Um passo à frente: história social de um rock brasileiro

Abstract

The work that follows seeks to elucidate the social history of rock and roll musical genre in Brazil. This genre has been treated with indifference by critics and historians of popular music, reducing its social history the seemingly random waves of popularity, marked by the “Jovem Guarda” and the emergence of “BRock” in the 1980s. The treatment of the rock and roll produced in Brazil in the 1970s is residual, including the academy, contributing to the building of an undersized image of the musical production from that period. The research begins with a reconstruction of the Brazilian popular music production course of the 1960s, in which is included the incipient Brazilian rock in order to understand how this foreign genre is received and interacts with other popular genres which it contended with. A track analysis based on the rock band “A Bolha” (The Bubble), that had to face the lack of space for the genre as well as the lack of interest of the media and the music industry throughout the 70’s follows hereupon. It is intended to uncover the existing social structures constricting the development of the genre in that period. That was a time marked by restrictions on civil rights due to the military regime that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, which was undoubtedly a key factor for shaping the musical production field of those years. The 1970s saw the consolidation of Brazilian popular music as the dominant musical genre owing to, among other factors, the prestigie accumulated by the Brasilian Pop Music Festivals shown on TV at that time, the facing off agaisnt the political regime adopted by the artists that joined it in, and yet, the acceptance of review critics and public consumers for their greater affinity with former Brazilian musical traditions. Through a structural analysis of the music production field to the Bourdieusian way, I intend to place the tax agents of the constitution of social representation built around the rock and roll genre in Brazil, so that you can understand how this segment, which threatened the MPB area in the mid-1960s, was to occupy only the channels and independent spaces of cultural production that make up the so-called "underground scene."