The concept behind this book has allowed me to explain to myself why my own musical preferences as a teenager back in Brazil (British postpunk: Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Durutti Column, Siouxie and the Banshees, Bauhaus) maintained a surprising dialogue, and were not that socially incompatible with, the death / thrash metal (Slayer, Venom, Metallica, Sepultura) favored by my younger brothers and friends. It has allowed me to understand why that particular phenomenon is an important chapter of contemporary Brazilian music related to the trajectory of MPB in the 1970s and 80s. The easiness with which punks, headbangers, goths, and other tribes dialogued and collaborated with each other in Brazil owes something to a common rejection of the MPB stardom, and to a perception that the canonical forms of Brazilian popular music had been coopted by the remarkable entertainment industry developed during the 70s. Our relation with Brazilian music was highly problematic indeed, and this was true not only of us goths, but of our punk and headbanging friends as well. Brazilian music for us meant the MPB stars impeccably dressed on TV, moving their lips to recordings of their songs played on Friday nights or Sunday afternoons in one of those Globo network music shows. That institutionalization reached a high point, I would contend, with the role of music in the campaign for free elections and, after the defeat of said campaign, the rise of the first postdictatorial civil government, the center-right coalition led by Tancredo Neves and José Sarney.
            There is a  story yet to be told about the role of dominant forms of Brazilian popular music in the consolidation and legitimization of the opposition block that would succeed the military regime in 1985. Not having been freely elected, but led by a congressional alliance with sectors of the regime into a victory in the electoral college, the Tancredo-Sarney ticket carried considerable legitimacy, derived from the massive campaign for direct elections which they joined late – that campaign was launched by the Workers Party - and subsequently abandoned to negotiate a consensual formula with the military regime. The campaign for diretas já counted on conspicuous support from Brazilian filmmakers, writers, actors, and artists in all fields, but it was undoubtedly the voices of the major singers of MPB that resonated the loudest, and came to be most directly associated with the cultural block in support of the struggle for free elections.  It was also, however, a certain sector of MPB that came to take the burden of being linked with a regime – that of Sarney, after Tancredo’s death – that was not able to maintain the diretas já-generated popular legitimacy for longer than a few months, due to its staunchly reactionary composition.
             Not, of course, that MPB was ever a vital part in electing the center-right block that succeeded the military. If anything, music played a lateral role in gathering support for a coalition which, after the defeat of the free election amendment in Congress, would have been able to impose itself anyway, such was its strength within the Brazilian elites. Symbolically, however, the presence of some MPB stars in the Tancredo-Sarney rallies changed the perception that a portion of the music public held of them until that moment. This change became more pronounced after Tancredo’s death and the rise to the presidential palace (1985) of a man who had been allied with the military power throughout his political career, José Sarney.
            The liberal-conservative betrayal of the campaign for direct and free elections after its defeat in Congress, and the subsequent rise of José Sarney to power were supported by several MPB stars, most notably, in my memory at least, by Mílton Nascimento, who composed the anthem “Coração de Estudante” that would become the musical stamp of the center-right coalition (to be true to Mílton, it had also been the jingle animating the campaign for free elections, and later appropriated by the “New Republic”). If you’ve ever seen the liberal-conservative leadership of that alliance holding hands at a rally singing “Coração de Estudante” with Mílton Nascimento, you know why goths, punks, headbangers, Workers Party activists, feminists, black movement militants, anarchists, environmentalists, and several other tribes were united in hating it. If you haven’t, let me jump straight to the conclusion: the crowning of “Coração de Estudante” as the hymn of Tancredo and Sarney’s campaign epitomized, in the minds of several musical tribes linked with the internationalization of Brazilian music in the 1980s, the capitulation of MPB to the status quo, its metamorphosis into the mouthpiece of the respectable and decent Brazil of the “New Republic.”
