When the ghosts return: Street art in São Paulo, Brazil (photo: flickr/K Alexander, 2012)

Sound Collage as Political Chronic

Short Essay

The song «Apesar de Você» («In Spite of You») by Brazilian musician and writer Chico Buarque is one of the most iconic protest songs published in the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). Here, sound researcher Henrique Souza Lima presents a sound collage made from clippings of the word «despite» in various instances of Brazilian pop music. In doing so, Souza Lima establishes an intertextual relationship with the renowned song and approaches popular song in general as a platform for critical thinking on the current information war and the ghostly return of ultra-conservatism in Brazil.

During the military dictatorial regime in Brazil, the identity of Brazilian pop music (MPB) was largely characterized by politicized lyrics. In response to the limiting conditions imposed by censorship, songwriters explored a range of linguistic strategies in order to both fool the censors and communicate messages against the repressive system (Rezende 2008). By the end of the 1960s, Brazilian pop music incorporated plenty of neologisms, metaphors, analogies, antitheses, and other linguistic resources accompanied by Afro-Brazilian regional musics. Among the local music genres that have been turned into platforms for making protest songs, Samba was particularly relevant at that time.

One of the most iconic uses of Samba as a platform for protesting during the Brazilian military dictatorship is the case of the song «Apesar de Você» («In Spite of You») written by Chico Buarque. First released in 1970 within an EP record, this song features lyrics from a first-person voice, which constantly refers to a second-person in a complaining manner (Buarque 1979): «Today it’s you who give the orders / what you say is said / and there is no argument / you who invented all this (...)» (italics by the author). The voice insistently relates to an antagonistic «you», but this pronoun has no explicit referent. «You who invented sadness / Now, do me a favour and disinvent it / You are going to pay double for every tear shed from this sorrowing of mine». The climax of this agonistic situation happens in the chorus, which is sung by a collective of voices: «In spite of you, tomorrow will be another day». The absence of an explicit referent for the pronoun «you» leaves open the interpretation of who he/she/it is. It took a while for the dictatorial regime to realize that it was the referent for that «you». In the end, this was not a simple song depicting a disagreement between lovers.

Becoming an Iconic Phrase

Between its first release and censorship, over 100,000 copies of the EP were sold and the song became an important hymn in the democratic movement. In 1971, army officers stormed Philips’ headquarters and destroyed the remaining copies. The military regime censored and removed the record from the market, but the song was already in the Brazilian public consciousness. Eight years after its first release, Buarque re-recorded the song and released it as the 11th track of the album Chico Buarque (1978). The song came back with a more sophisticated arrangement and phonographic production.

A little over forty years after the troubled 1970s in Brazil, the chorus of «In Spite of You» has become an iconic phrase within the academic literature on censorship (Jones 2001) and resistance (Foley 2019). In the early 21^st century, this chorus is not only circulating in the voice and imagination of the Brazilian public, but it has become an icon circulating in a transnational space. This refrain remains particularly relevant to this day because it mirrors the ghost of the dictatorial regime haunting Brazil in 2019. Considered as a kind of ghost mirror, this chorus would be a centerpiece in a possible Brazilian hauntology.1

The Apesar Sound Collage

If we shift the focus from the pronoun «you» to the preposition «in spite of», other layers of meaning begin to emerge. Instead of gravitating around the oppressive force referred to in the second person, the emphasis on the «in spite of» highlights the position of resistance of the one who speaks. This chorus epitomizes a belief in the future («tomorrow will be...»), but it also affirms an action that is always in the present tense. This action is the marking of a position of resistance within a political context. The preposition therefore highlights a social contrast, and this contrast is the core of my following argument.

As a comment on the relevance of this relational position within the recent Brazilian public sphere, I sampled the word «apesar» (in spite of) in several instances of Brazilian pop music that had significant popularity in the last decades. It resulted in a sound collage made as a stream of samples of the same word sung by several different voices. By displacing this preposition from its original contexts, the sound collage builds a linguistic loop about a particular social position. Resistance is a particular virtuality within the recent memory of Brazilian popular music, a virtuality to which I would like to refer through this linguistic loop (In spite… of in spite of… in spite of…). Moreover, resistance is a virtuality that is relevant now in Brazil, where we are dealing with the ultra-conservative, conspiratorial, misogynist, and racist ghosts of the dictatorial regime on an everyday basis (Fogel 2018).

Will There Be Another Day Tomorrow?

