The Wo! Front

Cultural guru? I’m not so sure. Maybe cultural commentator, if culture is limited to the small sector I engage with, but this is a blog and therefore its contents are defined by its author, namely me.

For post number one I thought I’d introduce you to one of my favourite all time artists, Tom Zé, and his new record, Estudando O Pagode. I’m still in two minds as to whether men can practice feminism, but I’d say in the case of Tom Zé he does a good job of engaging with, commenting on, and participating in developing ideas of feminism in a pop-cultural context.

Here’s the Zé intro: Born in 1936 in the Bahia region of Brazil, Zé has been a part of outsider culture coming out of Brazil since he first started making music. His early work dealt with his impressions of metropolitan Brazil, following his move to the relatively massive Sao Paulo coming from the poor northeast, but as time and ideas progressed he became a crucial part of the Tropicalia movement of the late 60s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicalia for more info). Using music as a platform to experiment with ideas and comment on politics through a more oblique language, the Tropicalistas created a form of political activism that proved effective because of its populist tenets and the way this blended with both creative and political experimentalism. Zé is perhaps most well known for his oft-quoted proclamation, “I don’t make art, I make spoken and sung journalism.”

I’d go so far as to say that this record is a musical essay, journalism in its most critically engaged form.

Over the last 40 years not much has changed, Zé has been at the forefront of combining cultural observations with an agenda engaged with musical experimentalism, political observation, social commentaries and subversive populism equally. That he has achieved all of these with considerable amounts of success is remarkable.

So what makes his most recent record relevant to this blog? Read on and see, this is a review/ appreciation of sorts.

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Tom Zé
Estudando O Pagode
(Luaka Bop, 2006)

Listen to mp3 of song Elaeu

So, men practicing feminism… It brings up all sorts of taboo issues, especially in regards to the idea of speaking on someone else’s behalf in a political context, of presuming to know “what its like” for those you’re speaking on behalf of. I think it becomes especially problematic when the issue is something as complicated in meaning, both intrinsically and externally, as feminism. Admittedly, my ability to understand the intricacies of Zé’s are limited given his lyrics are written in his native tongue of Portuguese, but with the liner notes as my tour guide and my ears as my dear companion the depth of this record begins to strike.

Yes, this is a three act, feminist operetta. Woah.

I’ve been incredibly obsessed with the idea of activism through music for an extremely long time – the way that a musician can take the codes and conventions of a musical genre, or even music itself, and actively use and/or subvert these, regardless of if it comes with overt lyrical reference. I feel that Tom Zé does this, and has throughout his career – actively taking musical boundaries and using them to craft a world that blends the most definable populist tenets of songwriting with an intertextuality which reveals how constructed taste, generic codes and cultural conventions are. He continues this on Estudando O Pagode (literally, a study of the Pagode – a subgenre of Samba that was popularised in Rio de Janeiro in the 80s and is now enjoying a renaissance of sorts, being embraced as a style of dance music associated to street culture in Brazil and despised by the middle class). So with the form defined from the outset, Zé uses it to engage with class politics, but perhaps more importantly for this analysis, challenges the lyrical norms that are associated with Pagode. That is, to use Pagode as a credible musical platform but expand its boundaries – predominantly and popularly focusing in on machoistic lyrical forms – to challenge the ideas that it has inherently popularised.

Zé’s commitment to spoken and sung journalism becomes particularly apparent here – over his 70 years (yup, 70) he’s been engaged with ideas on struggle and, consequently, power. Through reading histories and experiencing the present he chooses now to relate these ideas to gender – namely a critique on male chauvinism and the power affixed to sexual acts. It’s not a simple hierarchy, of course, and is instead a complex interaction of social and sexual relations which are constantly defining and redefining the sexual and social role of women, but the musical anarchism that Zé employs somehow manages to illustrate just how complex and interrelated these images and roles are.

Things are (still) fucked, yes. That’s quite simple to understand, and as a woman to have a man telling me this as some kind of authority on gender issues is infuriating. What makes Estudando O Pagode an exception is not only the form it takes and the critique it provides, as a result, but the willingness to explore how the forms of oppression linked to gender relations have developed alongside historical currents, but also how to effect change. And that it does it through the braying of donkeys and the occasional orgasmic cries of women makes it more intense. Context and content changing, this album explores more in song than a doctorate could – I’d say it was the pinnacle of Zé’s work if I didn’t know how exemplary his sung journalism has been in the past, but as an operetta that uses form and pastiche of form as both method and mode Estudando O Pagode perhaps presents itself as the most ambitious, and thus most successful, work of Zé’s life.

In what other album this year are you going to find anyone engaging with how socially constructed gendered perceptions of pain, suffering and women’s sexuality? With perceived hetero-normativity and the multiplicity of sexual realities? With the arbitrariness of moral laws? With the connection of territory as property and women as property? And with an pop infectiousness that makes this album both more entertaining and even more hard hitting? What other album is going to end with the exchange:

“Love is bile and honey”

“Honey? What honey, you bum!”

This isn’t a plug, this is an appreciation for the existence of this album, and the possibilities it presents on a musical landscape.