"Beat the Donkey" with Cyro Baptista

A performance by Beat the Donkey (Cyro Baptista and other musicians)

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

A few years ago I had the opportunity to listen to David Barsamian interview University of Colorado ethnomusicology professor John Galm about Brazilian popular music. In that interview, Professor Galm said something that I was reminded of by Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey's performance this past Saturday. Galm remarked in the interview that Brazilian popular music, in particular the music of the carnival, rests on a tremendous inventiveness. Since musical instruments can be expensive and often beyond the reach of common people, the masses in Brazil often simply improvise, Galm said, making music out of whatever is at hand. This has given rise, Galm said, to a quite wide variety of quite unorthodox and wildly inventive instruments, some of them even improvised from domestic utensils or appliances such as pots and pans, shelves or wooden crates. It is a matter of making a virtue out of necessity, so to speak.

In its performance, Beat the Donkey led by Cyro Baptista seemed to have taken this Brazilian tradition into a flight of whimsy that seemed to make the show part vaudeville, part a world music pageant, and part a fanciful caper. Over there in the [art]seen blog, Krithika has already done an excellent job of describing the concert, and so I won't give you a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I will be somewhat impressionistic and simply share my general thoughts about the concert.

Cyro Baptista reminded me somewhat of the great Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Tom Zé, well-known for creating music with the sounds of blenders, floor polishers, radios, typewriters and vacuum cleaners during the 1970s. Zé (and to a lesser extent, Zé's fellow artists in the Brazilian "Tropicalia" movement, too) were harkening back to the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade's influential "Cannibalist Manifesto" of 1928, a key text of Brazilian modernism, in which Andrade had compared the postcolonial re-appropriation, in places such as Brazil, of European/North American cultural symbols, to "cannibalism". The idea is that we postcolonials cannibalize (literally consume) western cultural artifacts, and in doing so we create something new out of them, very different from their originally intended use. The appearance, at one point in Beat the Donkey's performance, of a giant Coca-Cola crate (used as a percussion instrument) is a gesture, i think, towards this "cultural re-appropriation."

After the performance, I had a very lively and interesting discussion with a friend over coffee at Panera's. She said -- and I think she is correct -- that a concert like this can all too easily become kitschy, an exercise in mere showmanship and crowd-pleasing -- and in pandering, with its profligate and over-stumulative excess -- to us, the perpetually attention-deficient denizens of the cyberculture era, who are likely to lap up such pageantry and consume with goggle-eyed ecstasy, the globetrotting bricolage of world-music samples seemingly thrown together in a randomly jumbled, decontextualized, fashion. But I think that Cyro Baptista is well aware of this, and, with more than a hint of self-parody, he is putting on this performance in what is actually an ironic way. Very postmodern, in fact. He is, I think, while not denying the cacophony and kitschiness of modern existence, challenging its meaninglessness and actually humanizing it by performing it with fellow musicians with such joy and intensity.

In fact, something that Cyro Baptista says in one of his interviews is very revealing, I think, of how he envisages this kind of performance as, in a small way, an act of resistance:

Interviewer: Music brings together people in harmony…

Cyro Baptista: Yes. When I started to get together ‘Beat the Donkey’ I had this idea and I call this percussionist and I say, ‘I want to have music and dancers all together and do this….’ And he says, ‘Man. Why do we need ten people to do that? Me and you, we can do this with machines…’ In a time like we are passing now we need to do things together …… to see if we can transform the energy…. I wake up now and I see this stupid man who wants to have a stupid war and I think ‘What the f*ck…Why?’ This guy is wasting his time…I barely have time to do things during the day like composing, doing this and that, taking care of the kids, and how does this guy have time during the day to make a war? Does he not have anything else to do?