with low social status and the “wrong” colour skin. Just as the Tropicalistas were shooting their last load, another revolution of a more radical and weaponised kind was already taking place in the land of the free. Coming off the back of the peaceful approach to Black equality and freedom that was the Civil Rights Movement headed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton were not taking it lying down anymore. Founded in 1966, The Black Panther party were radicalising Black political speech, arming their factions with real weapons, as well as the weapons of personal pride and outspoken rhetoric against the oppressive white majority. Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Bell Hooks, Sonia Sanchez and a much longer list of under-recognized contributors to any dialogue about the arts, were founders and contributors of the Black Arts Movement which was pursuing the ideas of “a black aesthetic” through theatre, poetry, and literature. Described by another founder Larry Neal as “the merge of the ideologies of Black Power with the artistic values of African expression” Their focus was less on integration with white society and more on a celebration of differences, systemic and cultural. Whilst the socio-economic change that was being fought for was still far from being visible, the visibility of this expression was on the streets and in the arts, and was swelling the hearts and minds of everyday African Americans. Afrocentrism was being purposed wherever you looked. Natural hair and Dashikis, All black militant uniforms and the clenched fist salute, As-Salaam-Alaikum [peace be unto you] as a greeting, simply of respect regardless of your faith. Your fellow travelers were your Brothers and Sisters regardless of familial ties, and a strong sense of self-regard and respect for each other and the collective heritage was essential to the cause. As Sam Cooke’s unofficial anthem to the Civil rights movement intoned a hope, maybe a promise, that patiently A Change (was) Gonna come, musicians of this new era were turning the powerful and positive energy that was energising the Black community to a more conscious, concise and powerful message of empowerment. Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) [James Brown], The Revolution Will Not Be televised [Gil Scott-Heron], We’re a Winner [Curtis Mayfield], Am I Black Enough For You [Billy Paul], the straight to the jugular, and very funny, it wasn’t true, White Man’s Got a God Complex [Last Poets], and the powerful, sublimely moving Gospel message to the children of the revolution Young, Gifted and Black [Nina Simone]. These enlightened and highly motivated artists took the message of empowerment from the streets, into the studio and delivered it back to the streets as more fuel to the fight. Politics and the arts were merging. A feeling that change really was gonna come was in the air. Sense of Community and purpose was at an all-time high, and in the Americas below the equator, this was being observed by their contemporaries with the interest of a younger sibling watching it’s older counterpart defy their parents and get away with it.
Whilst the Brazilian dictatorship had strict embargo’s on the importing and indeed broadcasting of any material that might put thoughts of dissent into its citizen’s minds, one cannot blockade against a radio waveform or human wiles. So, of course, the information, and more importantly for the young and disaffected youth who desperately craved escapism, the music, had been finding its way into their ears, and if they were connected enough, into the hands of a select few for quite a while.
Big Boy, a Radio DJ and latterly MC had been running Baile’s [Dances] in the southern district since 1966. These were more attuned to the whiter middle-class ears of the area and he was serving up a mixture of mostly Psychedelic Rock, Pop, with a smattering of Soul. Up in the Northern Quarter, DJ Ademir Lemos had been doing the same thing but heavily leaning on the sounds of Black America. Both larger than life characters, it was only natural that these two combined forces, and when Big Boy lost his residency in the posh part of town, the whole operation was moved to Zona Norte and the first equipe (sound system) was effectively born. The scale of some of the larger parties was immense, and the atmosphere was charged to full capacity. At times one could witness more than a thousand young people packed into dark, hot sweaty venues, getting down to the sounds of it’s older cousins liberated musical intonements of Blackness. Strobe lights illuminated the Afro’s and Flares and Winged collars flailed wildly as screens projected images of their American Brothers and Sisters, and played clips from Shaft, Superfly, and Wattstax. A slightly more raggedy Black aesthetic was being incubated, but no less potent or significant in its power to unify these young people into a cohesive, proud and autonomous force, and advance the sense of self in one’s heritage that had been missing from their repressed existence. Not one note of Samba could be heard here. The Brazil who had taken everything, and given these people nothing was dead to them, and they were creating an alternative lifestyle which could almost be seen as Anti-Brazilian. They were the masters of their own future, shaping their everyday existence into something cohesive and truly meaningful and their time was now. They could be themselves, amongst themselves, and if being treated as “other” for the entirety of their lives had brought them nothing but hardship and pain, then now they were embracing their “otherness”, owning it, revelling in the freedom to be who they were, without stifling judgement and prejudice being borne down upon them.
They were doing and saying what James Brown was exhorting them to do, and they were going to participate fully in their own emancipation.
