It was a typical Friday night at the Beco do Rato, a samba club tucked down a dark alleyway in Rio de Janeiro’s nocturnal Lapa district. A group of musicians beat their tantãs, tambourines and agogô bells to an audience of sweaty samba lovers who sang along.
Yet something about this scene was different: the band’s nine musicians were all women, and the crowd was also overwhelmingly female.
Such a sight remains relatively unusual in the world of Brazilian samba, which has always been dominated by men – from the singers and musicians, to the songwriters.
“Women were one in a million, and usually, they sang,” said Silvia Duffrayer, founder of the all-female Samba Que Elas Querem band, one of several such groups which are slowly tackling the inherent sexism of this widely loved music genre.
Samba Que Elas Querem drew widespread attention in 2018 after singing a feminist rewrite of the samba hit Mulheres (Women) – an ode of sorts to the many women in a man’s life, originally performed in 1995 by the cherished sambista Martinho da Vila.
The empowering lyrics of the rewrite, penned by Duffrayer and fellow singer Doralyce challenge the original’s faintly misogynistic stereotyping of women and raise a middle finger to the patriarchy.
This feminist version was an instant success. But its fans have been outraged by the recent news that the composer of the original, Toninho Geraes, has requested that the song be taken down from music-streaming platforms for rights reasons.
Geraes, a prolific samba composer, rejected accusations of censorship and sexism, arguing that the matter is merely one of intellectual property. Duffrayer and Doralyce said they thought the issue had been resolved last year after they agreed to give up any royalties from their feminist rewrite.
Behind the legal tussle, many simply see the composer’s attitude as illustrative of the old-fashioned machismo that still pervades samba. “It rang out as an attack on women,” said Duffrayer.
While all-female samba groups are not the rarity they once were, they remain a minority, struggling to deconstruct gender stereotypes perpetuated by the very music they play.
“Samba speaks about our society … its lyrics speak about what we live, what we breathe, and consequently, samba is a snapshot of a sexist society,” said Ana Priscila da Silva, a percussionist and founding member of Moça Prosa, an all-female samba band born in Rio in 2012.
Some musicians such as Chico Buarque have recognized that not all their lyrics have aged well, choosing to stop performing certain songs or swapping out words that might be deemed offensive.
But countless sambas reproducing “dubious” representations of women continue to be sung, said Silva. She said that Moça Prosa recently declined a request to play Faixa Amarela, an otherwise “great” love song by the legendary Zeca Pagodinho, because it includes a verse explicitly threatening a woman with bodily harm if she fails to return a man’s affections.
“We still have a long way to go, we cannot think that samba stands apart in a world in which femicides happen daily,” said Duffrayer.
The state of Rio saw a record number of femicides last year, with one woman killed every three days on average because of her gender, according to the state’s public security institute. Across Brazil, a woman was murdered every six hours in 2022.
“It’s a big responsibility, being an all-female samba group at this moment. [It] is a political job, it’s a feminist job, like it or not,” the samba singer concluded.