The sound collage was composed in 2017, when it was already possible to smell the meme-driven fascism around the corner (Bravo 2017). Only one year later, the information war and the self-truth regime promoted by the far-right strategists definitively landed in Brazil. As it landed, it mingled with the ghosts of the military dictatorship, resulting in the particular mix of Christian Protestantism, structural racism, misogyny, negationism, anti-communism, and the taste for the most baffling conspiracy theories. The archetypes and narrative plots of this meme-based information war formed a sophisticated disinformation-based propaganda channeled through social media (Banjo 2019). The fact that presidents behave as unqualified digital influencers is a feature of our time, and it is fully operational in the Brazil of early 2020. In such a scenario, we cannot be so sure that «tomorrow will be another day».

The sound collage Apesar was created as a modest comment on this particular state of affairs marked by the haunting presence of the undead dictatorial regime. Brazilian structural racism and necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) are undead, or the walking dead. If, on the one hand, the morbid desire for the dictatorial repression is always actualizable in Brazil, on the other, multiple voices within Brazilian culture activate popular song as a platform for the diffusion of critical thought within the public sphere. Between these two opposite poles, critical thought might build escape routes within this dialectical duality between oppression and resistance.

1. «Hauntology» is a term coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida as a fusion between the verb «to haunt» and the noun «Ontology». In contrast to the traditional ontology that thinks of being in terms of self-identical presence, Derrida states that the existence of something is only possible on the basis of a whole series of absences. This brings to the forefront of the critical investigation the concept of «spectre», which relates to the agency of the virtual, that is, that which acts imminently in a given context without physically existing. This conceptual approach was used to critically think about issues related to late capitalism in Derrida (1994) and Fisher (2014).

List of References

Banjo, Shelly. 2019. «Facebook, Twitter and the Digital Disinformation Mess». The Washington Post. October 2. Accessed December 2. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/facebook-twitter-and-the-digital-disinformation-mess/2019/10/01/53334c08-e4b4-11e9-b0a6-3d03721b85ef_story.html).

Bravo. 2017. «Cyberwar Series 21of8 The Great Meme War». Dailymotion. Accessed December 2, 2019. (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ebknr).

Chico Buarque. 1979. «Two Songs: In Spite of You». Index of Cencorship 8 (5): 50–51. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227908532947).

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge.

Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books.

Fogel, Benjamin. 2018. «Fascism Has Arrived in Brazil – Jair Bolsonaro’s Presidency Will Be Worse Than You Think». The Independent. October 29. Accessed December 2, 2019. (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-election-results-president-fascism-far-right-fernando-haddad-a8606391.html).

Foley, Conor. 2019. In Spite of You: Bolsonaro and the New Brazilian Resistance. New York: OR Books.

Jones, Derek, ed. 2001. Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. Vol. 1–4. New York: Routledge.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. «Necropolitics». Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Translated by Libby Meintjes.

Rezende, Fernanda. 2008. «The Influence of the Brazilian Dictatorship on Brazilian Music: A Rhetorical Analysis of Protest Songs». Senior thesis, Liberty University. (https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=honors).

Shaw, Lisa, and Stephanie Dennison, eds. 2005. «Brazilian Protest Music». In Pop Culture Latin America!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle. 39–41. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

This article is part of Norient’s online publication Sampling Politics Today, published in 2020 as part of the research project «Glocal Sounds – Re-Working and Re-Coding Place References» (No. 162797), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and supported by the Bern University of the Arts HKB.

Bibliographic Record: Souza Lima, Henrique. 2020. «Sound Collage as Political Chronic». In Sampling Politics Today, edited by Hannes Liechti, Thomas Burkhalter, and Philipp Rhensius (Norient Sound Series 1). Bern: Norient. DOI: 10.56513/nftg6449-17.

Biography

Henrique Souza Lima is a teacher and academic researcher. He received his PhD in music from the University of São Paulo with research foregrounding intersections between listening and coloniality. Henrique currently teaches music production at the University Anhembi Morumbi in São Paulo-Brazil.

Published on September 24, 2020

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Clebin Quirino producing in his Produto Novo Studio in Belo Horizonte (photo: Michel Brasil)

The Politics of Sample Chopping in Belo Horizonte

Short Essay

by Michel Brasil

Sampling is one of the most important techniques used in rap’s musical production. However, its use declined throughout the 1990s due to, among other reasons, legal suits by record labels and publishers (Alaigh 2018; Marshall 2006). Such restriction on the use of samples resulted in creative adaptations by the artists (Sewell 2014). One of these shifts is the «chopping» technique. With regard to the local case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, our author argues that the option for using this technique is both economic and political, since producers are forced to chop samples due to copyright issues.

