Foreword: The Music Politics of Norberto Tavares

Summary

Artistic minds live outside the realm of society and its norms and values, yet artists are not detached from the surrounding sociological and anthropological reality. In fact, artists—and chiefly pop musicians—engage in a close, deep, and continuous dialogue with what they perceive to be their natural social habitat. They channel their artistic creativity and talent to respond to the main questions of the day and/or to incite debate on sociopolitical institutions, norms, and values. Through his vast catalog of songs, Norberto Tavares was a man with a mission: to represent ordinary and marginalized men and women’s continuous struggle for reaffirmation and dignity. In this foreword, I limit my analysis of Tavares’s music politics to the periods between 1974/75 and 1989/1990.

As a multidimensional and multi-instrument artist, Tavares saw himself as an upholder of the tradition of the marginalized, particularly the Black peasants’ (Badiu) culture of the island of Santiago. Through critical innovation, he brought musical manifestations from the countryside, including batuku and funaná, to the realm of modern musical instruments. By so doing, he helped to move these genres to the global and diaspora stage. During colonial times, the colonial state classified Badiu cultural and musical manifestations as obscurantism, a treatment that lingered on even after independence. Thus, Tavares’s musical career was in many respects a project for human dignity for those whose culture had long been demeaned and marginalized.

Tavares, like many other Cabo Verdean artists of his generation, was a diasporicized artist. His career took off when he migrated to Portugal in the early 1970s and reached its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s in southern New England. Not incidentally, these two spaces (Portugal and southern New England) are the sites of historical and vibrant Cabo Verdean communities. As a diasporicized artist, Tavares sought to reduce the emotional, political, and representational distance between these diasporic communities and the homeland, Cabo Verde. With the homeland sociopolitical reality in mind, Tavares’s musical enterprise was meant to give voice to the voiceless and to represent the unrepresented.

A close analysis of Tavares’s music politics indicates two distinct moments in his prolific career. A first can be called a nationalist moment: it coincides with Tavares residing in Portugal and partnering with Nhô Balta (the stage name of Baltasar Barros).