The Sounds of Selling Out?: Tom Zé, Coca-Cola, and the Soundtrack to FIFA Brazil 2014
Welcome back to our summer series on “Sound and Sport.” In today’s post, Kariann Goldschmitt discusses the gamechanging controversy over Brazilian musician Tom Ze’s commercial for Coca-Cola’s FIFA 2014. For an instant replay of July’s post click Josh Ottum‘s “Sounding Boards and Sonic Styles: The Music of the Skatepark” or of June’s post, click Tara Betts‘s “Pretty, Fast, and Loud: The Audible Ali.” For May’s post, click Melissa Helquist‘s “Goalball: Sport, Silence, and Spectatorship.” This Thursday’s grand finale will continue our discussion of Brazil, with a podcast by Andrea Medrado entitled “The Sounds of Rio’s Favelas: Echoes of Social Inequality in an Olympic City” AND keep you on the edge of your seat with a bonus Olympic doubleheader post excerpted from David Hendy‘s recent Noise broadcasts for BBC Radio 4 on the sounds of Olympic crowds. And now. . .the sounds of FIFA’s sponsors. —J. Stoever-Ackerman, Editor-in-Chief
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Tensions in Brazil have been running high as the the country ramps up preparations for next year’s FIFA World Cup. Brazil’s economy is one of the world’s strongest, but its middle class has suffered as economic growth has stagnated amid rapidly rising costs of living. Yet, FIFA demands that Brazil’s government spend large amounts of money to renovate stadiums and further bolster tourism-based services at the expense of everything else. This last June, news of another hike in transit fees was the final straw for many citizens and they took to the streets to protest corruption and the routing of public funds to tournament preparations while basic services suffered. Protesters argue that the country is burnishing its international brand on the backs of its citizens. It is thus no surprise that much of the Brazilian public is fed up with FIFA and its multinational partners. As a consequence, musicians who participate in World Cup-related ad campaigns risk damaging their relationship with the public.
In Spring 2013, the Facebook page of one of Brazil’s most eccentric musical iconoclasts, Tom Zé, was bombarded by negative comments. Unforgivably to some of his most ardent fans, Zé had lent his vocal talents to a Coca-Cola commercial that sought to connect Brazil’s oft-mythologized cultural diversity to the universals of the World Cup and Coca-Cola’s alleged populism. Zé inflected his delivery of the ad copy with an especially musical speaking cadence and rhythm. It was a peculiar take that drew on his signature vocal eclecticism.
The ad opens with Zé stating,
Muita gente se pergunta como vai ser a copa
A coca-cola vai falar como ela não vai ser
[Many people are asking themselves what this cup will be like
Coca-Cola is going to tell you what it won’t be like]
as the shot features a group of people smoothing out a giant kite with the Brazilian flag. There is a strong syncopated rhythm to Zé’s voice that matches the carnival samba drums (especially the caixa) that accompany the ad throughout. As it continues, the imagery matches what Zé describes, in either stills or brief shots, often recalling the frenzy surrounding world cups of the past. In a rapid cadence, he says:
não vai ser só a copa de vuvuzela, do vidente, da celebridade
da menina bonita, do jogadores com cabelo da moda…”
[it won’t be the Cup of the vuvuzela, the psychic, nor of celebrity
of beautiful women, nor of players with fashionable hair]
The synchronization of Zé’s rapidly rhythmic delivery over archetypal images of Brazil’s tournament excitement is crucial to the ad’s message. This passage mentions two icons of the 2010 tournament, the vuvuzela and the psychic (vidente) octopus, with accompanying images. In under four seconds, the camera jumps from a man holding a celebrity magazine (celebridade), a woman cheering (menina bonita), some player figurines (jogadores) and a boy with an elaborate buzz cut. By aligning himself with an official sponsor of the upcoming tournament through ad copy that valorizes Brazil’s present, Zé also lent the sound of his voice to the sports-industrial complex, thereby opening himself up to accusations that he was a “sell-out” (vendido).
Tom Zé – Todos os Olhos (1973)
Zé is famous for taking part in the tropicália of the late 1960s – a cultural movement that was most effective through popular music. Tropicália musicians bucked Brazilian musical conventions by blending imported rock ‘n’ roll with national music protest songs during a period when musical taste often indicated one’s support or disapproval of the military dictatorship. While most involved in tropicália eventually became Brazilian musical mega-stars (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, and Mara Bethânia), Zé drifted to obscurity by rejecting many of the machinations of the record industry. He only found an international audience when David Byrne’s Luaka Bop Records released some of his music in the 1990s, the most successful of which was Fabrication Defect [Com Defeito de Fabricação] (1998). Due to his peculiar status, Zé disrupted fan expectations and threatened his brand when he embraced a corporate power so intricately connected to an increasingly unpopular athletic tournament.