            The fact is important because Mílton’s music had been closely associated with an oppositional imaginary during the military dictatorship. Mílton’s career had in fact coincided with the rise and fall of the military regime (his first record is from 1967), and had translated like no other the ephemerous hopes and lasting disillusionment proper to the Brazilian popular and middle classes during the “long night” of the 1960s and 1970s. Embedded, as Charles Perrone has pointed out, “in the folk roots and historical heritage of Minas Gerais” (133), Mílton’s music evoked nostalgia and melancholia but also offered a powerful message of political protest and dissent. The unique combination of jazz, classical music, traditional Minas Gerais toadas, folkloric rhythms, religious chants, the tradition of Brazilian erudite music, Spanish American genres, and avant-garde forms, the rich textures of his melodies, the mesmerizing alternation of haunting contraltos and chilling sopranos, the evocative and intensely poetic lyrics (signed by Mílton himself or by his partners Ronaldo Bastos, Fernando Brant, Lô Borges, Beto Guedes or Márcio Borges, members of the “Corner Club”), all of these factors made of Mílton’s music an inescapable reference in the Brazilian cultural landscape of the 1970s.
             By 1985 Mílton was an established name, internationally recognized not only for his contributions to the Brazilian songbook but also for his connections with “world music” and his several collaborations with luminaries of American jazz. In Brazil his name had always been political in a more direct or less mediated sense than Caetano or Gil, and popular in his roots in a more recognizable way than Chico Buarque. Perhaps coherent with the less mediated character of his relationship with the political field, his wager on the Sarney regime in 1985 ended up being more naively formulated and more enthusiastic than that of either Caetano, Gil, Chico, or any other MPB giant (Chico in fact having been very critical and skeptical early on in the Sarney regime). As a consequence, Mílton would later suffer the greatest loss of political and cultural capital following the failure of Sarney’s regime, its constant leanings to the right, and its betrayal of the popular legitimacy inherited from the campaign for free elections. Meanwhile, Belo Horizonte – the city most closely associated with the imaginary latent in Mílton’s songs – was becoming the capital of Brazilian heavy metal, a genre which emerged precisely by spitting on the “New Republic” whose forging had been symbolically supported by Mílton’s art.
These various developments in the cultural and political fields do not maintain a cause-effect relationship with each other, but are certainly related in more ways than simply their chronological coexistence. The hopeful imaginary not only of Mílton’s anthem to the New Republic, but also of much of his earlier (musically and lyrically much richer) production, had to decline if the imaginary of mineiro heavy metal were to establish its voice, or at least make enough room to become socially audible. Heavy metal indeed came to manifest the hidden unconscious, the negation, so to speak, of the Clube da Esquina. The Mílton Clube had drawn the musical horizon of the state of Minas Gerais for two decades  and therefore represented tradition’s most solid foothold. Heavy metal was a genre claiming legitimacy through a strategy of radical negation, a negation directed both at tradition and at everything that’s part of the present actuality, the totality of what is. Mílton was the musical embodiment of both the past and the present, precisely the two major targets of the headbanging negation.
            At an unconscious level, that is a level never theorized by the heavy metal movement as such, Mílton was the negative condition of possibility for heavy metal. Mílton’s music had both refracted and produced a certain iconography of Minas Gerais’s oxcarts, baroque churches, and steep unpaved paths being swept away by modernization and preserved in the elegiac homage music would pay to them:

