Saturday, January 30, 2010

Not massively enthused by this racist and classist "exoticisation" of Brazil's "otherness" (poverty, urban squalor, ugly / animal people, cockroaches, crude sexuality) and the contrast being made with white, male, middle-class, hi-tech, artist qua space-explorers.

Horrible.

And the music is dull-as-ditchwater too. Go listen to where the real innovation is happening in Brasilian music.

2 comments:

John Powers said...

You may have seen it already but there's a great video Good Copy Bad Copy. Starting at 40:25 for about 10 minutes is a great segment on Tecno Brega. The idea of cultural cannibalism (hum should I say the culture of cultural cannibalism?) provides an interesting lens on the development of world society.

I know it's not pretty sometimes. One of my nephews DJs and some sort of Brazilian music (my brain is Swiss Cheese) is his "secret sauce" for a white audience in the American South. It gets eaten up and made flesh anew. How to think about intellectual property when to eat it means to own it?

Scribe said...

Have you been reading Baudrillard too? Just finished "The Transparency of Evil" which goes into "otherness" in a pretty mindblowing way.

We portray "other" cultures as "savage" probably because we are too wrapped up in our own self-awareness.