“Não posso mais: eu quero é viver na orgia”: female trickery and work rejection in sambas from the 1930s and 40s

Abstract

At the end of the 1920s, samba players from the Estácio de Sá neighboorhood (In Rio de Janeiro) impose a new mode of samba, played to the rhythm for the official street parades and street Carnival parades. From this generation, descend the samba players of the following decades, who found the radio to be an important vehicle to diffuse it culturally and to help “consolidate” the samba as an element of nationality and the in the emerging of great composers, such as Noel Rosa, Ataulfo Alves and Wilson Batista. The objective of this study is to examine, from some samba lyrics from the 1930s and 40s - having as a starting point a song named “Oh, Seu Oscar!” (1940), by Wilson Batista and Ataulfo Alves - , the opposition between regular world and orderly world (in which are included the family constitution and honest work) and the universe of trickery, giving emphasis to the topic of the “orgy woman.”