Rapente: Rap and Repente

Rio de Janeiro - A few days ago I went to see a concert by Berna Ceppas, a fellow who plays computerized music. “Electronic music” is dance music played in clubs. Computerized music is music for nerds like me who sit still. They watch a roller coaster of fleeting and disconnected images projected on a screen, set to the sound of loops and samples. On stage a handful of guys operate computers, soundboards and sundry contraptions, creating an interplay of improvisation between images and sound.

The show included a guest appearance by Don Negrone, a rapper from Rio de Janeiro. From one moment to the next, the concert changed completely. After 50 minutes of synthetic sound and big screen images, during which nobody on stage showed any sign of live beyond fiddling with buttons, a guy comes on and takes the microphone, approaches the audience, and asks people to lend him their identification documents. He takes their ID cards and drivers licenses, reads the contents and begins to improvise: “This one here is Luciana, born in ´74, she came here to hear me rap, won’t forget me anymore... I see that she´s carioca, ´cause in Rio she was born, and she likes to drink guaraná, when she´s eating popcorn...”

The audience ate it up. The show, which had been excellent musically, added a human dimension that it hadn’t had before. The spectator began to feel part of the show, to see his or her name and records used as a pretext-for-rhyme by a poet. Everyone laughed, everyone loved it, and as the poet returned the ID cards at the end of his routine, the applause was enthusiastic.

When I was a teenager, I witnessed the performances of “cantadores” and “emboladores” in the streets of Campina Grande, Paraíba. Always in pairs, these “repentistas” work in improvised rhyme. Cantadores accompany themselves on twangy guitars; emboladores recite to the beat of tambourines. I witnessed the give-and-take between audiences and the duos Dedé da Multatinha and Colombita, Cachimbinho and Geraldo Mouzinho, and Caju and Castanha. The style made popular in the 1980s by North American blacks was already common in the backlands of Paraíba in the 1880s. I’m not going to get detoured here into the rigmarole that it is enough to be American to be successful. That’s old news.

Rap and repente are not rivals: they’re brothers, sons of European Capitalism with different mothers. They might look down upon each other, but both know what they are, and given a chance to coexist, they’ll end up growing closer and reaching an understanding. A bit of creative improvisation can change the dry and chilly atmosphere of technological music, which is based on improvised cloned sounds. A great example of this is a DJ Dolores show, where computerized music prepares the ground for Maciel Salu to improvise rhymes, chants or rabeca solos. High-tech music and folk music can enrich each other. Any audience admires improvisation about something it understands. Cachimbinho & Cia. don’t need to abandon their tambourines to go electronic. The old form remains. But a new form might emerge, as long as it emerges to increase the esteem of improvisation, of “repente,” the key quality in this Higher Art.