Spaced Out in Paradise: Post-Punk Futurities, Politics, Transitions, and Other Voices in Brazil

This dissertation is a practice-based autoethnographic post punk study concerning the investigation of underground music and politics in Brazil. It focuses on the utopian impulses and forms of futurities manifested in distinct DIY scenes and contexts, as Brazil was emerging from a twenty-one-year repressive military dictatorship. The research articulates a particular genealogy of Brazilian music in conversation with a system of formative historical and aesthetic pasts, trajectories, and mutant sonic worlds, from the legacies of Brazilian Modernism through to the countercultural residues of Tropicalismo, and Anglo-American post punk. It examines the spaces and conditions of possibility for underground creative practices to take place in distinct periods and political scenarios. At the same time, it engages with questions of improvisation, cultural cannibalism, and how such processes developed into experimentalist post-tropicalist forms of sensibility in Brazil, and how these gave rise to new futures and alternative formulations of knowledge. Largely, the thesis explores how Brazilian post punk challenged understandings of both Tropicalismo, and Anglo-American post punk disciplinary study and thought.
The study is informed by scholarly and creative multidisciplinary approaches, drawing from the fields of popular music studies, cultural history and analysis, black studies, semiotics, Latin American/Brazilian studies, and political science. In addition to these, the project also draws on my practice as a musician/poet and active participant of the Brazilian post punk scene since the mid 1980s. It delves into forms of musicality and collective assemblages of knowledges as I examine a constellation of voices, sounds, modes of composing and operating in the work of artists such as Tom Zé, Mercenárias, Black Future, Divergência Socialista, Julio Barroso and Gang 90 & Absurdettes, Sexo Explícito, Tetine among others, culminating with the making of an album as the outcome of this research.