Acabaram com o beco                                           they did away with the alley
mais ninguém lá vai morar                                    no one lives there any longer
cheio de lembranças vem o povo                          folks full of memories come
do fundo escuro beco                                           out of the deep dark alley
nessa clara praça se dissolver                              to dissolve in this here clear square
(“Beco do Mota”, Nascimento-Brant, 1969)

Eh! minha cidade                                                     Oh my town
portão de ouro, aldeia morta, solidão                      golden gate, dead village, solitude
. . .                                                                              . . .
aldeia morta, cadeado, coração                               dead village, padlock, heart
e eu reconquistado                                                    and I, reconquered,
vou caminhando, caminhando e morrer                     keep walking and walking to death
   (“Os Povos”, Nascimento-M.Borges, 1972)
            It was primarily the idyllic imaginary of a peaceful, premodern, melancholy yet hopeful Minas Gerais mourned in the Clube da Esquina tradition that heavy metal came to contest. Some of Mílton’s memorable scenes depicted children of rural working class families parting and saying goodbye to the little interior village, returning with a diploma and the sinhá mocinha to be introduced to their parents (see “Morro Velho”, Nascimento, 1967). That iconography created a songbook and a poetic reserve of rituals of emigration, abandonment, and departure. Heavy metal had to negate that imaginary, for it never experienced that attachment to Minas Gerais, and cultivated in fact an enraged cosmopolitanism that cancelled out those mournful rituals of departure. In that particular case it was the very backbone of the Minas Gerais popular and artistic symbology that was being negated.
              The symbolic antagonism between Clube da Esquina and heavy metal becomes clearer with a few historical clarifications. What is meant here by “heavy metal” bears little resemblance to the softer, and perhaps more musically varied forms (sometimes also alluded by that label) epitomized in the 70s by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. These groups had indeed some following in Brazil during the 70s and 80s, but it would be difficult to argue that much major Brazilian music, even its pop and rock genres, owed much to them, certainly not as intensely as, say, Raul Seixas to Elvis or the Mutantes to the Beatles. The death metal that would become remarkably popular in the 80s and 90s among the Belo Horizonte working and lower-middle classes (and with some presence in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and other metropolises) was propelled by bands such as Slayer, Venom, and Metallica, and produced a rather different effect, proper to the movement’s do-it-yourself ethic: it generated countless bands among its following. Of those Sepultura is the simply the one that eventually achieved international recognition and sales measured in millions, the tip of an iceberg that included dozens of bands within half a dozen neighborhoods. Some names are important to mention, if anything to stake out the vocabulary that differentiates them from the Clube da Esquina: Overdose, Sepultura, Witchhammer, Destroyer, Butcher...
            The resemantization of a certain catholic iconography of Minas Gerais is the major line of continuity between Mílton and the metal bands that emerged against the horizon delimited by his gigantic artistic figure. Not that the two strategies, of course, bore any resemblance: while Mílton reappropriated messages and symbols of charity, fraternity, and hope in a political, popular, and emancipatory sense (culminating in Sentinela and Missa dos Quilombos), heavy metal proposed no appropriation, and rather a strategy of radical negation, inversion, and voiding of the catholic iconography so strong in Minas Gerais:
 

                                 ... Christians, Today They Still Cry
                                   But The Bastards Adore Images
                        Remembrances From The Past, From The Crucifixion
                                Rotting Christ, Nailed To The Cross
                                 From The Semen Of The Mankind
                                 We'll Spread Our Seed
                                  And We'll Show To The Devoted
                   The Truth, The Painful Truth
                                                                                (“Morbid Visions”, 1986)

The imperative for death metal was the destruction of the signifier itself, not its preservation with a different meaning. Metal did not distinguish a truer and recuperable message in the mineiro religiosity, and decided instead to cancel it out through extensive use, decontextualization, and ultimately the voiding of its symbolic apparatus. Inverted crosses, Satanic allusions, eschatological obsession, are part of a poetic strategy completely built around the negation of the hope Mílton’s music was famous for expressing: the hope that underneath the conservative, conventional, traditional, and religious universe of Minas Gerais resided some emancipatory, fraternal, and compassionate kernel politically and culturally available. Death metal was primarily a negation of that availability.
            Death metal’s relationship with Minas Gerais should be understood as an unconscious relation, naturally different from Mílton’s explicit project of symbolically remaking the state. In fact the proper names Mílton Nascimento and Belo Horizonte death metal (or Mílton and Sepultura, if one prefers the synecdoche) describe opposite movements vis-à-vis the symbolic kernel of Minas Gerais’ mythology. While the imaginary of Mílton’s music depicts a centripetal move toward the center, Belo Horizonte, which progressively but circularly runs away from the interior, death metal, on the contrary, arises out of an already urban, belo-horizontina crowd of impoverished middle class youth who of necessity cannot but establish a centrifugal relation to Minas Gerais and its center. Mílton mourns the ritual of migration from the interior to the capital by taking the standpoint of the peasant father who stays and later receives the returning son – or fantasizes he is doing it, which poetically there amounts to the same. In death metal, the movement and the operation are symmetrically opposed: they depart from an already disillusioned urban experience, and project out of that cage a migration which has been completely dissociated from mourning. Already in Mílton’s first album, Travessia, the song “Três Pontas” gave a poetic indication of a pattern of returns to the interior associated with the possibility of storytelling:

todo mundo vem correndo para ver, rever                        all came running to see, again
gente que partiu pensando um dia em voltar                     folks who left thinking of returns
enfim voltou no trem                                                         and returned on the train
E voltou contando histórias                                              telling stories
De uma terra tão distante                                                 of lands so far away
do mar of the sea
(Nascimento – R. Bastos, 1967).

