The other “Os”

This band was one of the first I learned about when I started working at the UC Berkeley radio station, KALX. I eventually left, mostly because a) the other people tended to conform to stereotypes to a horrifying degree and b) I was lazy. DJing is really fun, if also scary, but the thing I miss much more is the Alexandrian (or Congressine) library. They had everything, and you could read decade-long arguments scrawled all over the record jackets. Doolittle was hardly visible under the vitriol.

Anyway, this band, Os Novos Baianos, is one of the many reasons why MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) is going to eventually be recognized as the greatest genre of music ever, not counting power pop, New Wave, Bollywood oldies, klezmer and all the other ones that I like. MPB is sort of rockization of previous genres of Brazilian pop and folk music, and basically every Brazilian musician you and I have heard of plays it. I like the name because you never know if it just means Brazilian pop or something more specific, and when you’re lazy but have more or less catholic tastes, like me, that’s handy. I listened to almost nothing but Cuban music for the couple years in high school before I found out about “Dazed and Confused,” but that didn’t mean I ever actually figured out how to reliably tell the difference among son, guaracha and all the other genres. I’m not bragging about my ignorance - I’d love to know more than I do, but at the same time I’m more interested in just listening to music than learning terminology. Genre names in any country and idiom are like species, anyway: just because it looks different than its parents doesn’t mean the liger-bunny won’t turn out to be sterile. Actually, what I mean is that it’s just a convenient label, and there’s no point in using it if it hems you in.

That was all just a roundabout way of saying that I think this is a lovely song. I gather from this page that “Preta Pretinha” means “Black, Blackie.” I don’t know exactly how to take that, but since the band sounds like very nice people and that page is about multicultural dolls seemingly named after the song, I assume that it doesn’t have any racist connotations. I don’t pretend to be an expert, and I know that Brazilian racism is at least as widespread as in the rest of South America, but I’ve noticed that many Cuban songs mention “mulatas” and “negros” in tones that don’t seem to be derogatory. Whatever the title means, the song is great, like the rest of Acabou Chorare.

Os Novos Baianos - Preta Pretinha