Samba De Janeiro Notes
Waneta
The first notes of the samba and the tango instantly capture ones attention, transporting the listener to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the River Plate in Argentina. Seen as national symbols for their respective countries, the samba and the tango are more than just popular musical and dance genres. A deeper dive into the development of these musical genres reveals a conflict between African slaves, indigenous people, and European migrants over musical identity and Latin American state formation.
Andreia Menezes, a linguistics and literature professor at the Federal University of So Paulo in Brazil, joins us to explain how the samba and the tango transformed from the music of the socially marginalized to an important issue for national intellectuals.
Samba and tango are two musical genres that appeared more or less at the same time in Brazil and Argentina and are closely related to the idea of a national symbol. About their origins it is not a very easy answer because it is possible to find different versions about their origins.
In the case of samba, scholars usually point out that it came from other musical genres such as the Portuguese fandango, or the Cuban habanera, but we can say that the most important contributions came from the cultural backgrounds of Brazilian populations of African origin. We can say that samba began in early twentieth century in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which was then the capital of Brazil.
In that moment, Buenos Aires was receiving a great wave of European immigrants, especially Spaniards and Italians, as well as migrants from the interior of the country. This poor population lived in the slums located in the peripheries of the capital where they spoke their different languages and mixed their different cultural backgrounds. There is also much discussion about the probable influence of the Afro argentine population on the tango. Musically, there are also contributions from rural Argentine musical genres, as well as from the habanera, the same that was related to the samba.
If we think of the beginning of these two genres, especially from a foreign view, the first characters that come to mind are Carmen Miranda and Carlos Gardel. What is their role in this process?
Samba and tango arose when the radio and the cinema were been establishing as mass media in Brazil and in Argentina. The radio in Brazil was officially installed in 1922 and in the following decade it had already 30 radio stations. In Argentina, the first radio station appeared in 1920, and by 1928 the country already had 36 radio stations.
In the beginning, in these two countries, radio was a state organization and its programmation had an educational aspect, as well as was used as an instrument of state propaganda. However, the radio stations gradually gained commercial outlines, beginning to emit mainly musical programs building up the music market and promoting the appearance of pop stars. By the 1930s, tango and samba were no longer considered marginal music and had become the most popular genre in their countries. This popularity was reflected in how often they played on radio shows.
Therefore, the most important actors at the beginning of the cinema were exactly the most famous singers of the music industry. It was in this context that the figures of Carlos Gardel and Carmen Miranda appeared. They were not only excellent singers, but also beautiful and charming actors. Carlos Gardel unfortunately had a short life because he died in a airplane accident in 1935 when he was 45 years old. He participated in 11 films in total: two recorded in Argentina, four in Paramount studios in France, and five in Paramount studios in New York.
The end of nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century were the scene of intense nationalist discussions all over the world. One of the main focus of these discussions was the definition of a homogeneous national population both racially and culturally.
However, Brazil was a multiethnic country, especially because of the numerous presence of the population of African ancestry resulted of almost four centuries of African enslaved. Also Argentina was a multiethnic country, in this case because of the migratory flood that this country received during the second half of the nineteenth century. The exit found against racial diversity was the adoption of the image of the melting pot. As I said before, people of different social classes, geographic and even ethnic backgrounds participated in the stabilization of the samba and the tango. Therefore, despite the marginal origins of these genres, they were adopted by the intelligentsia of these countries as an incarnation of the melting pot. In the Brazilian case there was even some state participation in this association.
Actually it is interesting to note that the marginal characters of the lyrics of samba and tango, who were hardly seen before, had their characteristics changed in a positive way: anarchy became independence, murder and brutality in courage and cheating in intelligence.
It is especially interesting to note that although the association of samba and tango to the idea of national symbols occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century and many other musical genres have emerged since then, it remains in many different ways to this day.
However, in the case of Argentina, tango is more associated specifically to the city of Buenos Aires, something that we find strongly expressed in its lyrics. The genres related to the Argentine folklore, my current object of study, are more associated by the Argentinean to the imaginary of nation. But I could say that in the case of Brazil this association is still very strong. For example, I watched the first game of Brazil in the World Cup, an event seen in Brazil as a very patriotic moment, here in Austin. I went to a Brazilian restaurant that announced that during the broadcast they would serve feijoada, caipirinha and samba.
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