O Rock'n'roll Evangélico: um estudo sobre a nova concepção musical dos evangélicos

Abstract

In the mid-1980s of the last century, something unprecedented and surprising appeared in the Brazilian music scene: a niche in the music market aimed exclusively at the evangelical audience. It is the result of an entire effort to renew gospel music that became known as “gospel music”. The most visible and surprising face of the movement is the fact that members of numerous evangelical churches start to use, both in worship and in presentations on independent stages, musical genres that were previously banned: rock, samba, reggae, baião, among others. The main question is to understand this supposed paradox. How is it justified the adherence of evangelicals, so faithful and submissive to their conservative principles, to musical genres that express values radically different from their own. It is worth remembering, to take just two examples, that in their songs many rock bands proclaim the worship of the “devil” and that Bom Marley, the greatest exponent of reggae, openly defends the use and legalization of marijuana. The main hypothesis worked is that such an approximation was only possible due to the “resemantization” and “reterritorialization” of these musical genres, a process that results from the intense massification of these genres on a global scale. In other words, the strenuous massification of music and its genres and subgenres removes their original references from them and transforms them into contents with multiple meanings that are activated or exchanged depending on the circumstances. The fieldwork is carried out from the analysis of phonographic material and live performances, either in churches based in the city of Fortaleza or on independent stages in other cities. Interviews and the examination of some publications in newspapers and magazines are also carried out.