Racionais MCs' Sobrevivendo no Inferno

Derek Pardue

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501338847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

In 1997 the rap group Racionais MCs (the 'Rational' MCs) recorded the album Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), subsequently changing the hip-hop scene in São Paulo and firmly establishing itself as the point of reference for youth across Brazil. In an era when rappers needed to defend the very idea that their work was indeed music and a time when neighborhoods such as Capão Redondo, from where Racionais frontman Mano Brown hailed, often topped homicide statistics, Sobrevivendo empowered as it provoked. As one journalist noted, "the underworld of São Paulo's working-class suburbs is dominated by cheap thrills and provides little space for representation." Sobrevivendo changed all of that; a brutal but invigorating imagination was born. The lure of Sobrevivendo is the particular combination of word and sound that powerfully involves listeners, especially those millions of young Brazilians who live in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Brazil's megacities. This book celebrates the 25-year anniversary of Sobrevivendo by representing the album's power not only within the hip-hop community but also in other cultural domains such as cinema and literature. The author also provides his own narrative spins on the sentiment of Sobrevivendo, thus making the book a creative mix of cultural analysis and inspired testimony.

1 Who Cares About Brazilian Rap?

The contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued that the link between “bare life” and politics constitutes the defining moment of modernity, the essential mechanism of power. Agents of capitalism have articulated human value as the bare body in many ways. The professions of construction, sports, beauty, fashion, and prostitution are obvious examples. It is the logic of the bare life to which Agamben directs our attention. The common sense of such processes and entrepreneurial projects provides a spark among some of us to expose this brutality. A brutality of the global everyday. But what does this bare life look like, sound like? Can we feel its crushing simplicity as we look in the mirror and get ready to face a two-hour commute to a job that means absolutely nothing beyond the barely adequate payment to survive barely in a city constructed with the objective to exclude us? We are simply bodies, sometimes in motion, occasionally in transport. That’s all.

We are more than that. We are racialized, engendered, sexualized, and spirited bodies. Why is that important? The thing that philosophers often diminish is the power of popular culture. Like anything else, pop is widely and wildly heterogeneous. And there is always a cadre of voices calling us to reflect on what we take for granted. Every once in a while, a charismatic storyteller emerges and illuminates the bare life to us. He or she draws crowds. We feel a part of a new group, something worthwhile.

Ladrão sangue bom tem moral na quebrada.	A reliable thief has a rep in the hood
Mas pro Estado é só um número, mais nada.	But for the state, he’s just a number

In the case of Mano Brown and the Racionais MCs the urban periphery (periferia), made even more colloquial in the term quebrada, is the constant point of reference. Translation is challenging, as the real sense of terms like ladrão is not necessarily “thief” per se but can be any resident, anyone who is marked as an outlier, a delinquent, a good-for-nothing. The state sees everyone in the periferia as a “thief,” so the Racionais, following the lead of so many periphery residents, embrace that and turn it around. The periferia also contains many who are sangue bom, of “good blood,” who command respect in what is otherwise a living hell. It is important to recognize that even though the Racionais locate their stories in the peripheries of São Paulo, there are strategic moments when they cite districts of other cities, such as Rio de Janeiro (“Baixada Fluminense”) and Brasília (Ceilândia”) that were and continue to be significant points of reference in the Brazilian hip-hop cartography.

Just as the “ghetto” and the “projects” have been key sites of neoliberal urban planning and the main stage from which so much of US Black culture is expressed,¹ the periferia is the principal category of place to understand Brazilian hip-hop. All of these terms have important and dynamic histories that are central to demographics, urbanization, and social stigma. They possess points of overlap and divergence. For example, all three terms—ghetto, project, and periferia—refer to residential areas that are spatially separate and relatively distant from centers of modernity in terms of institutions of culture (museums, theaters, cinemas, book stores, cafés), finance (banks, employment), and formal politics (city hall, legislative buildings, union headquarters). They are essentially suburban, literally below the urban in rank and power. Race, ethnicity, and class become active qualifiers to justify or explain inequalities. One main difference that distinguishes the Brazilian (and by extension, the Global South) from much of the United States, Western Europe, and the so-called Global North is that the periferia is overwhelmingly unplanned; that is, it is not a “project” by the state but, rather, improvised, auto-constructed, conglomerate housing. For most Brazilians, the state is present only in the form of the police, a repressive force, and sporadic basic services, a form of constant precarity. The periferia materializes this sociopolitical and economic milieu.

