The The tradition and the contemporary in the voices of Clementina de Jesus and Sandra de Sá: two decades of Brazilian Black Music

Abstract

The article is based on Brazilian popular music representation of black female voice in its aesthetic, historical, identity and intersectional aspects. The voice – being an instrument of communication and perpetuation of traditions and knowledge – has a fundamental importance in the continuity and permanence of cultures within society. Using the concepts of the tradition and the contemporary, I illustrate two black voices of BBM – “Brazilian black music”, the “partideira” (partisan) Clementina de Jesus and the soul woman Sandra de Sá. In Clementina ancestry can be understood as a category of relation, connection, inclusion, diversity, unity and enchantment (OLIVEIRA, 2007), that updates the tradition from her experience, her life wisdom, her ethics and her shared sensitivity; it’s the permanence of the past in the present, the resistance which the capital seeks to overwhelm, what is alive in the present (SILVA, 2016, p. 83). Sandra de Sá, heiress of the 1970’s black music, and from the funk parties in Rio de Janeiro’s periphery, became a commercial phenomenon in the mid 1980’s. Her black singing makes its peripheral ballasts explicit. The two singers were sanctioned by male, white producers, who have sometimes suffocated their singular and unique voices.