The controversy surrounding the Coca-Cola ad took a turn towards farce when, on April 22nd, 2013, Zé released a free 5-song EP on his website titled Tribunal do Feicebuque – a clear play on the way that Brazilians tend to pronounce “Facebook.” Accompanying the songs was a parody of tribunal orders listing the performing and collaboration credits along with lyrics to the songs. Zé’s actions exposed how the incident was a different kind of sonically-driven sports spectacle – this time it was played out over social media, in Brazil’s most influential newspaper, in Tribunal references and fights with fans during his shows at Rio’s famed Circo Voador, and in the ensuing blog reviews of his shows.
The chaotic structure of the EP’s title track, while typical of Zé catalog, disrupts his fans’ claims of “selling out.” He employs a variety of sonically disjunct approaches, opening with the startup sound for Microsoft’s Vista OS before jumping into a psychedelic samba-rock tune with a staccato guitar and a brass section. Zé recorded his vocals over multiple tracks, at times simultaneously sung/spoken at a low pitch and sung at a high pitch. The first half is familiar – the voices trade between Zé and a female companion in something sounding like a duet over a samba-rock beat. The lyrics directly reference infamous moments when Brazilian audiences have turned on their musical icons thought to be too involved in international business influences.
Vendido, vendido, vendido!
A preço de banana
Já não olha mais pro samba
Tá estudando propaganda
[Sell-out, sell-out, sell-out!
The price of a banana
He no longer looks to samba
He’s studying advertising]
At the mid-point, rock gives way to a serious march and more voices enter (including famed São Paulo hip-hop artist Emicida) making the song’s structure more like a trial, complete with competing arguments, before returning to samba-rock under Emicida’s rapping. The song is creative and fun, but it is far from Brazil’s top-40 fare which often favors smoother genre blends and urban pop hits.
Given all of the attention paid to musicians’ efforts to supplement their meager income from digital sales and streaming royalties by forging partnerships with a variety of multinational corporations, it is a little surprising that Tom Zé’s participation in a Coca-Cola commercial would be this controversial. It is difficult to find a musician in Brazil that hasn’t benefitted from some kind of corporate sponsorship. Most artists accept funding from a granting arm of a national corporation (oil company Petrobras, major bank Itaú), license music to national ad campaigns, or embark on a more direct co-branding effort from the likes of mobile phone providers and skin care companies.
Tom Zé in 2008 performing in front of a Petrobras sign, photo used by CC license, Neto Silveira
One of the hallmarks of the recent changes that have affected the music industry is that musicians rarely refuse opportunities for their music to be used as the soundtrack for mainstream audio/visual entertainment and advertisements. The practice is so common that one of the best-regarded music industry survival books explains possible changes to a musician’s brand when they participate in the advertising of other products. Instead of “don’t license your music,” musicians should license their music in a way that will benefit their brand. It is rare for a song’s success among World Cup spectators to harm musicians; anthems that reflect well on the host nation(s) and express the energy of cheering crowds are a central feature of the tournament. Shakira’s “Waka Waka” actually bolstered her credibility among music fans across the African continent because it sampled Golden Sounds’ hit “Zamina Mina,” a popular song among hip-hop artists in Camaroon and Senegal. In Zé’s case, he misjudged how the tournament and its corporate sponsors were being read by the Brazilian public just weeks before tensions exploded in protest. Indeed, as compared to other Brazilian artists who have recorded potential 2014 World Cup anthems, the reaction to Zé is unique.
As others have noted, television advertising played an important role in the June protest soundtrack. Protesters appropriated the song from a Fiat commercial (released just weeks after Zé’s Facebook episode) that explicitly connects cheering soccer crowds in the street to a new car.
The meaning of “torcer,” a common expression for “cheer” in both advertisements’ copy, is transformed back to its original meaning to wrench or twist thereby exposing the conflicts that have been exacerbated by Brazil’s preparations for the tournament and the sports industrial complex.
These crowds twisted an ad’s soundtrack to challenge the role of multinational agencies and corporations in Brazil’s skewed socio-economic priorities. Indeed, as Leo Cardoso wrote in Sounding Out! a year ago, some of these priorities include regulating sound in Brazil’s largest cities.