To do a truly just analysis of this masterful song we would have to show how the accumulation of percussive energy in the moments when Mílton powerfully extends the monosyllables  (“trem”, “ver”, “mar”) allegorizes, in itself, the movement of memory that the lyrics depict, the condensation of mournful energy in a sound which is the explicit theme of the song. Be that as it may, in Mílton the most intense musical moments tend to coincide with the mournful portrayal of memory in the lyrics. The inventive horizons opened by music are coextensive with the possibility of storytelling alluded to by the lyrics. There is a correlation, in other words, between the poetic reserve generated by the music and the mnemonic reserve that the lyrics mournfully attempt to depict.
On the other hand, the possibility of storytelling in death metal has been divorced from memory, since death metal depicts a world where apocalypse has already happened, or is imminent to the point of canceling out any possibility of memory:
 

What Has Gone Through Me Will Never Return
Future Won't Let Me Look Back
   (“Primitive Future”, 1989)

Death metal’s futuristic-eschatological matrix is the inverted correlate of Mílton’s linking of memory and mourning. While Mílton returns to the past in order to stage it as a present lamenting its own passing, Sepultura arises out of an unbearable present to project its own annihilation in a future understood as a final judgment. While Mílton has been responsible for the musicalization of Minas Gerais memory in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and to a certain degree the 90s, death metal has turned the 80s and 90s into a time of no memory, for the time of metal is always the temporality of the last day, a day by definition incapable of any memory and therefore purely present to itself. In Hegelian terms one could say that Mílton composed the morning anthem while death metal produced the dusk-dwelling sound, the frequent encounters between Lucifer and a weakened God in the latter being nothing but an allegorization of the world’s inability to recollect itself as memory, its inhabiting of an eschatological locus, its purely nightly existence:
 

Beneath The Remains
Cities In Ruins
Bodies Packed On Minefields
Neurotic Game Of Life And Death
Now I Can Feel The End
Premonition About My Final Hour
  (“Beneath the Remains”, 1989)
 

 The Terror Is Declared
 The Final Fight Started
 The Antichrist And Lucifer
  Fighting With Angels And God
  (“The Warriors of Death”, Bestial Devastation, 1985)

