Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
had an elaborate lighting system at its disposal and a sound engineer to trigger samples and add sound effects. All the instruments were miked, and the mix emphasized thunderous bass, visceral percussion, and Lirinha’s apocalyptic incantations.
While the first performance in Arcoverde began with a call for dead poets to authenticate the work of the group, its first CD and performances on the subsequent tour began with the more nebulous, disorienting track “A chegada do Zé do Né na lagoa de dentro” (The arrival of Zé do Né to the inner lagoon). The track started with sound in the left channel and floated to the right as the reverse attack of an acoustic guitar’s decay played backward built to an abrupt crescendo. Immediately after this first guitar stab, a vocal melismatic melody appeared as the guitar continued to orbit from ear to ear. Clayton’s guitar playing recorded backward sustained a low drone while he picked quicker notes on the upper strings, which when reversed sounded like prickly stabs. The prolonged attack of the droning low notes gave the song an expansive sense of space, invoking the Doppler effect and sounding like a recording made in slow motion. The detail of the lilting aboio (an a capella cowherder’s song) that the singer Zé do Né recorded with the crackly aesthetic of early ethnographic field recording, was contrasted with the swirling guitar recorded backward.6 Once the looped vocal sample repeated itself verbatim, however, its electronic manipulation was foregrounded, and it too was denaturalized and unmoored in this swirling orbit.
By the time Cordel’s tours were being produced by Gutie and their disc was recorded by Naná, the band had gone from downplaying the intertextual gaps between its performances and those of related performers to emphasizing gaps in order to present the group as iconoclastic innovators. The band’s shift away from a posture of homage was vividly indexed by the changes in the performance of “O Cordel Estradeiro,” with which they began their first SESC show. The song, which declares their performance to be “road-ready folklore,” indexes the band’s emerging questions about the use of marginal-turned-traditional source materials. The song, in which Lirinha calls to his departed elders in the world of poetry and popular culture for authentication, now explores the negative potential of homage, understood as an appropriation rather than a tribute. Although Lirinha recites more or less identical words, the difference becomes clear the moment he utters the word verdadeiro (authentic). During the band’s earlier performances the guitar came in to reassure the audience with a pleasant, stable chord progression. On the record, however, an ominous, dissonant line appears at this point, using the lowest register of an accordion run through distortion and other effects.7 What appeared earlier to be the inspirational passing of the torch of tradition now sounds like a Frankenstein-like jolting of life into the dead. With the recitation of the image of Lirinha’s land as a rugged place where “the rattlesnake naps in the mouth of the bandit,” the aboio sample of “Zé do Né” reappears, this time played backward.
With this contrasting musical accompaniment, the tone of the poem shifts from Lirinha reverently asking for his elder’s blessing to asserting his power with bluster. Cordel’s new power is declared with a show of technical prowess by playing the sampled traditional voice backward—like a magic show, in which a magician, with a puff of smoke, suspends someone upside down in midair. Just as the magician performing such a trick would control the inverted body, Cordel asserts control over the traditional material.
After this act of self-authentication Lirinha’s own words are once again blurred with moments of ventriloquism. Now when he recites another poet’s verse, the mood shifts abruptly as a sunny circle of fifths chord progression emerges. In the CD liner notes these poets are cited without quotation marks, and during performance it isn’t clear where Lirinha’s words end and the other poets’ verses begin. When the last verse ended during Cordel’s debut performance, the song ended. But on the CD, the moment that the words are complete the dark accordion part returns, along with the inverted aboio vocal sample. Musically and lyrically, the band acknowledges in this track that its approach could be heard as either homage to be celebrated or appropriation to be scorned.
This marked change in its posture of homage happened during the period when many of the traditional performers cited in Cordel’s lyrics and music were approaching the band with intellectual property rights claims. The half hour of samba de coco and reisado songs from their Arcoverde phase had been whittled down to one four-minute medley, chosen because it consisted of songs in Arcoverde’s samba de coco and reisado repertoires that were played by other groups throughout the region, making them impervious to lawsuits claiming ownership of the song’s intellectual property rights. The excessive footnotes in the CD booklet, citing details as minute as the fact that the rhythm of a made-up word was inspired by a samba de coco dancer’s steps, serve two purposes: (1) to prevent lawsuits in Arcoverde’s volatile environment by acknowledging the band’s sources and (2) to prove the band’s uniqueness in the musical marketplace by linking it to the interior region in a way no coastal Recife band can claim.
In addition to the shrinking of the folkloric medleys, the structure of the performances shifted during Cordel’s second phase, when the band members were living in Recife. While Cordel was starting out in Arcoverde the mood on stage would vary from one skitlike segment to the next. Following a poem about an indigenous prophecy, Lirinha would tell a funny story about a bumbling rural man trying to navigate the urban environment. Humorous poems followed solemn moments. After moving away from Arcoverde, however, the mood of a few moments in the first performance, in which Lirinha portrayed the charismatic power of the prophets and the bandits, became standard throughout the entire show. Humor was almost completely absent, and the majority of the words were spoken as an incantation, or “a heavy church mass” as the band described it in its lyrics. An aura of ecstatic religion was invoked through the use of candomblé drumming patterns in 12/8 time, folk Catholic pilgrim’s songs, and the impassioned vocal cadence of a millenarian fire and brimstone preacher.
The last scene of the band’s music video for “Chover (ou invocação para um dia liquido)” (Rain [Invocation for a liquid day]), which enjoyed MTV Brasil airplay, was filmed under the cross of the Alto do Cruzeiro. The clip featured Cordel and the Calixto family dancing coco and playing music together. This image of harmony and celebration belied the instability of their relationship at that time, as each group was finding a way through distinct but tethered predicaments surrounding their emerging commodification. The musicians in Coco Raízes were working to realize their dreams of appearing on television and performing all over Brazil. As they worked toward these goals, they were aware that they were performing music with premodern roots within a place-based project. In the words of their stage manager, Carlinhos, Coco Raízes had to remain careful not to “get off track” by revealing their ambitions and risk being seen as just another pop band. The members of Coco Raízes maintained their floral print, old-fashioned outfits for performing and reluctantly heeded their manager’s warning not to abandon Arcoverde as their home base. Meanwhile, Cordel faced a transition from folklore revue to mutationist pop band and, in percussionist Emerson Calado’s words, eased away from reproducing the work of others, toward producing original work of its own. Authorship copyright conflicts only accelerated the movement of both groups away from drawing inspiration from songs considered part of the public domain.
CHAPTER TWO
Museums
When Lula Calixto died on November 15, 1999, his death triggered a social earthquake, shifting the tectonic plates of the samba de coco families in Arcoverde. Almost immediately friction emerged between the Calixto and Gomes families on one side and the Lopes sisters on the other.
Lula Calixto’s Death and a Feud Fought through Museums
The strain on the relationship among the three families was evident as early as Lula’s funeral. Assis lent me a videotape of the memorial service, which took place at the gymnasium of the SESC. In the middle of the gym floor, the casket was open, and Lula’s body was completely covered by a layer of daisies. Only his face was visible, and his trademark leather hat was placed on the flowers. Padim Batista’s pífano band stood