For both of these cases involving sonic responses to advertisements that explicitly seek to capitalize on excitement for the soccer tournament, their original intended meaning was twisted and wrenched, forcing musicians to re-evaluate their publics. In the current political climate, Zé found that musical sounds can be aligned with the FIFA World Cup, so long as they are about celebrating sport rather than its multinational sponsors.
Promotional FIFA 2014 Can, Photo used by CC license, José Roitberg
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Featured Image: Tom Zé in 2008 performing in front of a Petrobras sign, photo used by CC license, Neto Silveira
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Kariann Goldschmitt is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New College of Florida and Ringling College of Art and Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from UCLA (2009) and was the 2009-2011 Mellon Fellow of Non-Western Music at Colby College in Maine. Her scholarly work focuses on Brazilian music, modes of listening, and sonic branding in the global cultural industries. She has published in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Music, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Luso-Brazilian Review and contributes to the South American cultural magazine, Sounds and Colours.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil”–Leonardo Cardoso
Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest–Jonathan Sterne
Hello, Americans: Orson Welles, Latin America, and the Sounds of the “Good Neighbor”–Tom McEnaney
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Listening to #Occupy in the Classroom
Yes, it’s that time again, readers. You are going to have to stop pretending the “Back to School” aisles haven’t been appearing in stores for the past few weeks. We at SO! are here to ease your transition from summer work schedules to the business of teaching and student-ing with our fall forum on “Sound and Pedagogy.” Developed to explore the relationship between sound and learning, this forum blends the thinking of our editors (Liana Silva), recruited guests (D. Travers Scott), and one of the winners of our recent Call For Posts (Jentery Sayers) to explore how listening impacts the writing process, the teachable moment, and the syllabus (and vice versa). We hope to inspire your fall planning–whether or not you teach a course on “sound studies”–and encourage teachers and students of any subjects to reconsider the classroom as a sensory space. We also encourage you to share your feedback, tips, and experiences in comments to these posts and on our Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit sites. As I said in the Call for Posts for this Forum: “because teaching is so crucial—yet so frequently ignored at conferences and on campus—Sounding Out! wants to wants to provide a virtual space for this vital discussion.” This conversation will be ongoing: we will also bring you a “Spring Break Brush-Up” edition in 2013 featuring several more excellent posts by writers selected from our open call. Right now, the bell’s about to ring–so take a seat, open those ears, and enjoy this shiny auditory apple of an offering from D. Travers Scott in which he discusses how the sounds of #Occupy invigorated his classroom. And, yes, it will be on the test. —JSA, Editor-in-Chief
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In the late fall of 2011, I was teaching a class on cultural studies of advertising. I presented the Occupy Student Debt campaign, a subcategory or spinoff of the larger Occupy movement, while we were examining ways people challenged consumer culture. We discussed education as a commodity and students as consumers. Unsurprisingly, my seniors were dissatisfied consumers. They expressed that what had been advertised to them was a product that guaranteed or at least would strongly increase their chances for quality employment (of course, it was also a product they had worked for years in creating, and one they couldn’t return.) If higher education really did land you the lucrative job it had been advertised as guaranteeing, in theory, then, you would be able to more easily pay off student loan debt. To address this dissatisfaction, I showed them two artifacts: a video from the launch in New York City on November 12, 2011, and the OSD debtors’ pledge*.
In the video, OSD founder Pamela Brown reads the pledge one line at a time, with each line chanted back by others. I played the video in a dark classroom. I also projected it on the room’s main screen, but I didn’t use the room’s amplification system because it sounds too much like an authoritarian public address and disperses the audio in a dominating way. External speakers connected to my laptop made the sound feel, to me, more localized and objectified, something we could focus on rather than an institutional part of the room. The students’ first reaction was, not to the words, but the sound: the verbal relay used at the public demonstration. Brows furrowed and heads cocked quizzically, they asked, “Why are they all repeating the speaker like that?” I explained how this provides additional amplification, but the students’ listening experience was instructive to me. Their unfamiliarity with a sonic practice of vocalization indicated their unfamiliarity with larger practices of collective, public social action.
