Beat Diaspora: Beats, Buses, Bricks

Clarification: “Blame It On Samba,” the first ZéTube I embedded below, was released after World War II in 1948.  I didn’t explicitly attribute it to either of the WWII Latin Disney efforts that I cited, but if it was unintentionally implied, well there you have it. (thx Kariann Goldschmitt)

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The decidedly unBrazilian weather this week cancelled Wednesday night’s Braziladelphia/Discoteca party, but instead I caught up on some Brazilian linkthink –

• Interview with Oscar-Castro Neves that “really lays out the history of bossa nova quite well” (h/t Neal Becton, proprietor of Som Records).

• Brazil Soul Power, made for a UT-Austin master’s, makes me think universities all over should require websites this good to graduate (h/t Andrew Giessel).

I’ve also been poring over some vintage Disney (h/t Kasanova) down south:

While I am charmed by the notion that samba can sweep away the literal blues plaguing Daffy Duck and Zé Carioca (more on him in a minute), I do wonder about the dual nature of “blame,” which certainly has more a negative that positive connotation.  What is the title suggesting that you blame on samba?  Is it an excuse for distraction?  An implied Brazilian attitude to shrug off responsibility?  It’s left very unclear.  From a more musical level, moreover, there is very little that actually sounds like samba, especially during the first half before the samba cocktail gets going with the live woman playing keyboard.  Samba to dance to is rarely if ever a one-person affair and I find it strange they didn’t show a full band, unless maybe there were technical limitations (and the larger-than-life instruments were supposed to fulfill that role).  The dancing, however, of both the cartoon characters and the real dancers, was not samba at all — this coming from a gringo who has tried very hard (and failed) to learn how to sambar.

“Aquarela do Brasil,” a scene from the 1942 Disney release Saludos Amigos (more, in turn, on that in a minute), gets it much better, thanks in no small part to a bonafide samba classic by Ary Barroso being the source musical material.  The cross-cultural exchange between the clueless tourist Daffy (the monolingual American mispronouncing Portugese) and the much suaver José (notably defined by his name — he is carioca so much that it names him) is simple but effective.  Daffy extends his hand for a shake; Zé grabs him in a warm embrace.  Daffy sees the bottle of cachaça and thinks it’s sodapop; Zé downs his no problem and lights his cigar off the fire that Daffy breathes from drinking it too fast.

But while the cartoon might well have served as a tourism promotion tool, it was actually part of much larger geopolitical machinations.  Disney traveled to South America and received government backing to produce films lauding our new South American friends, products of the “Good Neighbor Policy” designed to keep them under the Allies’ sphere of influence.  In addition to Saludos Amigos, the American viewing public also got 1944’s The Three Caballeros. In a disappointing linguistic blunder, both chose Spanish titles even though the Portuguese-speaking Zé Carioca was a main character in both and Carmen Miranda’s younger sister features in the latter.  Carmen Miranda, meanwhile, was an in-the-flesh Latin promotion effort, a story told probingly in the documentary Bananas is my Business.  The symbolism and imagery of these efforts to promote Brazil to the American public were naturally one-dimensional, especially having a lily white (and Portugal-born) chanteuse singing samba, which a scant generation earlier was derided as too African.

Of course, the kind of samba being promoted was itself far from the spontaneous, imprompu tradition from which the music sprang.  “Aquarela do Brasil” was a samba-exaltação (exaltation samba), patriotic in purpose and serving the interests of the dictatorial and quasi-fascist Vargas regime.  It was Vargas who had institutionalized the samba parade in Rio during the 1930s, turning it into a tool of nationalist pride, making it rigid, orderly, an almost military processional.  The state, in essence, co-opted a cultural form — or at least one major manifestation of it — steeped in resistance to the dominant order.  But the ’30s and ’40s were a time of dominant orders and militarization.  The Good Neighbor Policy worked ultimately, with Brazil declaring war on Nazi Germany in 1943 after one too many U-Boat attacks on its ships.  Here is the less playful side of Brazil that the Office of War Information portrayed:

That supposed 3 million man army was in reality the much smaller 25,000 strong Brazilian Expeditionary Force, which saw heavy combat in Italy.  Thus the end result of samba politics.  A sullied use of music, perhaps, although I am not so hyper-normative as to be unwilling to affirm my gratitude that Brazil chose to side with the Allies rather than the Axis (which was not a foregone conclusion, given that Vargas’ political proclivities were quite Mussolini-esque).  One use of culture begats another, though, and the result by 1960 was a prominent piece of monumental architecture in the Brazilian international style dedicated to the soldiers of World War II.