Serginho who was in his teens when these happenings were taking place remembers the sense of pride well, and also the sense of self consciously re-creating what was going on in that land above them. The Naturals were left to blow out, and although not as forthrightly Afrocentric in their fashion, they tried to emulate as best they could, an individual and identifying style of their own. A shoe shop, Pinheiro Shoes in Madureira, the suburb where Serginho was born was said at its high point to be selling more than 500 pairs of Platform shoes a week! Of course, along with the swagger and the garments came the music. Tim Maia, who had lived in the States for several years whilst studying was a semi-mainstream artist with connections in the music industry. He was dabbling in a soul style he was trying to make his own, and recorded his first L.P. in 1970. It did fairly well and had slight mainstream appeal, but didn’t really sit well in any camp. Norte or Sul. Many artists came through with Soul variants of their own that sometimes hit home, and sometimes misfired. Gerson King and Emilio Santiago, sang it like they meant it, and Toni Tornado and Trio Ternura gave the closest renditions of funky Soul you could hear at that time. In this period of incubation Serginho, although still young was writing songs and was an accomplished enough musician to be noticed amongst the peers. He sights many artists as an influence and remembers with great fondness some of these names that came and went almost in a breath, but were no less important in the founding of the Black Rio sound. Whilst on this subject, the name Black Rio was not a name that was coined by the musicians who would go on to perpetuate that particular sound of the suburbs. It was a name given by a journalist in a piece they wrote in 1976. In it, they clambered to discredit the happenings in Zona Norte, shamelessly trying to incite fear that something was going on in those suburbs that was subversive and alien and that it was growing unmonitored and exponentially without proper regulation by the official keepers of all things cultural and Brazilian. Namely the rich and the powerful. The phenomenon was defamed as “Black Rio” for twofold reasons, one to diminish the participants to the valueless state in which they had always been regarded in the eyes of the middle classes and elites of Rio. Secondly, it was meant to provoke a fear that a growing and uncontrolled rebellion was happening that was taking its cues from the more militarised and organised movements in the U.S. Plus these kids were also Black, and so should be feared. The idea that this proposition was threatening was yet another sulphurous bubble coming to the surface. After slavery was abolished in the 1800s gradually a semi harmonious type of integration and mixing of peoples had taken root in Brazilian society. There was a vocally spread boast that Brazil was multicultural and, not only that, give or take that bitter kind of truth again, had really always seen itself as such. Scientists of the day decided that now it considered itself a homogenous nation of all colours, the way to the top culturally and socially was not actually hindered at all by one’s race per se, but rather by one’s class.
Being white, however, they concluded, meant that you were already of a superior class, and so the solution was obvious. To advance those below you to your higher place by simply making everybody white. Christo looked on. The official policy of Blanqueamiento or Racial whitening was vociferously adopted and within the concluding years of the 19th Century and the beginning of the next, the Government of those times subsidised the immigration of more than a million European settlers with the explicit intention of bleaching the Blackness out of the population. They sincerely believed that in Three, maybe Four generations they could erase the evidence of their colonial past by diluting it away with an insidious social policy of long-form trickle-down eugenics. As the spoken refrain in the bridge on the title track of Public Enemy’s third album Fear of a Black Planet pointedly explains, this is not at all how it works.
And so with this past as a backdrop, and as in Hip Hop today where there is now an owning and repurposing of THAT repugnant word which has throughout history been used by racist abusers as a shaming insult, in 1976 the term Black Rio was taken on by the exact people it was meant to shame and reconfigured to exemplify their pride in the creation of this marginal movement.
The outfit Banda Black Rio was founded in 1976 soon after the publication of the article from which it proudly took its name. They were stella class musicians and tight as a Tamborim skin. Signed to RCA WEA a world major label, and so with its eyes always on the currency, they played what was essentially heavy Jazz Funk, faintly woven with a thread of Brazilian rhythm and sensibility, and pointed squarely at the dancefloor. It was energetic, spacious and propulsive and was the pinnacle of sophisticated funkiness rather than rough and unhewn. It was essentially a new sound altogether that pointed out an urgency that as with any movement, one must evolve to stay alive. This suited the audience just fine, as the straight-up emulation of smooth American Soul and gritty Funk could probably not have withstood much more prodding. They wrote all their own tunes too, bar a few covers, but when they included Brazilian standards such as Casa Forte by Old Guard and reformed rebel Edu Lobo, it was by no means bowing to a pressure to conform to a more commercially viable sanitized standard. Their versions of old Brazilian MPB (Musica Popular Brazil) hits were fast-paced, plugged in, amped up. Wrought through with heavy funk, and everything including attitude, stance, and self-possession that they had learnt whilst playing to their Sisters and Brothers in the Bailes on the wrong side of town. They were by far the most successful of all the bands to come out of this scene, and they set the template in sound for the last part of musica soul’s and Movimento Black Rio’s glorious but short spun phoenix-like rise, before it was subsumed and inculcated into the mainstream popular musical paradigm. And it was going to be swallowed up whole before too long too, because, like all youth-led musical insurrections, they were before too long going to be quelled and silenced not by opposition, but by sly public acceptance and dilution. A musical manifesto of blanqueamiento written in semiquavers and ghost notes by record company executives. A time-tested paint by numbers sideways move in the music industry, that is only seeking one end, the ker-ching till and the accumulation of zeros at the end of the bank balance. Some of those other notable Funk and Soul acts like, Gerson King Combo, Carlos Dafe, Emilio Santiago, Tim Maia, et al could barely hang on to their defiance as slowly their tough sound, initially in opposition with the Brazilian culture they mutinied against, simply became the sound of the new Brazilian culture by way of the cash register. As just one spectacular example of this tactic, take the name of Bob Marley, which today would draw a blank in one’s mind had it not been for Chris Blackwell’s insistence on adding the guitars and organs of white rock music to create “appeal”. Punk went the same way, House Music and Hip Hop being two other very obvious benchmarks for this type of machination.
