Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how people sing and dance to express political critique during presidential elections by drawing on ethnography from São Paulo in 2018. Through a study of a music performance at Avenida Paulista I show how music adds affect to political statements in the streets.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how people sing, groove, and dance to express political critique during presidential elections by drawing on ethnography from São Paulo during the second round of the Brazilian election in 2018. Through a study of a music performance at Avenida Paulista by the carnival group “It’s time for Haddade” I show how musical practices add affect, repetition and durability to political statements when performed in the streets. I argue that this gives important visibility and audibility to the candidates and coin musicking politics as a concept to describe such practices. I coin musicking politics to study this, which is a re-interpretation of Small’s concept of “musicking”, which draws attention to how we do music as a verb, read through the lens of recent work on relational agency coupled with music research that underscores the link between politics and affect. Musicking politics suggests that we both study what people do with music and what the music do with people by creating affective musical experiences that allow political statements to be repeated and filled with emotions. Analysis of interviews with participants in the carnival group suggests that these musical expressions of politics gave them a sense of hope, inspiration, and empowerment in their political work. The ways in which music brought people back into street politics show how music cannot be seen as a passive device that only reflects political structures but should rather be understood as a powerful experience that nurture politics in new ways through affect.