This version of ‘Tatuando o samba / tattooing the samba’ was presented at the American Musicological Society’s 2018 conference. A somewhat extended version is in production.
I’d like to begin with two brief passages from Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto antropófago, or “cannibalist manifesto”:
Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
The world’s single law. Disguised expression of all individualism, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.
Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.
And then a few pages later,
The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Creation—illustrated by the permanent contradiction between Man and his Taboo. Everyday love and the capitalist way of life. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. The earthly goal. Even so, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal cannibalism, which carries within itself the highest meaning of life and avoids all the ills identified by Freud—catechist ills. What result[s] is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometrical scale of the cannibal instinct. (de Andrade 1991: 38, 43)
de Andrade’s aphoristic manifesto, which insists that there is no such thing as a “pure” Brazilian subject but rather that subjectivation can only emerge through a process of devouring the cultural, political, and artistic sources one encounters and in which one finds oneself, was absorbed by the instigators of the tropicalist movement in the late 1960s—a movement that included Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, and Tom Zé, my focus today. Tom Zé’s signal contribution to the tropicalists’ own manifesto-like album Tropicália: ou panis et circensis was the song “Parque industrial” (Industrial Park), which combined revolutionary slogans with pop-culture and imperialist capitalist imagery, all framing the rousing chorus “made in Brasil!,” sung ironically in English to a rambunctious brass band accompaniment. From de Andrade the tropicalists borrowed the notion of “cultural cannibalism” to radically extend the notion of Brazilian identity as what we might call a kind of molecular hybridization or machinic coupling or process of subjectivation-as-destratification, and in an important sense to reverse the polarity of cultural cooption, to transform primitivismo’s colonialist impulse through the seizure of dominant forces by minor voices. For these and several other reasons, including poignantly the historical 1968 moment in which tropicália emerged, I see in tropicália and its contexts a kind of ground-zero for developing and elucidating Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. I think that Félix Guattari understood this on some level—as evidenced in themes that recur throughout Molecular Revolution in Brazil, the book he co-authored with Suely Rolnik.
All of this lies in the background of my subject today, which is Tom Zé’s relationship with samba, and the Deleuzo-Guattarian themes that his explorations animate. That relationship is most obviously clarified on his 1976 album Estudando o samba (“studying the samba”), which has turned out to be the first of three similarly titled recordings, with subsequent iterations “studying” pagode and bossa nova respectively. But the concept of estudando flows through all of Tom Zé’s work. His method is clinical as well as critical. It proceeds as a kind of medical-scientific procedure: taking (in this case) samba apart, analyzing how its component strata function, how they assemble, and, importantly, what else they might do if differently connected. Those strata include music-syntactic materials, genealogies, cultural meanings, spaces and places, and more. So, for example when Tom Zé dislocates bossa nova from its metrically binary, samba-derived substrate, as he does with Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes’s ‘A felicidade’ by layering a three-count cross-rhythm over nearly the entirety of the performace, or when he molecularizes samba in his composition ‘Toc’, timbrally displacing key elements of samba’s signature rhythmic structure and abstracting other elements to the point of near-unrecognizabilty, we can interpret these acts as kinds of Deleuzian-hermeneutic processes, finding or enacting difference in order to understand identity.
Let’s listen to Tom Zé’s “A felicidade.” Notice how the superimposition of a triple meter deterritorializes samba’s two-count structure, and also how “found” sources, including an early-20th-century carnaval marchinha, are layered on top of Jobim’s song, each remapping the other.
[Here is a link to the track.]
Here, then, is an excerpt from “Toc” where we hear samba’s prototypical rhythmic timeline, usually played on tamborim, now timbrally displaed to electric guitar. To this ostinato structure Tom Zé adds multiple additional layers: a second pointillistic guitar figure that emphasizes different rhythmic onsets from the timeline, as well as seeming-random little percussive utterances, brass riffs, and more “found” sounds. “Toc’s” tempo is slowed down considerably as well. All of this—tempo, timbre, density, multidimensionality—serves to radically dislocate samba from its expected contexts.
[Here is a link to the track.]
While Tom Zé draws upon—or cannibalizes—myriad sources, samba underlies nearly all of his work in some way. Here is an excerpt from a 2003 interview:
“I can show two [examples] that I have here…. This one is a kind of assembly line. From a certain moment, I began. Like this: I had a bateria de samba, in either a medium slow or very fast groove. And I sat to compose: I would use the bateria de samba, would take the fifth and sixth strings of the guitar and try a little phrase, an ostinato. When it felt good…it [was] because I slightly modified the samba beat….
I try to do this with the cavaquinhos, a very rigid counterpoint, in a rhythmic feel…. I try to make something rhythmically demanding. When this begins to satisfy…it [becomes] a living thing: giving pleasure…. And when I have a large sequence of things like this—every once in a while I come back to them, working a little and so on—it remains an assembly line.”
