Look at the (Boy) Doll, Look at the (Girl) Doll: The Radical Wit & Transgressive Populism of Angolan Divas Titica & Ary
a PopCon-fabulation (-frontation) (-sternation) by Jonathan Bogart
“Não ligo à discriminação, sigam a globalização”
This single line in the 2012 pop-kuduro song “Olha o Boneco” is very nearly the only unambiguous political statement that the trans singer, dancer, model, and kudurista Titica has ever made. Rendered into English it would be, roughly, “I’m not cool with discrimination, get with globalization.”
Which as a political stance is, in an American context, both extremely banal and a cheerful capitulation to the hegemonic neoliberal post-cold war End of History. Globalization, as understood by most of us in this room, is simply imperialism by means of capitalism: to the extent that Titica’s homeland of Angola is a globalized nation, that means that money has poured into it from outside investors eager to profit from its natural resources, and that that money has remained in the hands of a tiny minority of elite Angolans and foreign nationals who administer the resource extraction, driving a brutally unsustainable economic wedge between the high-stakes luxury playground of Luanda, the most expensive city in Africa, and the vast majority of Angolans, who subsist on less than two dollars a day, whether in rural oblivion, unable to farm thanks to the everpresent danger of unexploded mines left over from the three-decade civil war, or in the crowded, dusty urban musseques, shantytowns where Angola’s rapid urbanization is stalled out in poverty, desperation, and violence.
A strict historical materialist reading of Titica’s championing of globalization, then, would categorize her as a tool of the system, either a useful dupe along the lines of eagerly pinkwashing celebrities who claim to support both the gays and the war machine, or an identitarian traitor like Caitlyn Jenner, happy to barter sisterly liberation for obscene wealth. But there are many kinds of liberation.
I want to play the entirety of “Olha o Boneco” for you now, both because it’s just a great song and video, and because I want to tease out some of the implications and stances that may not be obvious at first glance.
The song is primarily in Portuguese, but as you’ll see, there is also some French, Kimbundu, and English. I’ve tried to provide translation to the Portuguese in the captions to the best of my ability, but like all rap-derived music the lyrics are a blend of slang and referentiality, and my fieldwork has been limited to what Google knows. Additionally, my source for the original lyrics transcription is a Portuguese fan on the user-edited LyricsTranslate website, so there are multiple levels of error possible here.
An important thing to note is that the video was actually shot by a Swedish production house, as part of a documentary series on African popular culture; if you’ve spent enough time in the world of Angolan pop, you can register a certain ahistorical obliqueness and Eurocentric high-fashion aesthetic choices that Angolan production houses, or even Angolan-Portuguese or Angolan-Swiss ones, would not make.
This, then, is one thing that Titica means by embracing globalization: submitting to the colonizing European gaze in order to establish herself as an international, not just a national star. This was her third major video release, after she’d established her voice with the partying kuduro anthem “Chão” and the secondary-sexual-characteristic-tweaking “Kusi de Pole.” And it was her first collaboration with Ary, an established singer of romantic and sensual kizombas whose own impish, category-resisting personality did not come fully into focus until this collaboration.
“Olha o Boneco” is Titica’s most popular song by YouTube plays, or was until late last year, which I hope to get to, and it’s Ary’s, a much bigger star, second most popular. It was widely shared by Anglophone listeners curious about “world music” in 2012, to which I may have contributed when I wrote briefly about it on the Atlantic’s website for an ill-conceived songs-of-summer-from-around-the-globe roundup. And those Anglophone listeners and viewers may have been charmed by Titica’s comparison of herself to Michael Jackson and Ary’s invocation of Lady Gaga, a perhaps shrewder comparison than she may have meant: while Titica certainly benefited from the prestige of the respected diva Ary embracing her as a peer, Ary too benefited from, to use terms that were not current in 2012, her performance of wokeness.
