Soul Grand Prix was a Brazilian soul music group. It formed[when?] from musicians at Clube Renascença in Rio de Janeiro,[1] including Dom Filó and his associates.[2] The group soon initiated a new phase in Rio de Janeiro funk culture in 1975, which celebrated Blackness and Black culture.[3] This period came to be known as Black Rio in the media.[4]
Soul Grand Prix echoed the sounds of James Brown, Kool and the Gang and Wilson Pickett. In order to have large dances, Soul Grand Prix would put together large sound systems, sometimes using over a hundred speakers and generating crowds of over ten thousand of Brazil's youth. Soul Grand Prix dances used mixed media, films, photos, and posters to inculcate the "Black is beautiful" style period.[3][4] The group sometimes censored their own visual presentations however, to avoid offending white viewers.[1] In the middle of the 1970s, the Brazilian secret police began to associate soul with underground leftist movements and infiltrated a soul dance held by Soul Grand Prix together with Black Power.[5]: 9–10 Dom Filó and his cousin "Nirto" were later incarcerated.[5]: 14
Black Rio influenced the funkeiro culture in Brazil who still today host parties to dance to today's funk and sample music from the past to create modernized music.[6]
References
edit- ^ a b Hanchard, Michael George. Orpheus and Power: The Movimiento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1945–1988, p. 113. Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-691-03292-0. (registration required)
- ^ Dunn, Christopher. Contracultura: alternative arts and social transformation in authoritarian Brazil, p. 164. University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN 9781469628516. LCCN 2016-19440.
- ^ a b Yudice, George. "The Funkication of Rio". In Microphone Fiends, p. 206. London Routledge, 1994. (registration required)
- ^ a b Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, p. 124. Duke University Press, 2004.
- ^ a b Alberto, Paulina L. "When Rio Was Black: Soul Music, National Culture, and the Politics of Racial Comparison in 1970s Brazil". The Hispanic American Historical Review, volume 89, issue 1, February 2009.
- ^ Ambassador. Brazilian sound clash: Soul Grand Prix vs Soul Layzer. http://soulspectrum.blogspot.com/2007/11/brazilian-sound-clash-soul-layzer-vs.html