CITIES ARE, BY THEIR ESSENCE, PLACES of movement. Even if in some cases this is not visually perceptible, they pulsate with the desire for change, typically expressed by the impetus of youth. In the case of Brazil, young people have been shaking up the official state structures and the musical scenes in cities of different regions for some time.
As an important element of convergence, we have the movement of these young people [End Page 257] across cities, especially for work and leisure activities such as skateboarding. Though some youth have their own cars, the vast majority depend on public transportation to pursue their actions and activities.
The focus of the book is on urban mobility and music: protests for free transport, in combination with the punk/hardcore movement between 1996 and 2011. According to the author, with the arrival of the Internet in Brazil in 1995, there was a consolidation of movements such as Passe Livre (Free Fare) and the formation of journalistic networks such as the Centro de Mídia Independente (Independent Media Center) in 2000, through which independent communication channels encouraged the mobilization of the public.
Barros writes:
This connection was helped by the new digital tools created by the early commercial Internet: IRC, ICQ, Orkut, and others. The use of the Internet was furthermore essential to the creation of media outlets such as Brazil’s chapter of the Independent Media Center (known as CMI), which would escape the control of monopolies in existence in the country and which was used by the Free Fare Movement and present and former (hardcore) punks as their news channel and historical archive (p. 24).
Campaigns for free fares on public transport were triggered by the Buzu Revolt, which took place in Salvador in 2003, and the Turnstile Revolt, which took place in Florianópolis in 2004 and 2005—both caused by changes in the public transport system. In addition, the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre from 2001 onwards, with its slogan “Another World Is Possible,” consolidated the initiatives demanding free access to public transport. Subsequently, the important and cathartic 2013 protests in Brazil initiated with demonstrations against the price increase of bus, train and subway tickets and quickly grew into a general uproar against corruption in politics and police brutality against peaceful protesters.
The Brazilian punk/hardcore movement took shape in the post-dictatorial period after 1985, revealing the precarious displacement of young people between the urban peripheries and centers—a perverse dimension of big cities. This movement has often been ignored, in favor of other musical expressions, as the author writes:
Anti-nationalist sentiment was so strong in early punks from the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s that they had no problem being extremely critical of, and even abominating, Brazilian Popular Music (MPB). In this respect, punk music inaugurates a new chapter in the tradition of that country’s protest songs, in particular and Brazilian music in general. Such a chapter, however, seems to be many times forgotten due to the predominance of other genres in the musical history of Brazil. MPB, Tropicalia, samba, and bossa nova often take the front of the stage, whereas more apparently underground musical [End Page 258] manifestations stay precisely under the surface of public knowledge (p. 11).
Brazilian punk/hardcore was born politicized, and emerged to establish a robust bridge between counterculture expression and radical politics. This was in part due to the working-class culture and the strikes in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, led by metalworkers in the automotive industry in the 1970s and 1980s. In this process, the influences of anarchism, Trotskyism, situationism, and autonomism were evident.
This book examines the cities of Salvador, Florianópolis, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte as urban and musical contexts, starting in the late 1990s—a period that revolved around the Free Fare Movement and that won strength with the anti-globalization movements (closely related to the punk/hardcore counterculture).
Calls for free fares and against the difficulties of getting around in cities led to the territorialization of criticism of the globalization process, via claims for solutions to local problems. Punk/hardcore music was intensely involved in these street mobilizations of the early 2000s. The book urges readers to reflect on punk/hardcore not only as a musical genre in the four cities surveyed, but as a genre of life, which in Brazil was responsible for a paradigm shift in protests related to public transport.
Not exclusive to the Brazilian punk/hardcore scene, the counterculture movement also historically involved other musical genres, such as rap, as well as other groups, political parties, and social movements. But in the case of punk/hardcore, there has always been a dialogue with urban spaces and their problems resulting from the intrinsic contradictions of the capitalist system.
Like a cry from the excluded, punk/hardcore protested the contradictions of the globalization process. The book discusses many events sparked by the Passe Livre and the Centro de Mídia Independente movements, and the bands that played at these events. Both initiatives served an important social capillarization function at the federal level, in line with other events that took place in Brazil in the period reported on in the book.
It is worth mentioning that the author employed a wide range of primary and secondary sources: “archival exploration, cyberarchaeology of websites, consultation and interviews with historical actors and specialists, and review of the scholarly literature, interviews previously published by third parties, alternative and self-publications, films, and music productions” (p. 1). This methodology provides a historical account of the punk/hardcore movement in Brazil that is based on the mobilization of its agents, revealing elements of the geography of those who lived punk/hardcore. For them, drifting around the city has always been fundamental; the facts bear this out, especially in the accounts of interviewees.
In its cultural scope, the book suggests that the experience in Brazilian cities is an experience of institutional immersion, in which there is an exclusive, elitist, and oligarchic institutional project that is based on the privileges of a minority in these cities; and a range of people on the streets who need to create stopgap strategies to guarantee their minimum rights. [End Page 259]
The streets have a function, but they can be transformed into different kinds of places when they are appropriated for performance, as in the case of punk/hardcore bands. When this happens, the streets are “punkerized” by performances, subversions, behaviors, musicality, and ways of being in space. This transforms the functional territories of the streets into places—and here the arts in cities emerge as power, as escape valves, as everyday playfulness in and with the city.
For people from the peripheries of Brazilian cities, who live in quebradas or favelas, it is very common for the street to be the extension of the house, not least because the houses are small spaces, usually with many inhabitants. In other words, life takes place at home and on the street. Going into the streets also becomes a matter of survival, as with the jobs of many young punk/hardcore fans who work making deliveries.
The book sheds light on the different musical scenes that are part of contemporary Brazilian reality, pointing out challenges and contradictions that have yet to be overcome. This understanding of other dimensions goes beyond tourism and heritage in the four cities in this study. The author’s thesis serves as ammunition for the fight against injustice in cities, which is characterized by multiple disputes, and that reverberates in the unequal conditions of movement. Urbanities without disputes are lifeless urbanities. And the book demonstrates that there are disputes all the time, and that the manifestations of these disputes are a revealing part of our everyday experience.
Alessandro Dozena
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Source:
Dozena, Alessandro. Review of Distortion and Subversion: Punk Rock Music and the Protests for Free Public Transportation in Brazil (1996–2011), by Rodrigo Lopes de Barros. Journal of Latin American Geography, vol. 22 no. 2, 2023, p. 257-260. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/909100.
Rodrigo Lopes de Barros 