In the context of rap music production, «chopping» consists of cutting a sample into very short snippets, in order to reuse the resulting sliced excerpts to create a distinct musical arrangement. The chopping technique was popularized in the 1990s by beatmakers like DJ Premier and J Dilla. Since then, chopping has become a production trend among beatmakers who use samples. According to Schloss: «In the years since sampling began, in fact, chopping has largely displaced other forms of collage in sample-based hip-hop» (Schloss 2014, 151).

Chopping and other beat-making procedures have spread throughout the world along with rap music. In Brazil, rap started to be appropriated in the 1980s and has since spread to all the regions of the country. I have been in contact with Belo Horizonte’s hip hop scene since the early 2000s as a musician, communicator, and researcher. The South East Brazilian city has one of the most vibrant and diversified hip hop scenes in the country. Throughout its history, the local scene has been very much underground and regional, but its artists are increasingly reaching national visibility during the last decade. Even though sampling is not a prevalent beat-making technique in this local scene, chopping is a meaningful resource for local producers who still work with samples.

«É Noiz» by Tamara Franklin. The track is part of the female rappers’ collection «Desconstrução», produced by Clebin Quirino.

Avoiding Copyright Issues by Chopping Samples

Between 2016 and 2018, I carried out research on sampling among local beatmakers in Belo Horizonte. I observed that only a limited number of producers were using samples to make beats; among them Clebin Quirino, DJ Giffoni, Preto C, and DJ Sense. During the conversations with beatmakers, I have heard many times that there is a «right way» to sample songs. This «right way» would be using the sample in such a way that its source cannot be identified, in order to avoid copyright issues. In this sense, local beatmakers do not use long samples (with a full bar length, for example), neither do they use a large number of samples in the same beat. In contrast, these producers vividly use the chopping technique. In an interview with DJ Giffoni, the producer commented on the influence of legal matters on his choices:

If you sample in a way, for example, you sample it, you take a loop, and you make a beat with a song that already exists and it’s recorded. You take a loop of this song and make your song, then [if] you upload it on the YouTube, you’ll have problems. If you’re going to release a CD it will be a problem. When you send it to press your album, they’ll send it back [and say]: «Take the music from the CD or give me the [sample’s] legal authorization.» So there is the right way to sample. There is a way you can sample and there is a way you can’t. (DJ Giffoni 2017)

«O que acontece aqui?» by Família de Rua, produced by DJ Giffoni. The track is part of Família de Rua’s album «Ontem, Hoje e Sempre»

In this way, copyright issues clearly affect creative decisions in the local rap music scene. They contribute to the limited use of sampling and they also influence how a given sample might be used on a track. This fact was pointed out by producer Clebin Quirino as one of the reasons that made him choose chopping as one of his preferred beat-making procedures. He said:

I rarely use the whole sample because there is this copyright issue. But sometimes [if] the sample catches a lot of my attention, [if] it’s really cool, then I end up using it. It happens only a few times. But I’d rather re-arrange it, pick up only fast snippets and use one second from one, one second from another. (Clebin Quirino 2017)

«Que Assim Seja» by Ohana Santana. This track is also part of the collection «Desconstrução», produced by Clebin Quirino.

A Matter of Power

Since the early 1990s, music industry institutions have adopted the strategy of suing producers and rappers, forcing them to pay for using samples. This has been their main strategy for exerting power over their musical property. In a different time and space, Belo Horizonte’s beatmakers still deal with this issue, but in a rather indirect way. They rarely deal with major record companies, lawsuits, and royalties. As mentioned above in DJ Giffoni’s statement, copyright issues are made real when producers upload their tracks to streaming platforms or when they make large-scale print runs of their albums. Clebin Quirino also referred to this situation:

In Brazil this happens much more with monetization on YouTube and in other music streaming services. So people are using fewer samples because this falls into that copyright issue, depending on how you cut the sample. So most producers have chosen to create [their own musical arrangements], to avoid receiving a message from YouTube saying that their song belongs to someone else, or their song has excerpts of a someone else’s song. And to avoid the streaming platforms say they can’t make money with that song. (Clebin Quirino 2017)

The use of samples in rap music involves political issues insofar as it exposes and questions who owns a musical work and who is able to commercially exploit it. As sampling continues to be viewed as an unwelcome practice, underground rappers and producers remain on the weak side of this balance. While a new legal understanding regarding sampling is far away, local beatmakers in Belo Horizonte employ a tactic that addresses this struggle at a micro-level. By chopping samples, these beatmakers turn a beat-making technique in an everyday practice that, at the same, refers to rap music’s borrowing tradition, and serves to circumvent legal issues that may derive from this practice.