Interview with Frederico Freitas
Image 6.1: Frederico Freitas, São Paulo, 2009 Daigo Oliva
I was thinking about this when I woke up this morning. We did this kind of analysis of what sXe was in 2002 in Brazil, based on our own history, on having been sXe for a decade back then, and on our perceptions of what sXe was in the US and in Europe. So the essay was heavily based on the circumstances of that time, the beginning of the 2000s. It was also written in Portuguese first, primarily for Brazilian readers. It was translated into English later. So maybe some stuff in the text is kind of hard to relate to if you aren’t Brazilian.
If it was written today, some points of the analysis would be different, of course, because the scene is different and we are different too. One thing that totally escaped our critique was how sXe, and punk in general, is youth-oriented. This is something that is easier to notice when you get older (I’m thirty-three now). Straight edge revolves around a lot of concerns that are typical for young people. And in its social events, like at shows, it has a youth dynamic. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it can make older people feel alienated.
In my opinion, this all relates to the fact that sXe (as punk in general) is primarily a cultural movement (or scene); the social movement factor is weaker—if it is there at all. At least we did stress this aspect in our essay: that sXe should be a social movement; or at least open to social movements.
When we wrote the text we already had first-hand experiences with the scenes in the US and Europe. Some of us had already gone to the US, we had toured Europe once, and in São Paulo we had received people from abroad. Actually, it was the cultural differences we perceived when we had some friends from the US visiting that gave us the idea to write the essay.
A key element was that people from the US seemed so individualistic to us. Today I would say that this was a bias we developed based on the experiences with the people we were hosting. Later I had the opportunity to meet a lot of different people from the US, people with different backgrounds, and not all of them fit so easily into the ultra-individualistic category. But cultural differences always exist.
What was eye-opening to us was to see how much our identity as sXe was tied to US cultural hegemony. This is what we tried to deal with by writing this essay—recalling how we became sXe, but also pointing out how different and particular the sXe history was in São Paulo. We wanted to stress the strong element of politics in our “formation” as sXe, especially because we felt that for the younger sXe kids in Brazil the differences between the scenes in the US and in Brazil became increasingly unclear. We wanted to reinforce the political drive we had, and we wanted to discuss our own understanding of sXe with people in Brazil and abroad.
How do I see the relations between the different scenes today? I’m not so involved with sXe and hardcore as I used to be. My last experience with the European scene was the Point of No Return tour we did in Europe in 2002. Since then I’ve been back to Europe once, and I’ve been to the US too. But both times I hung out primarily with political activists and militants, so I can’t really say much about the hardcore scenes. Well, I have a kind of preconception, but as I’m not so involved anymore, I prefer not to say anything about this publicly.
I think that the individualism has to do both with general cultural aspects and with the political tradition one is connected to. In a general way we can say that North Americans—and maybe that goes for the whole Anglophone world—are very individualistic. Their culture is very individual-oriented, and this has good and bad aspects. A good aspect is that it makes you think for yourself—like being sXe. A bad aspect is that it makes you think you think for yourself—like being sXe because everyone around you is sXe while you think it was your individual choice. Another good aspect is that being individualistic can make you feel powerful enough to start political struggles and take stands without depending on anyone else. Then again, this can also make you think that the only and primary liberation that matters is your own, which can make you forget about solidarity and about connecting your own struggle with those of other people. This kind of reflects the general attitude of people in capitalist societies.
What seems clear to me is that changing society isn’t only a matter of individual change. There are some levels of society that depend on bigger structures, and they can only be dealt with collectively. Otherwise nothing will change. Capitalist liberal society has its place for individual outcasts like us.
It is also important to understand that individualism is the foundation of the society we live in today. If we want a different society, we need a different foundation. Again, otherwise nothing will change. Visions and utopias are still important for our thinking.
I think that, in terms of different political traditions in the US and Latin America, a lot has to do with the difference between being “radical” in the US, and being “leftwing” in Latin America. Marxism, socialism, class struggle are big things for the left here, even if you’re an anarchist. It used to be like that in the US too, but this tradition kind of died before WWII. I have the impression that the other tradition, the one of being “radical,” is more linked to the tradition of fighting for personal freedoms and rights against “big” capitalism etc. I have the impression that Europe, at least continental Europe, has a political left-wing tradition more similar to the one in Latin America, am I right?
Back then, in 2002, we had the beginning of a trend. People in hardcore have since become less and less political. I think 2000 was the apex of political activism in the Brazilian sXe scene. Everything was connected to bigger struggles: the so-called days of global action against the big targets (WTO, IMF, G8, etc.), the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, the Landless Workers Movement, the ties to the Zapatistas in Mexico. That was the atmosphere of the times. But then there was 9/11 and the specific target of that era, neo-liberalism, started to decline as a hegemonic idea and praxis. Security became the main agenda. At the same time, in Brazil, the Workers Party elected a president for the first time and this made all the social movements take a step back in order to give him some time to see what would happen.
