Banca de DEFESA: HUDSON LIMA BEZERRA ROCHA

CROSSING THE BRAZILIAN NIGHT. 

THE CLUBE DA ESQUINA'S SONGS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

Song; Semiotics; Resistance; Crossing; Dictatorship; Clube da Esquina

Clube da Esquina is the name given to an artistic group between Milton Nascimento and several partners who are acknowledged as being a great resistance against Brazilian dictatorship. On some occasions, however, the oppositional discourse between these composers and the dictatorship is questioned, especially in interpretations that place them in a dispute with the Tropicália movement in a search for engagement legitimacy. Actually, what happens and was not well comprehended or studied, is the fact that there is an esthetic language proper from the composers of the club, in which their work reveals itself as not only as being a product of a historical context, but it also transcending it. Our work deals precisely in the effort of understanding more thoroughly this specific poetics of Clube da Esquina, as being a politicized discourse under the circumstances in which protest songs were censored.  In order to do so, it is required an analysis more focused on the language and internal arrangement of the narratives presented in the lyrics. A corpus composed of six songs was adopted here. They were chosen because besides summarizing well Clube da Esquina’s different artist cycles, they also manage to accomplish a sort of dialogue between themselves. Their names are: “Beco do Mota” (1969), “Clube da Esquina n°1” (1970), “Para Lennon e McCartney” (1970), “Trem de Doido” (1972), “O Que Foi Feito Devera” (1978) e “Sol de Primavera” (1979). In an attempt to meet a demand of the song itself as a gender, we use the theorical support of Luiz Tatit semiotics perspective (1997, 2001, 2002, 2007 e 2008). As a result of this analytical process, we hope to comprehend and define a resistance esthetics presented in the songs as a sort of allegorical crossing, unveiled several times in the lyrics under the transition between nightfall and dawn. This notion can also be taken as a representation of Clube da Esquina’s artistic journey, going basically from the military coup until the first signs of democratic reopening, historically defined by the Lei de Anistia Federal (1979).