2/13/2017 “Turn Down for What?” | AnthropologyNews http://www.anthropologynews.org/index.php/2016/08/03/turndownforwhat/ 1/4 A mural depicting Emicida painted on the side of a newspaper stand. Photo courtesy Derek Pardue “Turn Down for What?” Sport Derek Pardue (Aarhus U) A Brazilian Remix One of the first things I noticed about Kendrick Lamar’s recent performance at the 2016 Grammys was the noise . Fans and critics have written about the polemical topics and the raw power of Lamar’s showstopping medley. For me, part of the power was the timbre of the sound itself. Lamar deployed sections of “noise” structurally as transition and sensorially for focus on the physical, historical, and psychological aspects of black struggle. In Brazil noise has also gained local nuances around struggle. For those interested in the legacy of anti government protest, both from the left and right, in the Southern Cone, there has been a resurgence of the panelaço (the piercing, incessant battering of the frying pan) in the last two years in urban Brazil with particular vigor over the past weeks. This noise marks a specific articulation; it is superficial to the long history and deep stigma that barulho (noise) carries in Brazil. In a recent post, São Paulo sarau (open microphone events) organizations issued a manifesto called #PeriferiasContraOGolpe , loosely translated as “The Periphery against the Coup,” in which they use noise as an existential position of interlocution rather than a simple sign of opposition. We the residents of the periphery, who never slept as the socalled giant slept, are here to send a noisy, resonant salve to the fascists: we are against the coup d’état currently in motion, one that would affect us directly! Barulho triggers a wide range of connotations, which reveal significant elements of Brazilian society in terms of class, race, aesthetics and space. While the brief interpretations that follow are obviously particular to urban Brazil, they also speak to global issues regarding sound, space, and social hierarchy. Is it music or is it noise? Anthropologist LeviStrauss once described this difference in terms of an analogy: nature is to noise as culture is to music. For their part, the legendary US rap group Public Enemy helped popularize the phrase “bring the noise” in the late 1980s as a call for legitimization of the then marginalized sounds of rap. In a society like Brazil, in which the popular masses have limited access to the instruments or trajectories of power (education, health, property, mobility, fair wages, etc.,) expressive culture is one forum through which symbolic appropriation and semiotic recasting of the pejorative (such as noise) takes place. Hip Hop When I first arrived in São Paulo in the mid1990s, it had become banal for rappers and DJs to emphasize barulho over music (música), or more often barulhoas music. From an antiartist posture, rappers often employed the noise of police sirens, screeching cars, street shouting matches, and simulated explosions as openings to songs. For example, Racionais MCs on the track “Rapaz Comum ” (Common Kid) recorded in 1997, begin this haunting rap dirge with a commonplace scene of a TV turned up to the highest volume complemented by a group of guys watching a soccer match. We hear a drive by shooting and the screeching tires of a car speeding off. The noise intensifies and we hear the gradual fade in of a pounding drone bass, whose pitch variation is barely distinguishable and sounds like a growling, guttural conveyor belt. Repetitive dissonant chords sampled from a set of keyboards punctuate the composition and complete the soundscapeperiphery 