A MPB como recipiente de protestos contra a ditadura militar: as metáforas, carregadas de vozes contra o regime autoritário.

Abstract

The Brazilian musical movement known as MPB (Música Popular Brasileira Brazilian Popular Music) has had a fundamental role in getting across messages against the oppressive political system which prevailed in Brazil between the years of 1964 and 1985. During this period, any kind of manifestation against the military regime was considered subversive and its representatives could be subject to penalties such as censorship, prison, torture, deportation, exhile and even death. In this context, certain artists were persecuted in the name of national peace and order. Some, music composers mainly, could not help but try subtler ways of getting their political messages across. One of the ways to break the walls of the Brazilian Censorship was to use metaphoric language. In doing this, Chico Buarque de Hollanda has proven a genius. He was the most often persecuted artist at the time and his compositions were previously censored just because he was the one that had written them. Even though his lyrics had to be altered many times, Chico Buarque managed to make them echo the disgust towards the government; he was so good at fooling the censors that one of his songs actually caused the president serious harm without the military noticing. In this research, we intend to investigate what kind of messages are to be found in Chico Buarque s political songs. Our starting point is that MPB can be seen as a repository of the composer s anguish and dissatisfaction with the political regime at the time and that the metaphorical language present in the lyrics depicted that moment as suffocated by the military regime. In order to do so, we have based the analysis of 20 songs written by Chico Buarque de Hollanda on the study of conceptual metaphors developed by Lakoff & Johnson (2002).