Brazilians consider the periferia a dangerous place, because it represents the outlaw backlands within the metropolitan spaces of modernity and progress.² The dialectics of shoreline culture and countryside tradition have generated a great deal of what is gingerly negotiated as Brazilian national history, but that history keeps these worldviews apart. City and Country. White, European influences and aspirations contrasted with Indigenous provincial lore and threatening African sorcery. The periferia is thus out of place. It’s too close.

The periferia also brings the sharp contradictions of faith too close to the bourgeois, objective, modern urban dweller. What is faith supposed to look like under neoliberalism? Which brand of Christianity (in the case of Brazil with centuries of Catholic-based colonialism) is best suited to markets? To entrepreneurship? To gutted state budgets? It is, of course, evangelical Christianity, a discourse of selflessness in the eyes of God but led by some of the most gawdy proponents of ostentation of wealth on the planet. Evangelicalism forces one to confront the failures of modernity, the moral overlaps of good and bad, and the dilemma of faith itself. The periferia is the brutal garden of temptation par excellence.

The release of Sobrevivendo coincided with a significant transition in the urban landscape, which was also reflected in hip-hop. Namely, the decade of the 1990s saw a proliferation of evangelical churches throughout the urban peripheries of Brazil. Despite being brought up in circles of candomblé, the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion of polytheism, and elaborate music-dance rituals, Mano Brown perceived the power of evangelical Christianity and its increasing pull in the periphery. Sobrevivendo no Inferno is full of references to biblical verses, local church sites, and neighborhood personalities. The figure of the crente, or “believer,” would be even more prominent in the subsequent recording Nada como um dia após o outro (2002). Be that as it may, Sobrevivendo prefigured the ensuing boom of “positive” or “evangelical” rap of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Any listening session featuring Brazilian rap, especially Racionais and, more specifically, the album Sobrevivendo, must take into consideration the role of state and state-sponsored violence against residents. As Brazilian sociologists, such as Vera Telles, Gabriel Feltran, and Lucas Oliveira, as well as engaged periferia/university students/YouTubers, such as Thiago Torres (“Chavoso da USP”), remind us, Brazil’s democratization and transition away from a military dictatorship was a sharp move toward neoliberalism. In the Americas this process is often glossed as the “Washington Consensus,” a set of economic policies that pinned many Latin American countries to lending agencies based in Washington, DC, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The guiding principles were the ideologies of developmentalism and “free” markets. Sustained acts of violence like torture and extra-judicial killings continued in the periferia during the late 1980s and into the 1990s because under neoliberalism the state divested itself from social services, for example, education, and authorized the police (and militias composed of ex-police) as the proper agency to handle “social problems.” The result was, among many events, three massacres of unarmed citizens, which were internationally recognized as serious Human Rights violations. They include the massacres at Carandiru, Candelária, and Vigário Geral. These events occurred in 1992 and 1993, respectively, with the first taking place in São Paulo and the other two in Rio de Janeiro. For the purposes of this book, the massacre of Carandiru is fundamental, because it acts as the background of the song “Diário de um Detento” (A Prisoner’s Diary”), one of the more well-known tracks from Sobrevivendo. The Carandiru prison complex, the largest in Latin America at the time, was demolished in 2000 and the area repurposed into a city park. Without Sobrevivendo, including the wildly popular music video of “Diário de um Detento,” such memories would be lost.³

Periferia and the marginalized dweller exist in relation to “the system” (o sistema). Many years ago, coincidentally around the time of the release of Sobrevivendo, a young man, who was a Racionais fan but not a rapper himself, tried to explain to me: “If you pay attention to what is being said in rap music, then you’ll know that there is something wrong going on out there, because rap is reality.” “Reality” indicates a complex set of conditions including race, class, gender, and geography that hip-hoppers mediate through the use of narration and music. This process is one of performance and order as hip-hoppers profess a desire to transform reality by opposing o sistema (the system).