The portuguese phrase that I have translated as “assembly line” is linha de montagem, from which flows a compelling multiplicity: montagem also means “montage,” “scenario,” “arrangement,” “composition,” “assemblage.” Tom Zé is talking about a compositional process that involves concatenating and superimposing small found, modified, and newly created musical objects in new contrapuntal relations: it is in the active doing of this process that I find resonances between “assembly” and both (musical) “composition” and “assemblage” or agencement, as in the laying out of the component parts and the lively practice of newly assembling them, all in pursuit of pleasure. What Tom Zé does—as we heard most clearly with “Toc”—is pull samba apart into its elemental component and then reassemble them, in doing so opening them to qualititative processes of differentiation. Transforming the speed or timbre of a characteristic gesture by transversally connecting one instrument’s tone with another’s rhythmic profile. Inventing new semantic possibilities by enacting lines of escape to real or fabulated Brazilian pasts, or by superimposing multiple historico-temporal strata. Remapping the music–noise boundary by pressing an agogô bell against an industrial sander in an ironic and somewhat violent dislocation of conventional playing technique. Later, in his 2006 Estudando o pagode, deterritorializing the misogynist lyrical plane of contemporaneous samba de pagode by reimagining it as a multidimensional “feminist opera.” And for the song “Tatuarambá,” from the 1992 album The Hips of Tradition, tattooing the samba, marking and defiling its sonic body, while at the same time “expos[ing] the hips of tradition to the burning iron of ads,” enacting a doubly clinical procedure that both reinscribes samba, opening it to new potential connectivities and discursivities, and reveals samba’s emergent subjectivity to be irreducibly wrapped up in what Guattari calls capitalistic modes of production.
Writing briefly about The Hips of Tradition, in his brilliant history of tropicália, Brutality Garden, Christopher Dunn suggests that “as a body part that provides support and generates sensual movement, ‘hips’ simultaneously connote stability and activity.” Dunn suggests that, for Tom Zé, “musical traditions are not to be preserved and revered deferentially but rather disassembled and perpetually reconstituted using new musical and poetic information.” And the clincher: “This is an operation that is both playful and painful.” This is most evident in “Tatuarambá,” the title of which is a portmanteau of the infinitive “to tattoo” and “samba.”
From hips to bodies: tradition has supportive, sensuous hips, and so does samba. Samba is a body, agential, there to affect and be affected by, implicated in processes of meaning-constitution. A politicking body, carrying the genealogical impingements of its pasts and virtual futures. A sensuous body, stimulating and stimulated by its participating interlocutors. A performative body, enacting its identity within and constitutive of its relational contexts. A timely body, caught up in and productive of music-temporal processes. And, in some important way, a material body, able to be marked, cut, inscribed; able to, in some important way, give and receive pain.
“What is this body doing, to what is it connecting, what new formations is it creating?” This is a question that Patricia MacCormack asks (2006, 62). In order to understand how to answer this question in the context of samba (as a marked body; as a multiplicity), I’d like to turn to Deleuze and Guattari:
“Savage formations are oral, are vocal, but not because they lack a graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations are oral precisely because they possess a graphic system independent of the voice, a system that is not aligned on the voice and not subordinated to it, but connected to it, co-ordinated ‘in an organization that is radiating, as it were’, and multidimensional.” (A/O 188)
Deleuze and Guattari go on to carefully stake out a distinction between voice and writing, one that avoids the too-easy binarizing move that pits them hierarchically against one another. Instead, they posit a different kind of binary—sign-system versus desire-production, but then already a coupling of the two: the machine “does work: the voice is like a voice of alliance to which, on the side of the extended filiation, a graphics is co-ordinated that bears no resemblance.” We’re getting into the space of non-representational, transversal communication—which is also, significantly, the space of music’s proliferating multidimensionality. Music, too, functions in a multivalent graphic system: musical sounds escape linguistic representation but at the same time are caught up in discursive structures. But some of those discursive structures escape subordination to linguistic frameworks: I’m reminded, for example, of Franz Liszt’s response when asked to analyze a piece he had just played, he played it again! Or Barbara Browning’s examinations of the ways in which dance maps out samba’s cultural histories in conjunction with its now-unfolding musical context. The footwork of dance becomes a form of discourse; Browning cites a famous aphorism about samba, “dizer no pé”—to speak with the feet—samba is discursively marked by dance, as a form of paralinguistic communication. We “dizer no pé” as a means of understanding. John Miller Chernoff makes a similar claim about African music: “when my African associates wondered whether I ‘heard’ the music, they were asking whether I could respond to the music: did I know the meaning of what I was playing? Did I know the dance? When you ‘hear’ the music, you ‘understand’ it with a dance.” (Chernoff 1997, 20) Music and dance in samba assemble as a kind of polysemic counterpoint, a multidimensional body.
The productive, paralinguistic force of tattoos returns twice in A Thousand Plateaus. “Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidimensionality of bodies.” (176) And the a suggestion that “tattoos…make the body a territory” (320); emphasizing the effects of such acts of territorialization: reorganizing functions, regrouping forces. Let’s turn back to to “Tatuarambá” to zoom in on some of these acts and effects. Let’s listen.