Some kids started identifying as sXe in Brazil, more specifically in São Paulo, in the late 1980s: there was Arilson, who later played in this crust band Abuso Sonoro; Ruy Fernando, singer of a band called No Violence; and Marcos Suarez, later in Point of No Return. But there wasn’t a scene, or even a group of people being sXe. The ones who were barely knew each other. Back then the punk scene from the 80s was dead, it used to be too gang-oriented and all the violence killed it.
The sXe scene in São Paulo really started in 91/92, when some kids who were involved with anarchism started a group called “Libertarian Youth.” It wasn’t originally a sXe group, but after a couple of years it became a de facto sXe group—and vegan too. Most of the older people involved with sXe have their origins in that group, like five of the seven Point of No Return members. As we were all anarchists back then, we were much more influenced by political hardcore, from crust bands to political sXe bands like Nations on Fire and Lärm. By the middle of the 90s, the scene got bigger, but our anarchist group broke up. People became less politically motivated and more musically oriented. Then we did Point of No Return in 96 to counter this development. In the end of the decade, the scene was more politically motivated again, filled with the “anti-globalization” spirit that I mentioned above.
As Brazil is—compared to Europe—big, I think I should talk about other cities in Brazil first. In the beginning of the 1990s, there was only the sXe scene in São Paulo. We had a big punk scene here in the 80s, and we have this tradition of being a really cosmopolitan place (contrary to Rio, the second biggest city in Brazil, which symbolizes everything stereotypically Brazilian, like carnival, beaches, etc.). So, São Paulo has this tradition of being the place in Brazil where the cultural movements of the “First World” first appear and are then reshaped in our own image and reality. Besides São Paulo, there were some kids in the smaller cities of the State (the city of São Paulo is the capital of São Paulo State, which is the richest and most industrialized state in the country, for better or worse).
As I said before, by ‘97 sXe became less political—but it also got really huge. There was the whole Victory thing, the “new school,” “old school” revivals, and also the 90s emo stuff. Bands started to appear in other States, a “neo-old school” scene appeared in Curitiba, some emo bands in Belo Horizonte, and some mosh-NYHC influenced bands in Rio de Janeiro (which is odd, given the feel of the city). In São Paulo State, there were some bands appearing on the coast, in Santos and São Vicente, which is located an hour’s drive from São Paulo City. Even though it was a time when politics weren’t as much on people’s minds as in the beginning of the 1990s, the bands were mostly political; at least more than the average US band. In 1999, we started to do these big hardcore festivals in São Paulo, and people and bands from other cities started to come. Then some bands started to tour more frequently and all that. All of this was related to sXe.
By the beginning of this decade (the 2000s), bands from other parts than southern Brazil (where São Paulo, Rio, Curitiba, and Belo Horizonte are located) started to appear. First, bands from the State of Espirito Santo, which is still south. Then bands from the western part of the country, Brasilia (the country’s capital), and Goiania. And then bands from the northeast, from cities like Salvador, Aracaju, Fortaleza, etc. I think that nowadays there are bands everywhere, and we cannot talk about one sXe scene ‘cause there are a lot of different ones.
Now about the other half of South America: in the early 90s, the only place that had a sXe scene besides São Paulo was Buenos Aires in Argentina. They had this big tradition of bands playing NYHC and kids emulating a NYHC lifestyle, so to them it was a “natural” step to have some kids interested in youth crew straight edge. It started there even a little earlier than in São Paulo. When the São Paulo scene became less political for the first time, around 95, two bands went to play in Buenos Aires—Self Conviction and Personal Choice—and the differences were interesting: in Buenos Aires people were totally into slower bands like those from Victory, New Age, etc., while we were into faster bands, what the Argentineans thought was passé. Buenos Aires also had a strong Krishna influence, while we were still kind of “vegan anarchist fundamentalists.” But, on the other hand, the Argentineans thought that we were much more US-dominated than them ‘cause our bands sang in English, while theirs sang in Spanish. After that year both scenes started to be more closely connected, and every summer we had tons of Argentineans on our couches.
In Chile, the sXe scene started later—in about 2000, and it was always more connected with Argentina than Brazil.
In Colombia, they already had tons of NYHC bands in 2000, which is kind of understandable ‘cause a lot of people used to live in New York as aliens, some had even been in the infamous DMS hardcore crew. In 2001 or 2002, some bands from Bogota came to play in Brazil, and we started to be more connected. At the same time, they became more political. Nowadays there is an anarchist hardcore scene that is more modern crustie; but still related to sXe—and to CrimethInc. in a way.
Uruguay is a small country, pretty European, located between Brazil and Argentina. They had a political emo sXe scene in the beginning of the 2000s, strongly influenced by situationism and with kind of “French” visual aesthetics in a Refused-like way (although they didn’t sound like Refused).
