EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 20 - Arrocha

Genre of the Day - Arrocha 🇧🇷

Album of the Day - É só dizer que sim by Pablo (2014)

June 20, 2024

There is a fundamental lack of the art of belting in the current music zeitgeist. This is only a bad thing if you want it to be: I think it’s nice, to an extent, that a variety of vocal textures have their chance to thrive and co-exist in the charts. That being said, belting has an underrated aspect: it’s the moment at which a singer fully gives in to the music, pushing themself to their maximum physical and emotional capabilities and testing their vocal chords’ fates all for the sake of a song’s impact on others. 

It’s a feeling that can be aptly described by the word éclat. In one of the best articles about music I’ve ever read by Godfre Leung that has lingered within me since, that actually covers one of my favorite artists in Mariah Carey, he explains French philosopher Rousseau’s vision of the word éclat (in my rough understanding) as the passion and vigor only to be found in the act of singing. He explains that the word approximates Rousseau’s belief that at one point, human communication was conducted in a way where speech and music were indistinguishable, a primordial period when melisma and belting might’ve run wild. 

One only wishes that could be our world today, but given the varying array of vocal talent handed to everyone at birth we leave it to the vocal experts to act out that éclat for us. As important as the art of virtuosic singing is to many music listeners, today’s genre also adds an extra emphasis on perhaps popular music’s most ever-present theme: love. It’s not like you need proof, but just go look up the word love in your longest Spotify playlist and see how the list is never-ending. As a genre meant for partnered dancing, its name is particularly poignant: “arrocha” means to tighten or compress in Portuguese, and the genre was christened after singers would urge their dancing audience to get closer, pull each other in, let the brimming power of the romantic music bloom between them. 

Arrocha arose primarily out of brega, a genre I’ve encountered derivations of in this column. Seen as the music of the lower-class in Brazil in the mid-20th century, overwashed in corny dramatics, it initially described overly romantic and inelegant music before evolving into a go-to term for when Brazilian music critics wanted to describe something our critics might call schmaltzy, gooey, or treacly. Nostalgia and cheesy music go hand in hand, though, aptly evoking the notion of a supposedly ‘simpler’ time and perhaps a time as a child where one wouldn’t analyze the quality of music but rather just enjoy its bare essence. Arrocha took brega nostalgia as well as historically popular bolero music and dance into a new era in the early 2000s, with the ultimate ‘schmaltzy’ musical accompaniment of saxophone in the primetime slot alongside electric keyboard and guitar. In classic Brazilian musical fashion, it can be traced to a single city, in this instance Candeias in eastern Brazil’s state of Bahia.

Singer Pablo, with his thrush tenor, creates a charming album that effectively transports the listener to a Bahian dance floor. You might jump to the conclusion that the singer is attempting to hypnotize you, as the guitar melodies flow seamlessly into each other between tracks as if they were all recorded in one take. He doesn’t need a swinging clock or a spiral to entrance you, though: the rich, sentimental guitar chords and his unbridled belts and falsettos stun consistently as he throws his voice’s zaelous weight into every fiery belt, illustrated quite literally in lyrics like “Agora” where he details “a força da paixão / que faz gritar um coração que chora” [“the strength of passion / that makes a crying heart scream”]. Subsequent track “Embolou” features the saxophone’s distinct romantic mournfulness à la “Careless Whisper.” If it all sounds too high fructose to you, that's understandable. Romantic lyrics and melodies aren't to everyone's taste, even when they incisively detail relatable situations such as “Embolou[‘s]” tale of confusing a friend’s behavior with romantic advances. The strong rhythmic groove of a song like “Ta Tubo Terminado” help anchor his unfettered vocal release and the lyrical sugar with some other essentials of the musical food pyramid. If simply measuring albums on the éclat-o-meter, this set hits the highest mark, Pablo’s zeal for conveying the emotions wrought by love through song doing Rousseau’s musings proud.