Os DJs da Perifa: Música Eletrônica, Trajetórias e Mediações Culturais em São Paulo
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil)
The DJs that Ivan Fontanari studies in Os DJs da Perifa (henceforth The Periph DJs) may be traced back to the dances that, in the early 1970s, started spreading across Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Porto Alegre. These events gathered a mostly black young crowd from lower-class neighbourhoods who would dance to rhythm and blues derived genres played by the first Brazilian DJs. As African-American music evolved from soul to funk, Philly soul, disco and Euro-disco in the 1970s; to hip-hop, electrofunk, electro, house, garage, acid house and techno in the 1980s; and to jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, trap and dubstep in the 1990s, Afro-Brazilians picked on whatever African-American music they identified with and made it pivotal to their cultures.
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, DJ Nazz and others brought from Europe and the US the synth-pop, electrofunk, electro, Miami bass and Latin freestyle tracks that, subjected by funkeiros (funksters) and such DJs as Grandmaster Raphael to various processes in cities around the Guanabara Bay, gave rise to funk carioca, the first Brazilian genre of electronic dance music (see Palombini 2014). More restricted in popularity and influence, the group Fontanari studies rose from the working-class Zona Leste (henceforth East End) of São Paulo in the 1990s to gain notoriety at the turn of the century through the performances and productions of DJs Marky, Patife and Xerxes (a.k.a. XRS), who highlighted a subgenre of drum ‘n’ bass sometimes designated by the terms sambass, drum and bossa or bossa and bass.
Drum ‘n’ bass arose in the UK in the 1990s as a derivate of jungle, the first native genre of British electronic dance music, which emerged in the late 1980s. Between 1992 and 1993 drum ‘n’ bass reached Brazil (190–1), where a 1997 boom was followed by decline (204). Yet at the turn of the century Brazilian drum ‘n’ bass was back in the spotlight. Marky, Patife and Xerxes released albums, DJ mixes and singles on various formats (acetate, CD, vinyl) in Brazil and in the UK; the Italian label Cuadra distributed four double volumes of the Sambass compilations; and EMI included drum ‘n’ bass remixes by Brazilian DJs on the CD Rewind, a compilation of Wilson Simonal songs.
When Fontanari started fieldwork in 2005, the São Paulo techno and drum ‘n’ bass scene perceived itself as in danger. Three historical East End venues had closed their doors, and the relatively upscale nightclubs that catered for a white middle-class clientele in the centre were discontinuing techno and drum ‘n’ bass events. This did not pose a threat to Marky, Patife and Xerxes, who could pursue their careers elsewhere. The earlier generation though had not enjoyed the same amount of public recognition and depended on those venues for survival. By contrast, a new generation of aspiring professionals, to whom Marky and Patife had been inspirational, relied on menial jobs to earn their living while collaboratively staging parties in the periphery out of which their role models had come. Fontanari turns his attention to this group. He asks: “why were drum ‘n’ bass DJs the most prominent in Brazil if the genre was viewed as unappealing to the local market?”.
The author has previously conducted ethnographic research into the white middle-class Porto Alegre rave scene. The Periph DJs derives from his 2008 doctoral dissertation in Social Anthropology, which won a National Arts Foundation Award for Critical Writing on Music in 2012. From May to December 2005 Fontanari participated in 27 parties and conducted 18 formal interviews in the course of which he came face-to-face with 22 DJs, a record-shop owner and a party promoter. He suggests that, “as they learn the mixing potential of the machine called mixer, DJs incorporate its properties while attributing to the machine creative powers undifferentiated from their own, in a process of biomechanical-symbolic feedback” (226).
Fontanari narrates how he built up the character of the ethnographer so as to become another—rather than the other—and thus conveniently circulate among periphery DJs and partygoers; among residents of the working-class neighbourhoods where periphery DJs and partygoers lived; among people in the unmarked territories periphery DJs and partygoers named the centre; and to cross these boundaries without attracting hostility or unwanted attention. The function of the periphery DJ is to “bring closer to the periphery a world of distant references through the performance of electronic music while promoting the distancing of themselves and their followers from the periphery world” (81). He explains: “For this reason, the most valued performances were those by periphery DJs who had followed the longest trajectories, individualizing and personalizing themselves to the utmost degree in relation to the periphery audience” (112).
This is Fontanari’s leitmotiv, which the reader follows through a set of anthropological methods systematically pursued: ethnography of periphery-DJ parties in the periphery and in the centre; semi-structured interviews with periphery DJs and a promoter working in the periphery; semi-structured interviews with periphery DJs and one record-shop owner working in the centre; analysis of technical devices in their relations to periphery DJs’ existence; and analysis of two drum ‘n’ bass hits released by periphery DJs in 2001. This leads him to the recognition of a direct relationship between the mixing potentials of drum ‘n’ bass/techno and the modes of interaction in the periphery/centre: “In the periphery there was collaboration between DJs. The centre was a place for individualized initiatives” (239).
However, “there were no mixes of drum ’n’ bass with axé-music or pagode” (243).[1] Mixing and combining possibilities were defined by “ethnic signification, class signification and geopolitical signification” (243–4). At this point we come across a most intriguing trait of musical appropriation and re-signification processes within the African diaspora: Afro-Brazilians tend to associate such African-American genres as disco, house and techno to whiteness, whereas a Black-British genre such as drum ‘n’ bass retains persistent links to blackness (240–1).
The Periph DJs offers an x-ray view into a culture that risked falling into oblivion since the day when Brazilian techno and drum ‘n’ bass started to fade out of mainstream earshot. Interviews are especially engrossing and leave us wondering what career paths the author’s collaborators may have subsequently taken. The Periph DJs sets a high standard for Brazilian scholarship in the field. Additionally, those who wish to challenge currently held assumptions on funk carioca shall find in this study something akin to a control group.
Guerreiro, Goli. 2014. “Axé-Music”. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Vol. 9: Genres: Caribbean and Latin America, ed. David Horn, Heidi Feldman, Mona-Lynn Courteau, Pamela Narbona Jerez and Hettie Malcomson, 24–6. London: Bloomsbury.
Lima, Luiz Fernando Nascimento de. 2014. “Pagode”. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Vol. 9: Genres: Caribbean and Latin America, ed. David Horn, Heidi Feldman, Mona-Lynn Courteau, Pamela Narbona Jerez and Hettie Malcomson, 580–3. London: Bloomsbury.
Palombini, Carlos. 2014. “Funk Carioca and Música Souls”. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Vol. 9: Genres: Caribbean and Latin America, ed. David Horn, Heidi Feldman, Mona-Lynn Courteau, Pamela Narbona Jerez and Hettie Malcomson, 317–25. London: Bloomsbury.
[1]Axé-music and pagode are two genres of Brazilian Afro-pop: on axé-music see Guerreiro (2014); on pagode see Lima (2014).