Bahia Brown: traduções da soul music norte-americana pela música afro-baiana

Abstract

This research investigates the translation relationship between Afro-Bahian music and North American soul music, with particular focus on the analysis of musical, thematic and discursive elements. This study is based on the concepts of cultural text, modeling systems and informative and creative memory (Lotman, 1996, 2021), in addition to semiotic translation (Machado, 2003), to understand, from the perspective of the semiotics of culture, how the musical dialogue between two distinct black cultures happens. Another concept used is the rhythmic clef (Leite, 2017), to mainly understand the peculiarities of Afro-Bahian music. The methodology is based on the analysis of seven songs by bahian artists, recorded between 1973 and 2020: “Glorioso Santo Antônio” (Antônio Carlos e Jocafi); “Babá Alapalá” (Gilberto Gil); “Adarrum” (Moraes Moreira); “Alegria da Cidade” (Margareth Menezes, composed by Lazzo Matumbi and Jorge Portugal); “A Namorada” (Carlinhos Brown); “Festa” (Ivete Sangalo, composed by Anderson Cunha); and “Recado” (Luedji Luna). The analysis started from the search for characteristic cultural elements in each of the songs, whether of a sound/musical nature or thematic. The choice of this route aims to identify the different languages articulated by each of the selected works, with the consequent presentation of the elements that have greater or lesser regularity, throughout the chosen historical context. From the analyzes carried out, it is concluded that the subgenre of North American soul music most translated over the time has been funk-soul, present in both dance and affirmative songs. Of Afro-Bahian music, the language that features most prominently in the works is the musical language of Candomblé, present both in the instrumental and in the lyrics of the songs, through the adoption of its respective mythological universe as a thematic basis. The analyzes made it possible to identify rhythm as a central element in the process of translating soul music into Afro-Bahian music, something that highlights the drum language operating as a primary modeling system.