EVERY GENRE PROJECT - April 8 - Tecnobrega
Genre of the Day - Tecnobrega
Album of the Day - Jaguatirica Print by Luísa e os Alquimistas (2019)
April 8, 2024
Tecnobrega as a portmanteau Brazilian word contains a surprising amount of layers. The word brega refers to a popular genre originating in the 1960s in northern Brazil, associated with the lower class. Thus it was dubbed with tongue-in-cheek name “brega,” which means corny in Portuguese. But the irony goes deeper: if brega is a music of the people in Brazil, tecnobrega goes one step further. Tecnobrega developed in the 2000s as remixes of popular brega songs around the northern city of Belem in Brazil. Tecnobrega then received some notoriety for being distributed by street vendors and the amount of peer-to-peer file sharing that went into the genre’s proliferation. These organic, often Internet-driven distribution systems truly define tecnobrega as the music of the people for a digital age.
While tecnobrega originally grew out of remixing ‘80s brega songs and reworking them, it grew into a genre of original content with electronic influence. It also absorbs twinges of calypso from the nearby Caribbean. Like the hurricanes that pass through it, it’s remarkable how Caribbean musical influences land on the shores of the regions around the Gulf. It’s no secret that Brazil gets down, so another notable aspect of tecnobrega—like American EDM—is its bombastic festivals. The setups look absolutely insane. They’re colorful and have stunning visual influence from indigenous art, bridging the gap between local traditions and forward-facing futurism.
Musically, tecnobrega is a little harder to pin down. It’s a regional sound that has incorporated new influences year by year as electronic music has shifted and the range of recording technology available to producers in the area has expanded from the nascent stages in the 2000s. There’s a great emphasis on tricky drum programming and speeding up the original BPMs of the sampled songs, usually up to a zooming 160-200 beats per minute. While tecnobrega has retained some influence from the original in female vocalists and slightly kitschy romantic lyrics, it’s also voraciously absorbed from other Latin American genres and developed a wider range of lyrical stylings.
Today’s album is an ambitious blend of tecnobrega with significant reggaeton influence. “Cadernin” starts off as a slow ballad with early-aughts R&B guitar strums before a dramatic drum buildup leads into sax and crashing percussion. The drum programming is one of the most unique facets of this album: the rhythms feel unusual and striking sonically, and the diverse sonics of the drums are pulled off just as skillfully. While a lot of the percussion feels reminiscent of reggaeton and Brazilian funk, this is a globally-minded album. The French vocal sample of the slinky “Garota Ligeuira” in particular slickly incorporates worldwide sounds into the tecnobrega universe. While the album oscillates between sunnier, slower, beachy moments like “Sol em Câncer,” there’s also hardcore rap verses that make this an album that draws on an impressive amount of different palettes. It’s a shame that I didn’t get to hear this straight from the source of a $1.50 street CD, but tecnobrega remains a music of the people no matter how it comes to you.