Sepultura's Roots: a politicized, electrified and polyrhythmic counterethnography

[Metalship encyclopedia]

Sepultura | Roots

Idelber Avelar, 2003, Heavy Metal Music in Postdictatorial Brazil: Sepultura and the Coding of Nationality in Sound, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 12:3, p. 343 

[I]t is to Sepultura’s credit that their journey into their nation’s sounds was never phrased in the tired vocabulary of authenticity. After the collaboration with the Xavante tribe on Roots, Igor Cavalera stated that ‘we did not do a world music record’. His insistence that ‘everything is mixed and distorted’ was not only an attempt to highlight the album’s heaviness but most importantly to set their collaboration with the Xavante tribe in terms irreducible to the Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel style ‘recoveries’ of indigenous musics, marked by an exoticizing that in practice denies those musics any coevalness with the artist doing the gathering. Stressing upfront the work of mixing, Igor removes the discussion from the terrain of preservation, authenticity, recovery, that is to say he removes it from the language of world music. Implicitly asked to become ‘boys’ of a ‘jungle’ they had never known, Sepultura indeed goes Amazonian but brings back not an ‘anthropological document’ but a politicized, electrified and polyrhythmic counterethnography.