Listening to OSD, and paying attention to how my students listened to it, informed me of larger contexts they needed to understand and discuss it, in ways that the object of the text did not suggest to me. It made me think about the experience and process of my students’ encountering OSD. I immediately noticed its ambient sounds of city life, which I no longer hear. These sounds of traffic, the acoustics of being surrounded by buildings, etc. gave several urban dimensions to the movement the pledge text did not. From the perspective of Upstate South Carolina, “urban” is not a simple thing, an identity or geography category, but intersectional: our largest city, Greenville, has a population under 60,000. City noises feel not merely urban, but un-Southern, and thereby alien. (I say un-Southern rather than Northern or Yankee because another thing I’ve learned here is the inadequacy of that binary: Los Angeles, for example, is not a Northern city but most certainly is as un-Southern as New York. Cities also carry a class dimension.) Even though my school is one of the elite institutions in this area, this region is still worse off economically than the rest of the country and has a generally lower cost of living. Cities require money to live in. In spatial, class, and urban dimensions, OSD felt alien.
Opening of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Image by Flickr User JohannaClear
The experience of listening to the ODS rally illustrates how a sound studies perspective foregrounds experiential processes over exclusive categories of things and ideas. For example, when I read the OSD Debtors’ Pledge aloud to my students—vocalizing the text and sounds and listening to them— it brought the text into my body, making it an action. It also made students uncomfortable. Even just a round-robin reading of theory seems to make then anxious and fidgety. While I try to understand and accommodate anxieties around public speaking, I think the way sound makes a text enter the body can be a powerful affective experience. And no one ever said the classroom always had to be comfortable. For me, reading the text aloud personalized the OSD pledge. It evoked sensory memories: “Pledge of” evoked saying the pledge of allegiance in public school; saying “We believe” took me to attending Lutheran church services with my husband at the time where they collectively recite the Apostles’ Creed. These associations evoked emotional disidentifications from organized religion and mandatory collective professions of patriotism. It also temporalized and spatialized OSD for me, positioning it in relations to Dallas, Texas in the 1970s and Greenville, SC today.
Overall, the reading aloud of the pledge staged a tension or dialectic of identification and disidentifications. Although I agreed and identified with the sentiments of the movement, several alienating and unsettling aspects of the pledge came through as I read aloud: the blithe collapsings of “we” and “as members of the most indebted generations” made me wary (collectives always do, but so do easy historical assertions. Really? Are we more indebted than indentured servants who came to America, or people born into slavery?), and the sudden shift to first person singular at the very end seemed jarring: (After saying “we” six times, suddenly it’s ‘I’ now – what happened?). Lastly, the numerous alliterations also had an alienating effect, making the text seem sophistic and manipulative, artificial, composed.
The auditory experience of OSD can also provide insight into how we create texts. A video of Andrew Ross shows him presenting the first, “very rough draft” weeks earlier at an OWS event. Listening to him read this different, earlier version underscores the text as process. The pledge is something that developed. While his flat tone and straight male voice do not appeal to me, they do complexify and dimensionalize Brown’s reading, giving it depth. They also show that some things that bothered me in the final version – the collectivity and alliterations – were not there. This intertextual, diachronic listening does not erase troublesome aspects of the ‘final’ text, but it mediates them. I am moved closer to it by listening to its different origin.
Arguably, any of these points could have been arrived at by good ole’ textual analysis. My point is not that listening always should supplant visual modes; sound studies tries to break that false dichotomy by not denigrating or replacing the visual but by elevating the sonic to complementary – not superseding – status. I argue that reading aloud should be a fundamental, basic component of sound studies methodology, as it allows anyone to hear, voice, embody, and experience a text. I not only noticed these aspects sooner through listening – my first time speaking it aloud, despite having read it at least a dozen times before. Moreover, I didn’t just notice them: I felt them on a personal, emotional, level, which spurs thinking and analysis that is, if not completely new and unique, definitely qualitatively different in its potency and urgency.
Listening to OWS, and the OSD in particular, brings insights affective and personal. Yes, I can read a statistic from a survey stating that a certain percentage of participants in OWS feel angry or betrayed. That doesn’t mean anything to me in a specific, personal, and empathetic way – and empathy is crucial for a social movement to garner support. Listening to both Ross and Brown, I am reflective and conflicted over my professional role – no longer a grad student, but certainly not an established scholar like Ross. I feel connected to OSD in ways beyond the literal facts of my debt. Listening draws me into a contemplative, reflexive space beyond a sticky note on my office desk saying “OWS: teachable moment.” I can see a map with big, red OWS circles over Washington D.C. and New York, but I don’t feel the distance from myself and my students in the same way—and this is crucial for my teaching and engaging them in dialogue about what could be the most significant social movements of their lifetimes.
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