From Lira Paulistana to Casa do Mancha: the “independent” as a distinctive element from the perspective of a local music scene

Abstract

This paper presents a section of an ongoing master’s research project, whose central question is to understand how “independent music” relates to the positions and representations of agents belonging to two music scenes associated with two distinct temporal and spatial settings in the western area of the city of São Paulo. In the first case, I analyze what I have termed the “Lira Paulistana alternative scene” in the 1980s; in the second, I examine what I have called the “São Paulo indie rock scene,” a scene that began to take shape in the mid-2010s and tends to gravitate around Casa do Mancha, an important hub for indie rock in São Paulo and Brazil. Based on research using press materials and interviews, I found that a local scene can reproduce the social logics of particular fields of symbolic production and, in this sense, shape the ways in which the very notion of the “independent” is signified and represented by the agents who circulate within it. In this paper, I emphasize how the “independent” was constructed and endowed with meaning by these agents as an element of cultural distinction.