For a sociology of the popular artist

Abstract

This has as a premise a recurrence in the form in which the careers of the popular artists, those artists originated from the popular classes, are structured. In the Brazilian society, marked by the strength of a symbolic goods’ market, consolidated in the heart of a conservative process of modernization, the social inequalities produced therein resemble the way these artists developed professionally and personally. Differentiation processes seen in the constitution of Brazilian popular music result in specific, tangible effects when groups of intellectuals linked to the production of culture gained a certain hegemony in sorting out what would or would not be considered popular, redefining the structures and properties that constitute this field. I take the career of João do Vale as a precise empiric object to identify the elements that tend to characterize the reproduction of these social inequalities in the symbolic universe of Brazilian’s popular music. One of my main points is the defence of a sociology of the popular artist that follows closely this particularity of our modernity and at the same time is able to recognize the work of our popular artists, the most “authentic”, the collective and socially territorialized nature of their creation, that is, a way to bring to view what their path and work carry of their social world and its structures.