The Mythology of Fado

I found this little book by Antonio Osorio in a cheapo bookshop and it’s very interesting. For a long time the intellectual musical elite in Portugal only recognized 2 ‘valid’ forms, orchestral and other classical music, and folkloric traditional music from the villages. Fado was looked down upon for its chord structure and for the unrestrained voices of the singers - urban music not acceptable in the Canon! Then Salazar’s dictatorship arrived from 1926 and he tried to suppress it because it expressed the troubles of marginalized people, but things changed again after 1945 when it wasn’t such a good look to maintain fascism after it had been defeated all over Europe. Gradually he guided the image of Fado as one of the Three ‘F’s along with Football and Fatima, promoting it as if it was the soul of the real Portugal, a land where people suffer and never complain. People in general, especially the youth turned away from Fado to jazz and Anglo-Saxon music from the US and UK, and when the new fadistas like Marisa began to sing Fado again in the 1980s with new lyrics they met an entrenched conservative reaction from the Fado hierarchy that was doing very well from the new Fado clubs that were marketed to tourists and still are. A step further is Fado Bicha, which you can read about below in my published journalism.

So culture is a contested space where vested interests grapple to keep their authority and their €€€€ against an urban liberal counter-current. History is constantly being invented, especially the history of a nation’s traditions, as it has been in England too. What many people think of as ‘essentially English’ was often invented in the 19th Century, and nothing had a greater influence than the need to promote the Empire as a god-given civilizing mission, both in England and Portugal. https://www.julianbarnes.com/resources/archive/nunning.pdf