The Brazilian Grammies of Christian Pop-Rock

10th July. From the hotel window we see a pedestrian street, filled with countless rivulets of people meandering around each-other and the stalls that sell watches, batteries, bags of all sizes and functions, amounts of plastic objects so vast that they (still) make one marvel at China’s manufacturing output and bootlegged CDs and DVDs from where blurry supersaturated stars stare at you with an offended air, resenting the indignity of being commercialized in so lowly a place and manner. People are coming in and out of the lancheonetes, pizza places, clothes shops, supermarkets, key cutting and electronics shops; elderly gents sandwiched between ‘Compro Ouro’ ("We Buy Gold") signs get a hot coffee from the thermos-totting ambulant vendors, elegantly poured in plastic shot glasses; people are scanning the rubbish bins, recycling the casks of other people’s pleasure.

In the evening the homeless come back from their daily toil to their pavement beds; some lie on ragged bits of cardboard just across from our window, in front of a bar that puts on live music every evening. People drink beer, eat chips, smoke, flirt, prance, sing along and dance with enthusiasm. The homeless sometimes join in with voice plastic percussion and hand claps. Under the orange street light, it suggests a colourful, benign world, where the ‘cour des miracles’ and the bourgeoisie gently touch each other.

It’s a delusion: Brazil is a cruel mommy with a gargantuan appetite for conspicuous consumption, enormous inequalities and massive religious infestation, kept from fracture by constant State and private violence sponsored by the upper bourgeoisie.

This religious infestation is so widespread that not an eye is blinked when neo-protestant churches display sulphurous menaces towards the non-converted, sport titles like ‘Igreja Mundial do Jesus Cristo’ (watch out neo-liberalism, there’s a new flock in town), put on nightly TV live shows with pastors curing live the ill, invalid, unhappy, unsuccessful, varicose, perverted or incontinent or commercialize pop music. We watched with giggly excitement the kitsch fervour of what could be called the Brazilian Grammies of Christian Rock, where wholesomeness, righteousness, piousness and gravitas (humour is a sin, irony a blasphemy, sarcasm gets you the stake) were constantly and comically bumping into the obligatory clichés of rock n’roll show-biz. 3 Brazilian cars out of 4 proudly display Jesus messages (from the popular ‘Jesus e fiel’ to the cocky ‘My car is bigger than yours because Jesus loves ME more’ and to the more biting ‘May god give you twice of what you wish me’- we found this latter one to be quite a hit with drivers in Malta too!); and so do 3 in 4 shops (“Jesus and Saint Priapinho are my stock managers”; “Jesus watches over my net profit”).

A media and governmental paranoid-compulsive obsession with ‘crisis’, ‘violence’, ‘gangs’, ‘anti-social behaviours’, the ‘dissolution of family values’ and, of course, ‘drugs’, complete the picture and respectable Brazilians often imagine the country as a war-zone where blood-thirsty criminals will ambush any good-hearted, tax-paying, Jesus-loving and drug-hating citizen and finger them mercilessly before removing their children and internal organs to auction on the black market (which fortunately keeps them barricaded inside their homes). It’s a place that often buries its head in the sand when it comes to staring at its image, reminding us a lot of North-America and quite a bit of Europe. And yet such a seductive place for the tourist in search of strong experiences...