EVERY GENRE PROJECT - March 11 - Forró universitário
Genre of the Day - Forró universitário
Album of the Day - Deixa Entrar… by Falamansa (2000)
March 11, 2024
Astoundingly, we are over two months into this column and Brazilian music is making its premiere only today. It simply doesn’t make sense statistically. RYM is a faithful archivist of Brazilian genres. The list of subgenres on this page alone numbers somewhere in the dozens. We’ve had one Portuguese genre, but today we rip open into the treasure trove of one the most famously musical countries in the world. This brave new world includes accordions. In an alternate universe, the same factors that led to rock’n’roll’s genesis occurred in Brazil rather than the United States and everyone in Brazil put aside the accordion for the guitar rather than this occurring in the US, which essentially killed the accordion’s presence here, doomed to permanent association with the French. However, the accordion remains strong in the heart of Brazil: this is literally college party music from less than thirty years ago and it’s accordion-driven all the way through. Brazil, you are a beautiful place.
Brazil has an absolutely dizzying array of homegrown genres beyond world famous ones like bossa nova and samba, such as maracatu, axé, sertanejo, as well as many fusion genres putting twists on international genres. Today we hone in on forró, though. Forró is also an accompanying dance, and it’s a considerably broad genre: it’s one of those genres with so many individual dances and substrains that an overarching definition is elusive. Generally, though, it came from northeast Brazil and mixes danceability with the unique repertoire of instruments: the zabumba (a bass drum), the accordion, and endearingly the triangle.
While the genre initially emerged as a proud regional hallmark for the northeast which has always had an independent streak as the drier and poorer part of Brazil. However, over time it has spread across the whole country, being reappropriated through new eras and with different accompanying dances. In the ‘90s, it caught on among university students, who infused it with influences of rock, reggae, and funk that made it not just fresher but suitable party music. I wonder if a draw here for aspiring forró universitário musicians was the hipness of revitalizing such a particular and distinctive genre: college musicians always love to think they’re doing something totally new and innovative, no matter the nation.
In this episode transcript (I categorically do not listen to podcasts), a Brazilian music podcast gets more into the social class aspects of forró universitário and applies some music theory, which helped me situate my thoughts post-listen. Falamansa was a band that formed and quickly shot to fame in the late 1990s in Brazil with their groovy takes on forró universitário that quickly clicked with the youth of Sao Paulo, who saw forro as a sort of harkening back to authentic Brazilianness. So the aim here is authenticity, I guess. The album stays pretty loyal to the original sound of forró: the zabumba is low in the mix, but it’s there, paired with whimsical accordion-driven melodies and a particularly funky, deep, standout bass. They imbue some additional crowd-rousing with flourishes like horns on “Falamansa Song.” the biggest hit, “Xote Dos Milagres,” points out the discrepancy between forró and its more pensive origins and forró as directed towards college students in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, with a chorus that translates to “Listen to the forró playing and all the people around / It is not time to cry / However, it is not a sin if I talk about love / If I sing about a sentiment, no matters what it may be.” It doesn’t have to be more than it is, but it doesn’t mean they can’t touch on a wellspring of topics while getting people to dance at the same time. I think it’s high time we import the accordion to party music here.