One of the first things that we might notice about “Tatuarambá” is that, frankly, it doesn’t sound very much like samba. Its surface is marked so thoroughly, so egregiously, that it is actually quite difficult to find the samba in its depths. Here are a few of the ways in which samba’s body is scored, transformed, reterritorialized:
1) as in “Toc,” electric guitar takes on the role of producing samba’s signature timeline ostinato,
2) but this time, abstracted in at least three further ways, further obscuring the pre-marked surface: through dynamic accents that draw attention away from important onset locations in the unmarked version, distortion and shifting octave displacements that add new expressive potentialities, and grouping structures in the vocal part that elide phrase beginnings,
3) a kick drum that reterritorializes the samba surdo using the timbral signature of contemporaneous rock and pop music,
4) samba’s sing-along lyricism reorganized as juxtapositions of long sustained cries and intense rapid-fire bursts of syllables,
5) Tom Zé’s [preacher-like] incantations layered over this new lyrical plane,
6) a recurring vocal refrain consisting of nonsense syllables—‘fake’ tupinambá?—extending a linguistic polysemy that already elides português and English,
7) Arto Linsday’s squealing electric guitar that threatens to drown everything out…
Can I still dance my understanding of this modified samba, in the absence of signs and cues that suggest how to do so? MacCormack suggests so: polysemic modifications are “means by which bodies in proximity can be made to unravel” (2011, 189). Against this, she suggests (five years earlier) that tattooed bodies “allow us navigate the plasticity of the regime of signification through which the body emerges.” We should not think of these as contradictory: bodies unravel and reemerge continuously, and both dancing and tattooing are means of enacting that double movement—so is music, as another kind of paralinguistic subjectifying force. But back to tattoos; as MacCormack reminds us, we must also engage “the concrete materiality of marked flesh, which involves actual pain.” Recall Dunn from earlier, and “playful and painful” operations. Tom Zé understands this: in “Tatuarambá” his relation to samba is enacted as a cruel clinical engagement violently marking and re- (or a-) signifying samba.
Part of that process is stated explicitly in Tom Zé’s spoken introduction, in both português and English: “to expose the hips of tradition to the burning iron of ads.” This reminds me of a quote by Elizabeth Grosz, cited prominently by Nikki Sullivan in her monograph on tattooed bodies: “the subject is named by being tagged or branded on its surface, creating a particular kind of ‘depth-body’ or interiority, a psychic layer the subject identifies as its (disembodied) core” (Grosz 1990, 65) I’m particularly interested in the double meaning of “branding” implicit in Grosz’s narrative and operating virtually in Tom Zé’s: the mark of the brand as scarification and as capitalistic insignia. Whatever words we choose to use to describe how subjects are produced, Guattari insists that they are only produced within capitalistic structures that legislate every aspect of how we think, act, desire, dream. Culture likewise: “culture as an anonymous sphere only exists in terms of markets of power, economic markets, and not in terms of production, creation, and real consumption.” Tattoos, and by extension Tom Zé’s multivalent marking of the samba as a kind of doubled S&M and capitalist gesture, become fertile ground for trying to understand not only the power dynamics at play in subject-formation but also how to operate within those dynamics—as minoritarian becomings—to continue to produce the new. This is a really important point: samba has been continually redefined in marketing terms since Carmen Miranda’s first arrival in the US, and the most famous site of samba in the world, carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, has long been lamented as utterly transformed by commercial interests, a transformation that has affected the music, lyrics, dress, dance, and, most problematically, who can afford to participate. By being subjected to such a branding apparatus, samba has been remade, reterritorialized: from this perspective Tom Zé’s transgressive procedures amount to a spin on an already-ongoing process, albeit one that begins to reclaim in minoritarian terms some of samba’s expressive, affective force.
One more quote from MacCormack: “The apparatus creates that body. The creator created the apparatus as a writing of his own body through his creation, defining himself through his tattoo(ing) as apparatus of self. But, like a tattoo, the corporeal reorganizing machine is part of, an expression by, but ultimately exceeds, its wearer. The apparatus consumes its maker, its signifying function, like any tattoo....”
Again, the parallels with music are striking, and while they are made overt in Tom Zé’s clinical experiments, they flow through all musicking-production. A work of music is produced by a maker or makers, but the sonorous body of the music is a product of the force-relations of its prodution, vastly exceeding not only the expressive intents of it maker(s) but also of those who form assemblages with the sonorous body of the music: consumers, listeners. All of this forms what MacCormack compelling calls a “corporeal reorganizing machine.” Because a sonic body is not a body in quite the same way that a flesh-and-bones one is, its potential to be reorganized is more obvious, less limited by biological a priori. Similarly, we can’t really hurt a sonorous body—or can we?—there is no shortage of tales about the pain the poor music must be feeling when given a bad or insensitive performance. But this is only to say that a sonorous body is a particularly fruitful entry point for thinking about bodies of all kinds. When Tom Zé tattooes samba, he is “consuming...its signifying function”; in de Andrade’s antropofagic terms, absorbing its essence, reterritorializing on its now-new plane, interrupting while somehow also working within the capitalistic processes of subject-formation that determine both he and it.