Ary would go on to occasionally use queerness, or signifiers of queerness, in her own music: in a video for the Brazilian market, she is seen texting a man, who is caught by his girlfriend, who starts to text back, and when the three of them finally meet, it’s the two women who hook up. It’s not a very good song, and it wasn’t particularly successful, but the fact that those spaces are open at all within African music is a challenge to the received Western neoliberal truism that it is the “civilized” European and North American nations who are the defenders of human rights, particularly “specialized” LGBT rights. Angola is not Nigeria, which has passed some of the strictest anti-LGBT legislation on the continent, or Uganda, where vigilante slayings of gay people is not only common but sanctioned by the state; Angola’s two closest cultural ties, to the Lusophone nations Portugal and Brazil, and to its wealthy liberal neighbor South Africa, mean that although anti-sodomy laws remain on the books, a legacy from the colonial era, they are not enforced, and while certainly the widespread condemnation from Christian denominations has its influence, Angolan media, influenced in large part by the all-but-out younger son of the President, who owns influential media properties and production houses, tends to be respectful and explanatory about LGBT issues.
This too is an effect of globalization, a process which has allowed Titica to not only exist without fear, but to thrive. In the five years since “Olha o Boneco,” she has become a mainstay of the Angolan pop marketplace, no longer merely relegated to the liminal space of kuduro, where outrageousness is a selling point, but dueting with semba-jazz legend Paulo Flores, making Lingala-language coupé-decalé for the Congolese market, and even notching a massive hit late last year with “Me Beija Só Na Boca,” the glossy video for which was released on the most popular kizomba channel on YouTube, and which in sheer viewcount has dwarfed not only her own previous efforts but all of Ary’s as well. No translation for now, unfortunately:
When I first encountered and was excited by Titica’s music in 2012, I would have understood a song and a video like this as a sort of betrayal, a selling-out, a capitulation to the dominant narrative of mass-marketed femininity, all smooth textures and emotional longing. The fuck-you wit and specifically Luandan snarl of the kuduro years are gone, replaced by a generalized sentimentality for the upscale international market: Titica has become the one percent.
The mistake this makes is in assuming anyone is ever only one thing. The other major video Titica released last year, “Abaixa,” is a deeply Angolan semba song about that classic pop-song topic, fake friends, and it’s working on so many coded levels of satirical irony that she had to formally apologize to local LGBT activists because they took the first line of the song, “Não quero homem que vira mulher,” or “I don’t want a man who becomes a woman,” literally, and believed she was denying her own transition. Even if you don’t play the whole song, do check out the last thirty seconds or so.
That final shot. She’s standing on a car in the middle of the street, twerking before an astonished crowd. She’s still daring anyone to step to her. This is not globalized pop: it is specifically Angolan, for the Angolan market, and it is not made to be legible to a bunch of white people in Seattle: even the guy who shot the video, Hochi Fu, is one of the few independent Angolan production houses.
He also shot Ary’s most recently successful song, “Papá Fugiu”, a socially-conscious song chastising men who abandon their families and praising stepfathers who nurture and teach. The video was the occasion for one of Ary’s most notorious pranks: she plays a pregnant woman in the video, and on April 1st, 2016 posted a photo of herself with a large abdomen on Instagram, with text about how happy she was to be the vessel for new life. As she was unmarried, this naturally provoked no little comment in the Angolan media; but she never walked it back. When the fulness of time produced no children, even the most credulous of her fans realized that she had April Fooled them as broadly and pointlessly as any teen on Facebook. Even as her public persona in the respectable video mouthed pieties about the sacred duty of parenthood, her equally public social-media persona let fans feel that they were participants in a joke at the expense of baby-crazy celebrity culture.
This practice, like Titica splitting herself between “Me Beija Só Na Boca” and “Abaixa,” of participating in official narratives while quietly subverting them or at least complicating the ways in which they are received is likely to be the most overt form of resistance that major pop stars in a stratified, dictatorial landscape will engage in. Ary too is part of the one percent; she recently announced her engagement (not on April 1st) to her longtime boyfriend, an executive in the state-owned oil company. She can afford to be flippant. Not everyone, in a country where people are jailed for participating in a book club about dictatorship and nonviolent resistance, can.
To close, I want to note that the President of Angola has been in office since 1979, that he oversaw the vast majority of a bloody, destructive civil war, that he and his family have vastly enriched themselves while pretending to care about the Angolan people, that nepotism, kleptocracy, suppression of dissent, and giving the people enough circuses that they’re distracted from the lack of bread is rather more of a global average than an aberration. But while we organize for bread, let’s not forget to enjoy the circuses.
This paper was originally read at the MoPop Pop Conference in Seattle, April 22, 2017.