I have heard about some sXe kids in Paraguay, in the border area near Brazil, but I have never heard any band from there. I’ve heard about some hardcore crowds in Ecuador and Peru, but I’m not sure whether there is an active scene there, or whether these are only audiences for foreign bands touring.
Mexico seems like a very distant place to Brazilians, both geographically and culturally. I’m corresponding with some kids in Guadalajara and in Mexico City. And I have “friends” from Mexico on Point of No Return’s MySpace. And I know that they have a scene there, but that’s it.
In a sense it was a rhetorical trick. The first draft of the essay was written by one of the band’s members as a first person account. So the line in question probably spoke of a “young, white, middle class man.” By turning it all into third person and adding a narrator, we thought that the piece would be more easily identifiable as a Point of No Return piece rather than the text of just one of us. So we, the band, narrated the woman’s reflection.
The fact that we changed the gender reflected the scene here in São Paulo. When we toured Europe in 2000, we realized how many more women were active in our scene. We wanted the text to express this. The other parts—“young, white, middle class”—never got changed, simply because we probably saw no need to change them. To be honest, we simply thought less about these issues, even though there were a lot of people in the scene who were neither white nor middle class, including some members of Point of No Return.
Yes, I would say that’s true. Women were reclaiming their space and power in the scene, and we were sensitive to that. Gender issues were an important political topic, pushed by bands like Dominatrix, One Day Kills, and Infect. The same wasn’t true for class and race issues. Class divides and racism are deeply embedded in Brazilian society, and they are reproduced in the scene. However, these issues just weren’t addressed that much at the time, and our text reflected this lack of discussion.
Even though social classes were mixed together when we played, there were also divisions. On the one hand, there were blue collar kids who spoke poor English and were less tuned into the latest developments in US hardcore; on the other hand, there were middle class kids with better education, more money, and the ability to emulate the European and North American scenes. Nowadays, though, the internet and capitalist globalization have blurred those lines, and the parameters of class identification may have changed.
Racism in Brazil is peculiar. It’s different to, say, the US. A Brazilian intellectual, Oracy Nogueira, has explained these differences in the 1950s by comparing a “prejudice of mark” in Brazil to a “prejudice of origin” in the US. This makes racial identities more fluid. For example, in Brazil you can be considered white even though your mother is black. It’s your appearance that matters most, not your origin or your ancestors. And your appearance is not reduced to skin tone either. It’s very much tied into class. This also means that people can change their “race” in the course of their lives. For example, with “brown” skin you might be considered black in Brazil as long as you are poor, and white once you have some money. People don’t talk about this as racism in Brazil since Brazilians see themselves as non-racist people—even though most of them are racist.
Brazilian hardcore and punk have always followed an ideal of aesthetic whiteness—even if this was never clearly defined. This reinforces racist patterns that give whiteness particular value. It is something that needs to be addressed much more.
I think that the essay and our statements about “third world hardcore” helped people and bands here to be aware of their own specific identity as sXe. But, again, I’m not so involved with hardcore nowadays, so I don’t really know what’s going on in other scenes.
I remember there was a point when I had a lot of pen pals from Southeast Asia, Indonesia, South Africa, and from all over Latin America. But these were still only places that were already “globalized” in a way. Thinking again about this topic, it’s kind of arrogant to wish that every single corner of the map needs to be so integrated into the international world system that there can be a sXe or punk scene as a local imperialist counter-cultural manifestation.
That’s really the point. That’s the point that most of the political movements miss, a point that used to be on the agenda of some traditional anarchist movements in the beginning of the 20th century.
In São Paulo there was a big anarchist movement in the early 20th century. It was formed by Spanish and Italian immigrants who made up the majority of the population in the city back then. There was also a strong emphasis on sobriety.
It seems to me that the early anarchists’ emphasis on sobriety was part of a whole set of attitudes that aimed to create the so-called “men and women of the new society.” They also propagated physical exercise, free love, etc. But it was more discourse than practice. It wasn’t anything that was based on an identity, like sXe is nowadays. It was something that was much looser, if you know what I mean. Well, the anarchist movement in Brazil declined in the 1920s after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. Some anarchists even turned to founding the first Brazilian communist party. And the whole thing with sobriety and staying healthy was mainly seen as naïve by the communists.
I don’t believe history happens again. Now we have this thing called sXe which is based on sobriety. But as a fruit of the times, it isn’t a movement. It is much more of a subculture, or maybe a counterculture, and a matter of identity; it has little to do with projections of a future society, as it was the case in the early 20th century. The Landless Workers Movement has an emphasis on being relatively sober in their communities, but this isn’t anything that is part of their identity and has nothing to do with a projection of a future society either. It is mainly about keeping the militants from drinking so that they stay out of trouble.
I think that if there was something like a “straight edge social movement,” a political movement with a strong critique of the legal and illegal drug industry and of legal and illegal drug consumption, it would be something totally different from what we had in the past.