“Golpe, não!”: Twenty-first-century Brazilian songs of protest

Brazilian Popular Music has long energized public debate on a variety of issues in Brazilian society. From Geraldo Vandré’s “Pra não dizer que não falei das flores” (1968) to Anitta’s “Vai, malandra” (2017), Brazilian Popular Music has sparked conversations and reflections about democracy, gender and race relations, poverty, migration, and much more. In this article, I analyze how recent Brazilian Popular Music was used as an instrument of mobilization around the defense of democracy in the context of the political turmoil the country has experienced since the beginning of President Dilma Rousseff’s second term. I contend that the songs in question—songs of protest—illustrate how Brazilian Popular Music as a discourse continues to have the constitutive proprieties that characterized it in the second half of the twentieth century. In other words, these songs serve as a compass for ways of living and behaving in current Brazilian society.