Only an academic moralist would pass judgment on the faulty English lyrics, but only someone immersed in the movement would be unable to see that the English errors themselves speak allegorical volumes about death metal: one of the most common lapses is the ungrammatical use of the definite pronoun (“To send souls to the hell”,etc.), coherent not only with the Portuguese language from which they translate, but also and most importantly with the radically immanentist vein of death metal, its tendency to singularize each thing so as to make it unfit for any metaphorization, its struggle against the generalist impulse in the English language. Death metal is, in that sense, also an explicit cry of revolt against transcendence, the very transcendence that Mílton’s music immortalized in its unique blend of international and Brazilian genres.
The canceling out of transcendence and memory in death metal is coherent with the movement’s relationship with its surroundings. Particularly strong in neighborhoods of lower middle or working class composition (Santa Teresa, first home to Sepultura, or Sagrada Família), death metal relates to location only insofar as it is a location to be abandoned, a point from which to draw a line of flight. Its performative effect relies on the staging of an eschatological flight from its surroundings. Death metal counters the backwardness of a particular place with the dissolution of location as such in the apocalypse. Contrary to the abandoning and departures portrayed in Mílton’s music, there’s no possibility of return, for one’s particular location in time is always a suicidal location, a place in dissolution. As we will see, both moments – Mílton’s mournful rituals of migration and metal’s memory-less apocalypse –hark back, through many mediations, to a contradiction in Brazilian capitalism, and especially to its particular manifestation in Minas Gerais’ unique blend of tradition and modernization.
            One of death metal’s strongholds in Belo Horizonte through the 80s and 90s is the neighborhood known as Sagrada Família, home primarily to old folks, unemployed youth, and dogs. If you’re familiar with Belo Horizonte, chances are you’ve at least heard of Sagrada Família - the name itself being quite ironic here. Situated a few minutes east of B.H.’s highly modern downtown area, and bounded by the dynamic commercial cluster known as Floresta, Sagrada Família is the epitome of Belo Horizonte as the epitome of Brazilian capitalism. An island of traditionalism in the center area one of the most modern Brazilian cities, S. Família is made up of old houses which have somehow survived the pressures of real estate corporations, since they’re inhabited by impoverished elderly who refuse to sell their property (since their only value is their location: they’re property to be sold, destroyed, and replaced). That refusal creates an economic impasse unexplainable by any rational theory model, namely the refusal to sell, the refusal to move to “better” places, the refusal to modernize when both your “self-interest” (at least as measured by such theories) and every market tendency impel you to do so. These old folks then stake out an experiential and mnemonic value in opposition to exchange value. These particular neighborhoods represent, then, a certain reserve of sheer memory value in a forward-looking and modernizing context.
The despair vis-à-vis temporality in death metal is strictly related to this particular junction in the modernization of Brazilian metropolises, in which the only available opposition to market logic is the one built around cries for preservation and memory. This preservative relation to memory becomes unbearable for any headbanger, and negatively explains much of the apocalyptic temporality present in the music and performance of countless death metal bands. Originated primarily in a milieu fully exposed to modernization but excluded from its fruits, heavy metal experiences progress already from the point of view of its final failure. However, the movement’s suicidal negation, its strong refusal to affirm, bars it from offering any other temporality alternative or subsequent to that final point. Time is halted and frozen into apocalypse because the only narrative available for organizing time has been that of progress, precisely the one upon whose ruins death metal puts up its tent. The irreconcilability between metal and its surroundings, then, is not only a spatial  impasse: it is derived in fact from the impossibility of temporalizing that space, for the only available temporalization was based on an ideology explicitly negated, and denounced as a failure, by one’s very surroundings. In that sense death metal takes to its ultimate limits – by allegorizing it as apocalypse – a particular temporal antinomy of Brazilian capitalism.
             Death metal depicts, then, a time in which the Benjaminian angel of history can no longer hope to return to the past and redeem piles of catastrophes, for it has drowned in them, suffocated by the past misery it once hoped to hold in its hands. Memory collapses into pure facticity, and cannot offer any experience of time other than the sheer presentness of the last day. The opposition with Mílton could not be clearer here, as Mílton’s music – with the elongated temporality of its melody and harmony –allegorized a certain extended time, the very stretched-out time depicted in the recollecting lyrics written by Brant, Bastos, or Mílton himself:

Ponta de Areia, ponto final                                       Sand point, final point
da Bahia-Minas, estrada natural                               From Bahia to Minas, natural road
que ligava Minas ao porto, ao mar                           that linked Minas to the port, the sea
caminho de ferro, mandaram arrancar                      railway now torn apart
. . .       . . .
na praça vazia um grito um ai                                   at the empty square a cry of pain
casas esquecidas viúvas nos portais                        forgotten houses widows at the threshold

(“Ponta de Areia”, Nascimento-Brant, 1975)

