“Os DJs da Perifa: música eletrônica, trajetórias e mediações culturais em São Paulo, by Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari, Porto Alegre, Sulina, 2013”

Os DJs da Perifa: música eletrônica, trajetórias e mediações culturais em São Paulo, by Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari, Porto Alegre, Sulina, 2013 Carlos Palombini The DJs 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-andblues derived genres played by the first professional Brazilian DJs, as reported by the mainstream press in a four-page feature article about what journalist Lena Frias named the Black Rio movement in 1976. 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 and bass, trap and dubstep in the 1990s, Afro-Brazilians picked on whatever African-American subgenres they felt identified with and made them pivotal to their cultures. Between the late eighties and early nineties, DJ Nazz (Carlos Machado) brought from Europe and the U.S.A. the synth-pop, electrofunk, electro, Miami bass and LatinFreestyle tracks that, subjected by funkeiros (funksters) and such DJs as Grandmaster Raphael to various processes in cities around the Guanabara bay, [1] gave rise to funk carioca, the first Brazilian genre of electronic dance music. 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 Land), who highlighted a subgenre of drum ’n’ bass sometimes designated by the terms drum and bossa, bossa and bass, and sambass. Drum ’n’ bass arose in the UK in the 1990s as a more commercial brand of jungle, [2] the first native genre of British electronic dance music, which emerged in the late 1980s. Between 1992 and 1993 drum ’n’ bass reached Brazil (Fontanari 2013: 190– 191), where a 1997 boom was followed by decline (Id.: 204). Yet at the turn of the century Brazilian drum ’n’ bass was back in the spotlight. Marky released CDs in the UK in 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005 and 2007; [3] the Italian label Cuadra distributed the compilations Sambass (2003), Sambass 2 (2004), Sambass 3 (2006) and Sambass 4 (2007) on

double vinyl and CD; [4] and EMI included drum ’n’ bass remixes by Brazilian DJs on the CD Rewind (2004), a compilation of Wilson Simonal songs. A veteran DJ recounts: “The story starts there, […] in the Sound Factory, with Julião playing jungle and Marky playing techno”. Julião would have been the first DJ to play the broken electronic beats of the hardcore genre in São Paulo, but he soon abandoned this tendency to build his DJ identity upon techno. Marky played techno at the time but took to broken beats, building his DJ identity upon the promotion of hardcore, and then jungle and drum ’n’ bass. Fred stressed that Sound Factory was an underground environment, with customers from among the LGBT community, something of a novelty in the East End. Until then LGBT individuals went exclusively to parties in the central region of São Paulo: club Latino, then Rose Bom Bom, and the events DJ Marquinhos MS put on in the club Allure. In such venues customers’ openness gave DJs the freedom to present avant-garde dance-music tendencies that had just come out in European and North-American LGBT nightclubs. (Fontanari 2013: 191)

When Fontanari started fieldwork in 2005, the São Paulo techno and drum ’n’ bass scene perceived itself as in danger. Three important East End venues — Toco (1972–1997), Sound Factory (1985–1997) and Overnight (1988–2004) — 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 himself: “why were drum ’n’ bass DJs the most prominent in Brazil if the genre was viewed as unappealing to the local market”? On the one hand, “the best DJs come from the periphery”, since many years were necessary for the development of a DJ specializing in one single genre, and such development was incompatible with the fluid habitus of the middle classes. On the other hand, even among the highly skilled, few were those who managed to leave the periphery as drum ’n’ bass specialists, because few specialists in a single genre were needed to supply this market, and few of them understood the difference of habitus between centre and periphery, and could thus successfully liaise between one and the other so as to advance their careers through barriers of country and class. (Fontanari 2013: 220)

The author had previously conducted ethnographic research into the white middle-class Porto Alegre rave scene (Fontanari 2003). The Periph DJs: electronic music, trajectories and cultural mediations in São Paulo 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 twenty-seven

