Periferia e negritude: ritmo e poesia (rap) como produção estratégica do mundo periférico em Belém-PA (1996-2023)

Abstract

In 1994 saw the first appearance of a rap group in the city of Belém do Pará. Emerging from the Terra Firme neighborhood, on the outskirts of Belém, the MBGC group - Manos da Baixada do Grosso Calibre - revolutionized with a new musical style to portray the reality of Belém's outskirts. Since the 1980s, a time of great change in cultural representation, including the historiographical sphere, rap has spread worldwide as a way of mirroring popular culture and the dissatisfactions suffered in neighborhoods far from the centers. It emerged in the 1970s in the United States, after a period of great crisis, as an innovative way of getting around the neglect experienced by young people in marginalized neighbourhoods. On the Brazilian scene, rap began as a form of entertainment and later became politicized. Thaide and DJ Hum started national rap and soon other names emerged, gaining prominence, such as Racionais Mc's, who gave rap an engaged form. As a result of these events and the visibility of rapping in the Belém newspapers and hip hop culture, the musical style gained strength and influenced new subjects in the region, paying attention to the Amazonian scenario and the difficulties suffered by the city's neighborhoods, including artists from Pará such as Pelé do Manifesto and Th do 91, with great visibility in "abolitionist poems". In this way, the general aim of this work is to understand the possibilities of the rap musical style as being susceptible to historical analysis and understanding, in that it includes people from the periphery - Pelé do Manifesto, Th do 91 and others who started the movement such as Mc Negro Edi, Bruno BO, Marcelo Muslim, Dj Morcegão - with their rhymes loaded with aspects of diasporic culture. Rap is a style characterized as "spoken song", which seeks to counter social, economic, cultural and historical injustices, and takes on the role of portraying realities faced strictly by black people, and can therefore be characterized as an effect of colonization. In view of this, it is noticeable that it stimulates thoughts contrary to a formed hegemony, in order to confront cultural tensions and racism.