Some of the protagonists sketched out in Sobrevivendo, such as the narrator of Tô ouvindo alguém me chamar (“I hear someone calling me”), illustrate one common vision that the only way to oppose and master the system is through crime. The system only respects brute power when it comes from the periphery and violence becomes an option. The song’s narrator reflects on his feelings during a bank robbery:

Pela primeira vez vi o sistema aos meu pés.	For the first time I saw the system at my feet
Apavorei, desempenho nota dez.	I panicked, a perfect performance.

After an initial shock, the narrator feels empowered as he sees a safe full of money and a hopeless security guard, whom he describes as foolish to risk his life for an institution that could not care less about him. The system manipulates weak people like the security guard, while he, the narrator, remains resistant. As the song develops, it becomes clear how dynamic, sinister, and multifaceted o sistema really is and how much critical work is necessary to combat and transform the system.

Hip-hoppers, through their narratives, underscore the potential empowerment of witnessing. Whether grounded in the US African American tradition of spirituality and power or a general indigenous Latin American tradition of truth and cosmology, the agency, in being a witness and relating experience, is undeniable.⁴ More pertinent to the purposes of this text, witnessing is a spatial claim. One must witness from some place and herein lies the significance of the ponto, the “point” of address. As Carolina Maria de Jesús reminds us, the favela and the periferia in São Paulo are more often than not unstable points of address:

July 27. I heated food for the children and started to write. I looked for a place where I could write in peace. But here in the favela there aren’t any such places. In the sun I feel the heat. In the shade I feel cold. I was wandering around with the notebooks in my hand when I heard angry voices. I went to see what it was . . . .⁵

“Periferia” is the keyword that indicates not only a working-class, poorly serviced, improvised suburban area of the city but also a stigmatized person. The conflation of place with person is most evident in Brazil when one considers the term “marginal,” as opposed to the cidadão, or (passive) citizen. The crushing objectification in the real and imaginary figure of the “marginal” in Brazilian hip-hop is the variable end result of a broken-down, chaotic system of city infrastructure. Simultaneously, the “marginal” is the typical anti-hero of contemporary Brazil, the wayward migrant with a cursed gift of gab and a similarly Calibanesque attitude of revolta (rage). The marginal is an alternative modern subject, a subaltern author of a translocal cosmology—a worldview based on the quotidian and conventionally abject. It is important to remember that the marginal and the periferia are not isolated phenomena but essentially entangled in the modernization, in all its connotations, of cities like São Paulo.

Marginality is a magical myth, one that “exerts a magnetic attraction” for those invested in public policy and cultural expression, as former president and sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso once wrote.⁶ Janice Perlman systematically demonstrated in her landmark study of Rio de Janeiro during the height of the military dictatorship in the la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• An Opening Salve
• 1 Who Cares About Brazilian Rap?
• 2 Brazilian Hip-Hop: A Brief Genealogy
• 3 Sound, Text, Delirium
• 4 Dreams at the Beginning
• 5 A Go-getter
• 6 The Wait
• 7 It’s Everywhere
• 8 Wesley’s House
• 9 The Laugh and the Echo
• 10 Nóia / The Sounds of Paranoia
• 11 Guina’s Turn: Does God Still Watch Over Me?
• 12 Surroundings
• 13 . . .
• 14 Aleph in the Periferia
• 15 In Search of Authority
• 16 Outro
• Glossary
• Notes
• Copyright