ABSTRACT
The concept behind this book has allowed me to explain to myself why my own musical preferences as a teenager back in Brazil (British postpunk: Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Durutti Column, Siouxie and the Banshees, Bauhaus) maintained a surprising dialogue, and were not that socially incompatible, with the death/thrash metal (Slayer, Venom, Metallica, Sepultura) favored by my younger brothers and friends. It has allowed me to understand why that particular phenomenon is an important chapter of contemporary Brazilian popular music related to the trajectory of MPB [Música Popular Brasileira] in the 1970s and 1980s. The ease with which punks, headbangers, goths, and other “tribes” dialogued and collaborated with each other in Brazil owes something to a common rejection of the stardom of MPB, and to a perception that the canonical forms of Brazilian popular music had been coopted by the remarkable entertainment industry developed during the 1970s. Our relationship with Brazilian music was highly problematic indeed, and this was true not only of us goths, but of our punk and headbanging friends as well. For us “Brazilian music” meant the MPB stars on TV, impeccably dressed, moving their lips to the recordings of their songs played on Friday nights or Sunday afternoons on one of those Globo-network variety shows. That institutionalization reached a high point, I would contend, with the role of popular music in the campaign for free and direct presidential elections (1984) and, after the defeat of said campaign, in the rise of the first postdictatorial civil government, the center-right coalition led by Tancredo Neves and José Sarney.