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parties and conducted eighteen formal interviews in the course of which he came face-toface with twenty-two DJs, a record-shop owner and a party promoter. He suggests that in the process of learning 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. The DJ becomes the mixer, transforming himself as a requirement to mediate between the musics he plays, which he transforms as a requirement to transform his audience, who is never the same after each party, in a centrifugal spiral movement. (Fontanari 2013: 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” (Id.: 81). If, on the one hand, the DJ role was defined by the distance that his trajectory of differentiation established in relation to his audience, on the other, it was also defined by the audience capability to project themselves onto his figure, recognizing in him an “equal”, but in a more potent version. This acknowledgement depended on the mediation between, on the one side, the “individualist” tendency and commercial logic that permeated the DJ’s trajectory of professionalization and, on the other, a kind of expectation based on “communitarian” principles that oriented personal relations in the periphery scene. The farther the distance between these two poles and the greater the DJ ability to skilfully mediate between them, the more highly esteemed by the audience he would be — and the more “humble” too. 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. (Fontanari 2013: 111–112)

This is Fontanari’s leitmotiv, which the reader follows through a set of anthropological methods systematically pursued: ethnography of periphery-DJs 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 existences; 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. While the genre of electronic dance music associated with the African musical diaspora (viz. drum ’n’ bass) is defined as “open” to combinations with a wide variety of other genres, that associated with occidental music (viz. techno) is defined as “closed”, thus reflecting the way

 

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collaborators of this study perceived differences of class in the São Paulo city environment, of which the emblem was the difference between “periphery” and “centre”. In the periphery there was collaboration between DJs. The centre was a place for individualized initiatives. (Fontanari 2013: 238–239)

This notwithstanding, There were no mixes of drum ’n’ bass with axé-music or pagode [5] in this electronic music universe. Combinations were understood as possible within limits defined by individuals socially legitimated to do so, who operated musical symbols in specific contexts. Mixing and combining possibilities were by no means defined simply by the taste of those who operated them, but by ethnic signification, class signification and geopolitical signification, as well as by reciprocity ties that went beyond these operators’ local universe and time present. (Fontanari 2013: 243–244)

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 (Id. 240–241). 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. Fontanari’s writing displays his academic training and counterbalances the dominance that journalistic writing has exerted on EDM publications in Brazil. [6] 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.

Notes [1] Vaguely designated as Great Rio or Rio Metropolitan Region, which in this case includes Niterói, São Gonçalo, Itaboraí, Maricá and cities in the Baixada Fluminense (Rio de Janeiro state lowlands). [2] The relationship between jungle and drum ’n’ bass is a contentious issue. [3] See Discogs for details, http://goo.gl/FqXkYZ. [4] See Discogs for details, http://goo.gl/PCgzys. [5] Two Afro-pop Brazilian genres: on axé-music, see Guerreiro (2014); on pagode, Lima (2014).

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[6] This does not apply to funk carioca, which counts on a growing scholarly corpus.

References Fontanari, Ivan Paolo de Paris 2013 Os DJs da perifa: música eletrônica, trajetórias e mediações culturais em São Paulo. Porto Alegre: Sulina. Fontanari, Ivan Paolo de Paris 2008 “Os DJs da perifa: música eletrônica, mediação, globalização e performance entre grupos populares em São Paulo”. Doctoral dissertation in Social Anthropology. Porto Alegre: Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/14398 Fontanari, Ivan Paolo de Paris 2003 “Rave à margem do Guaíba: música e identidade jovem na cena eletrônica de Porto Alegre”. Master’s dissertation in Social Anthropology. Porto Alegre: Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/3703 Frias, Lena 1976 “Black Rio: o orgulho (importado) de ser negro no Brasil”. Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, 17 July, cover and 4–6. Guerreiro, Goli 2014 “Axé-Music”. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, vol. 9. David Horn et al., ed. London: Bloomsbury, 24–26. Lima, Luiz Fernando Nascimento de 2014. “Pagode”. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, vol. 9. David Horn et al., ed. London: Bloomsbury, 580–583.

 

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