The Portuguese-speaking countries of Brazil, Mozambique and Cape Verde have some of the richest musical histories in the world — it is about time they had some global recognition.
A 1970s Bossa Nova Concert in Brazil. Heinrich Klaffs. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The American pop zeitgeist has embraced a slew of foreign influences in the last few years. Reggaeton and K-Pop songs have burst onto the top charts, changing the definition of American pop in the process. More recently, social media apps like TikTok have blurred the lines even further, as catchy hooks from all over the world capture our attention spans—for a few seconds, at least.
Still, there are thousands of musical genres out there that have yet to enter the American canon. Considering songs sung in Portuguese—the ninth most-spoken language in the world, and a language that is spoken by more people in the US than Japanese or Italian—we can explore a few historic music styles.
Obviously, Portuguese is not just spoken in Portugal. Brazil, a nation 20 times its size, speaks the language because of its colonial history. The African nations Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, as well as the island nations Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, share a similar story. Because of this, music in Portuguese (which is more commonly known as Lusophone music) can be divided into hundreds of distinct genres.
The place to start is Brazil, which has such a textured musical history that there are dozens of academic papers devoted to dissecting it. Indiginous folk music has an illustrious history in Brazil, but the country was not able to claim a seat at the international music table until the late 1950s, when bossa nova was created. Bossa nova was a new (hence the nova) style of samba music that took a more jazzy, restrained approach to presenting itself. Its syncopated beats and dissonant chords are features that are alien to traditional samba. Singer-songwriter João Gilberto was the figurehead of the movement; his 1963 album with American saxophonist Stan Getz was so successful that it won Album of the Year at the Grammy awards, the first non-American work to win the award. The album’s opening track, “The Girl From Ipanema,” has become arguably the most famous Lusophone song in existence.
Soon after bossa nova came MPB—música popular brasileira—which was not a certain style of music but rather a moniker given to bossa nova and the various kinds of acoustic music that evolved from it. MPB made Brazil’s musical essence more substantial; rather than homogenizing different styles, Brazilian artists flourished by experimenting under the MPB label. Novos Baianos and Milton Nascimento are two examples; both the Bahian band and the composer from Rio produced albums in 1972 (Acabou Chorare and Clube da Esquina, respectively) which are seen as classics in Brazil. Both artists adopted an electric guitar-based approach that could not sound more different from Gilberto’s jazzy sounds, showing how decisively MPB could diverge from bossa nova.
A revolutionary air was apparent in many MPB songs, and the Tropicália movement, which began in the late 1960s, was the main group to use music as a form of protest. The tropicalista included many great artists—Gal Costa, Jorge Ben Jor, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil all counted themselves among the ranks. They used a combination of Western psychedelic rock and Afro-Brazilian rhythms to create colorful, expressive songs. Yet, with their anarchistic lyrics they were laser-focused, expressing anger against the junta which held Brazil in a chokehold. Many of their members were arrested or exiled as a result.
In the nation of Mozambique, which was held under Portuguese colonial rule until 1975, music was similarly used as a way for motivating change. The marrabeta genre developed in the 1950s as a combination of traditional African rhythms, newer sounds like Angolan pop and melancholy fado tunes. Marrabenta was named for the Portuguese word for break—arrebentar—as local musicians would strum their fishing-line guitars so violently that their strings would often snap after a few sessions.
Marrabenta does not completely fit our Lusophone theme, as the vast majority of marrabenta songs are not sung in Portuguese but in local languages. Singing in a different language from that of their oppressors was a symbol of resistance for the people of Mozambique, to the point where the colonial authorities banned their music during the country’s civil war. Fortunately, the artists won out in the end. Today, marrabenta has become a genre highly influenced by rap and reggae, and remains popular with young people in the country.
There are also numerous styles of music to examine in Portugal itself, the most culturally significant of which is probably fado. Fado, one of marrabeta’s main influences, can be traced back to Lisbon, Portugal in the 1820s, although the style likely has earlier origins. Fado’s age makes sense; it has an almost primordial essence to it. Operatic songs about working-class struggle, nostalgia and the ocean make up most of the genre, but the only thing that actually defines a fado song is the instrumentation and structure of the beat. Fado songs carry timeless themes, most often dealing with love and death. The meaning of the word likely comes from the Latin word “fatum,” meaning "fate," "death" or "utterance."
Lusophone music is sung all around the world, but with limited space and time, it is difficult to talk about it all. The tiny archipelago of Cape Verde deserves a late mention, having produced both the nationally-adored band Simentera, and the successful modern pop artist, Mayra Andrade. Both Simentera and Andrade make music steeped in the history of their country, while they each lend different kinds of flair to their works. Simentera's songs have a nautical mythos to them; they sound like the culmination of centuries of work. Andrade’s songs are more upbeat and worldly, but she also uses the traditional percussion of the island to ground her songs. Lusophone music is all about the balance between tradition and newness. It has to be. Portuguese is a language that was forced on most of its speakers. The foreign masses are the ones who accepted it, sang with it and in doing so made it something beautiful.
Finn Hartnett
Finn grew up in New York City and is now a first-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to writing for Catalyst, he serves as a reporter for the Chicago Maroon. He spends his free time watching soccer and petting his cat.