In “Ponta de Areia”, a pinnacle of Mílton’s career and one of the richest melodies in the contemporary songbook of Brazilian popular music, the extended guitar, bass, sax, piano, and percussion lines – combined in highly dissonant fashion – are accompanied by one of the most powerful performances of Mílton’s falsetto soprano, which introduces the song before his contralto takes over and stretches all stressed vowels to their absolute limit. Mílton’s voice takes a labyrinthine stroll along the stretched-out vowels, as if replicating the curves of the railroad mourned by the lyrics (an effect reinforced by reproductions of the train’s whistling, carefully placed in dialogue with Nivaldo Ornelas’s soprano sax). This coincidence between form and content is one of the keys to Mílton’s art, and it is invariably achieved through the staging of an extended, elongated, mournful temporality.
                In contrast, the fast succession of repetitive movements in metal’s distorted guitars emblematizes the annihilation of all extended temporalities and the apocalyptic canceling out of time which are proper to the movement. Since in death metal all time has coalesced on the last day, there is an undeniable coherence in metal’s choice for crafting its music by taking repetition to its ultimate limits. The realm of sheer repetition can only come on judgment day. “To repeat until all differences are annihilated” is one of metal’s mottoes, a striking contrast with Mílton, whose musical and lyric art is premised on a careful use of repetition as a kind of modulator of differences. In fact, one of major musical contrasts between death metal and neighboring genres, such as punk or other forms of metal, is the absence of any modulation, discontinuity, or alternation between the guitars and the rhythmic section composed of bass and drums. The two replicate one another to exhaustion, again coherently with the annihilation of time depicted in the apocalyptic lyrics.
 More than simply a “reflection” of the lack of alternatives for Brazilian working class youth amidst a debt crisis, chronic unemployment, and hyperinflation, heavy metal represents an active, creative intervention into established mythologies of Brazilian cultural and political life. What is new, I would contend, about my argument here is the highlight on the convergence of two of those mythologies around 1985 (the civic  mythology of Brazilian democracy and the Christianizing-redemptive mythology of Mílton’s music). It is important, then, to realize how such a convergence provided heavy metal with its primary, albeit unconscious, target of attack and negation in the mainstream. It’s not by coincidence, then, that the mid-eighties represent a major turning point for Brazilian heavy metal, with the consolidation of Cogumelo Discos (the first independent label for Sepultura, Overdose, and cia.) and a rise in sales and following that would soon catapult Sepultura into international stardom. It was the New Republic’s appropriation of the Christian kernel of Mílton’s music that initially allowed metal’s inverted, negated Christianity to establish itself as an alternative mythology. The particular way in which the political field mediated between agents in the cultural field in this episode shows how comparisons in popular music scholarship should not be limited to musicians who influence or dialogue with each other. In this strict regard, of course, there is little doubt that Brazilian heavy metal does not dialogue with or owe anything to Mílton Nascimento’s music. But it is clear to me that the mainstreaming of Mílton’s artistic message opens up a national and regional space that heavy metal would subsequently occupy and implode.
             Following that initial moment, metal would need to have it out with its own international mainstreaming. Much like any other heir to the negative thrust of the early 20th century avant-garde, death metal, punk, and other “tribal” pop genres invariably face dilemmas related to the potential contradiction between their growing popularization and their nihilistic message. In this sense Sepultura is now facing, mutatis mutandi, the same crossroads faced by Mílton in 1985, when his enthusiasm for the new liberal order (even if corrected and contradicted later by his disillusioned “Carta à República”) came to emblematize the relative decline in the innovative energy of his music.  In death metal the trap of institutionalization manifests itself in a particular way, namely the impossibility of maintaining the apocalyptic, radically negative discourse in a context of systematic growth in sales and popularity. In search for affirmative forms of discourse, Sepultura would begin to highlight a certain Brazilianness (for example through use of the national flag in international concerts) as well as attempt a dialogue with figures of Brazilian pop music (albeit from its “alternative” strand, as in their recent collaboration with Carlinhos Brown, their homage to Chico Science, etc.). Soul Fly’s recent version of Jorge Ben’s “Ponta-de-Lança Africano” also comes to mind an instance of this shift from the nihilistic inversion of Christianity to the affirmative embrace of an alternative Brazilian tradition. It is still to be seen whether this shift spells heavy metal’s definitive institutionalization as another genre in the supermarket of pop, the ultimate cancellation of its origins in negativity. It remains true, however, that heavy metal’s negative reversal of national and regional mythologies was initially made possible by the collapse of an immense artistic reserve (that of Mílton Nascimento) into the symbolic reserve of Brazilian liberal democracy. Metal’s response to that collapse was unique, and it was firmly rooted in the experiences of urban working and lower middle class youth. This genuine and creative response undoubtedly accounts for the movement’s irreducible moment of truth.