Zona Sul and the money machine therein, whilst publicly appalled had always been watching carefully the growth and creativity of the Northern Quarter and was ready to imbibe now, so long as it could be curtailed and bound. At the same time as this was occurring the harsh ways of the Dictatorship were loosening its iron grip on the arts just a pinch, and what could and could not be disseminated was beginning to represent a public appearance at least, of status quo. Still heavily controlled beneath the surface, but like the crocodile, above the water, almost calm and unassuming. There was an opening up of sorts and a new way of indulging in Brazilianness, and although short-lasting, the Black Rio movement in no uncertain terms had a direct influence on all that came after it. Never really a political movement as one would recognise it, the force and power it instilled in those who were there had the effect of politicising their minds to their own self-belief and sense of worth, which included the outward expression of Brazilian blackness, or Afrobrazilidade.
Someone who was surviving the cultural musical pruning was an artist named Bebeto, and leaning on a sound of Samba Rock and Balancao, and taking very heavy musical influences from that doer of no wrongs and living Orixa, Jorge Ben, he was making marvellous headway in this new era. On his 1980 album, he had recorded a song by Serginho called Neguinho Poeta. Neguinho in Brazilian Portuguese means the N-word, but the title is a double-edged sword, as it was, and still is commonly used as a familiar greeting amongst those in the poorer neighborhoods regardless of their heritage, and so spoken by those who were included, in a similar way to it’s in use in hip hop today, as a slang term for friend. It is a story of a young, unrecognised, dreamer poet, who with his prose, is transforming the afflicted world around him to love and union. Its message could not be clearer or more sublimely stated. Even before this, Serginho had also been involved with a Black Rio funk/soul outfit called Copa 7, and had written a couple of tunes for them too, including a full-on funk jam that had cut it on the dancefloors and which the band used as their theme tune, and so when Polydor signed him in at the start of the 80s, He was ripe and ready to make his own mark.
His thirst was great, and he had a sound that he thought could cut the swathe between what was expected, and what he wanted. He describes it as Meritiense, or the sound of Meriti, which is a double-edged sword, because as mentioned, Meriti was his hometown, as well as his moniker. He also describes it as Electric Samba, and listening with different ears, one can hear the parts of the various ancient African instruments being picked up by new employees of the amplified kind. He used the new synthesisers of the time and studio effects to trick the ears into experiencing a familiar, but still unknown auditory pulse, with a musicians aural legerdermain.
He says the message he wanted to convey was that of “love, equality, [and] a portrait of how we were living at the time…The story of Black people coming to Brazil, and the dissatisfaction of the life”, into which they were indentured.
In our interview, when Serginho speaks of “dignity”, and “negritude” his voice audibly breaks with a wistful resignation of hope still unrecognised, and he seems to be carried back far beyond the recording of this record to a more primal and deeply rooted yearning for inner peace and resolution. Brazilian music itself has always had a penchant for using notes in a minor key. It brings those rhythms of celebration a muted tone that may not at first be completely apparent if one were to witness it in all its colour and joyful exuberance. This is the feeling and expression of Saudade. Saudade is a deeply emotional state and is a uniquely Brazilian word that roughly translates as a feeling of Happy and Sad simultaneously. It’s very much akin to that comorbid pang of both desolate longing and happiness one gets when thinking of a lost lover. That irreconcilable feeling of limbo. It’s a cognitive dissonance that is true to some parts of life, and is most certainly one that has run through Brazil and it’s music since those first stolen people were forced to make this country their home. Before we stopped talking Serginho was emphatic that it should be noted that these conditions have changed very little and the poor and the Black are very much at the same mercies they have always been. We gratefully received his support for this release but have to acknowledge there is no way to round up this story with a neat little bow. It is a hard and difficult to stomach truth but it is intrinsic to all Black Brazilian music. So if you have the empathy enough to hear beneath what sounds like optimism in most Brazilian music, the unaccountable feeling of Saudade in your chest should give you some of the clues you need to begin a deeper understanding of what really went into getting this into your hands today.
This is indeed a salient and sobering thought that will need time to percolate and to be genuinely understood.
In that interim, there are many many Black artists not just in Brazil, but the world over, who’s lived experiences trace these lines in myriad ways, who would be grateful, of the bare minimum, that is just to know you know, and at the very least acknowledge their personal truths as real and by no means over.
