[inkwell.vue.400 : State of the World 2011: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky permalink #138-144 of 156: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Mon 10 Jan 11 04:53]
Well, we’re cruising to a close in a bloody haze of maniacal gunfire, so I want to write a little concluding essay here, about a certain Brazilian pop musician, and why she makes me eagerly anticipate what comes next.
I happen to be quite the Cibelle Cavalli devotee, and it’s not because of her music (although her music is pretty good, if you like exotic Brazilian electronica with diva vocals). Pop stars are always interesting to me, while musicians interest me only on occasion. Musicians create works of music. Popstars create wannabes. Musicians can be very private people, while popstars are public media figures who inspire some social emulation.
Here I think Cibelle has rather a lot to offer, as a contemporary working artist in a 21st-century avant-garde position.
I surmise that this decade is gonna reveal a lot more people who are doing what Cibelle is doing – following her strategy, although, likely not quite in the way she is doing it.
First, she’s offshored. She’s based in London (to the extent that she’s based anywhere), although she’s originally from Sao Paulo. So she represents Brazilian Globalization. She’s not American, yet her fan-base is extensively globalized (her record label is Belgian. She tours Turkey, Europe, and the US).
Second, she’s electronic and digital. She’s got a band, or at least some London guys willing to accompany her in some of her& peregrinations, but as her career has advanced since 2003, she’s gotten steadily more network-centric and hardware-centric – less pretty-girl with acoustic guitar, way more techno DJ on the net.
Third, Cibelle does elaborate, artsy, even vaudeville-style performances with lighting, props and costumes. “You had to be there,” and that’s the point. That’s how you get people to pay to come in the door. Musicians can’t sell music now; journalists can’t sell journalism. So “events are the new magazines.”
Fourth, Cibelle has a cluster of allies who support her, and these people are not musicians. They’re the “Abravanista” movement, based in Sao Paulo. Cibelle sometimes refers to herself as an “Abravanista activist,” and if you think of her as a Sao Paulo Abravanista evangelist instead of some crooning diva with a guitar, all of a sudden her seemingly scattered activities get a lot more coherent.
The Abravanista people are difficult for me to describe. I don’t yet understand them. They’re very Brazilian, and deeply into performance art, video, painting, couture, and gay liberation. Trying to sum them up in a few words of American English is like trying to sum up the Brazilian Tropicalia movement.
You kinda know the Abravana crowd when you see them, because they’re long-haired big-city disco people with glitter clothes, neon and body paint. Yet they’re into a headspace that lacks a non-Brazilian equivalent.
Interestingly, and maybe kind of synchronistically, the art term “Abravana” comes from a famous young woman who was a Patty Hearst kidnapping figure in a huge Brazilian political-violence scandal. Patricia Abravanel was dazed, and suffering Stockholm syndrome from her week-long kidnapping ordeal, so after this colossal, televised fracas, she cheerily told the media that nothing had threatened or scared her, and that she felt great.
So Abravana means, basically, “Fuck it.” It means, “no matter how personally and politically awful this is, I won’t allow myself to engage with this and be traumatized.” So the Abravanista crowd are a kind of “oh fuck off” counterculture who have gone into a vibrant, post-traumatic creative scene. It’s this air of surreal nihilism that puts some iron in their bones. It’s why I take them seriously and consider them global-scale trend-setters as an art movement.
I got interested in Cibelle, because she sings in English, and is big on Twitter and seemed approachable and aware of her online fan base. She’s easier to parse than most Brazilian artists. So, nowadays, we do know one another, although we’ve never met. I closely follow her doings. I do that mostly because, I must say, she cheers me up. She& leads by example.
Americans, over our dual histories, have commonly looked on our cousins the Brazilians as a cheery, colorful, exotic and perky society. They’re not, but that’s something that they offer us that we Americans understand. Can’t be helped, there. It’s like Americans, a historically fortunate society, being known worldwide for our moaning, downtrodden blues music.
In point of fact, the Brazilians have an exceedingly dark history, with every kind of marauding and torment and hunger and fearsome Third World suffering. Brazilian musicians in particular tend to get harassed by the blinkered authorities. Mellow, perky Brazilian musicians have a mortality-rate like you wouldn’t believe.
I went to Sao Paulo and I asked around for Cibelle records. They all knew who she was, but they all assured me that Cibelle was much better-known in London. She’s become a foreign-guy’s pop star. So, wow, maybe I should go to Dalston in London to get the real deal? How convenient.
I know that sounds ironic, but frankly, I admire that situation. That was a gutsy choice for her to make, as opposed to hanging out in the neighborhood, trying to make the ultimate Brazilian Female Vocalist National Vinyl LP.
Fifth, (I’m still counting) Cibelle has got a theorist angle. Cibelle hangs out with painters and installation people, and is therefore keen on art manifestos. I had only the vaguest idea what “anthropophagy” and “Brazilian syncretism” were all about, but I listened to thoughtful people she was listening to, and, well, now I’m starting to get it.
Only a really, really big, young, multiracial, multiethnic country like Brazil or the USA could get behind some anthropophagic syncretism. It’s an alternative model for a global, rootless, massive culture. It’s like magic-realist globalization. I’ve never yet done any anthropophagic Abravanista syncretism, but I’m pretty into Postmodern subjectivity fragmentation. Gimme enough cachaca and lime juice, and hey, I might be able to hold my breath and get over there from here.
As a sixth and final twist – and it’s something I can’t resist – Cibelle practices folk design-fiction. In her performance alter-ego as “Sonja Khalecallon,” Cibelle creates elaborate fake video ads for fake consumer products. The “Anti-Skeptic Lotion,” the “Fresh Eye-Drops,” and the all-too-apt “Fuck-It Button,” a wall-mounted device which transforms you into an instant Abravanista.
Cibelle also has a non-fake, genuine alliance with Melissa, a with-it Brazilian shoe company that makes plastic designer shoes.
Popstars have been doing product-support for ages now. The Spice Girls were all over that, and Posh Spice in particular is moving into couture retail, rather like Jade Jagger and Stella McCartney. But Cibelle is the first pop-star I’ve seen who has moved into that mode of earning a living and just, well, syncretically cannibalized it.
She’s become a “multiartist” rather than a musician, mostly by soaking up these various changes in culture and media and trying to personify them. She’s like a sponge in a bucket-full of paints.
She’ll never be Lady Gaga, and M.I.A. is a lot more politically edgy if that’s what you’re looking for, but Cibelle, for me, is the avant-garde. Not in her music so much as her cultural activities, her global position.
So: you wanna know what a plausible pop-star looks like ten, fifteen years from now? She’s very into performance, dress shoes and clothes. She’s cloud-centric and globally mobile. She comes from a social movement rather than a recording label or a publishing house. She’s a syncretic multi-artist model-actress web personality, with a catchy soundtrack. Her fans are her participants. And she’s female, young, and Brazilian.
That’s the scenario. And you know, it’s not that bad. It’s okay. That somebody who personifies a culture we don’t quite have yet. It could be a pretty good culture, if its activists know what they are doing.
I look at Cibelle and I get the reassured feeling that I get from Brian Eno. It’s not that I love everything that guy creates, or that I embrace every idea among Eno’s many skyrocketing ideas, but, y’know, Brian Eno has fucking got it going on. As a creative, you can see or hear stuff that Brian Eno was doing thirty years ago, and you can think, “Hey, that might work right now. I should try that.” The guy’s lived example makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.
And if you keep getting out of bed, hey, you’ll live long enough to sum up another year.