Um espelho é mais do que um espelho: as novas formas e linguagens da canção que protesta na contemporaneidade portuguesa

Abstract

This paper presents an approach of the (new) protest songs of two of the most iconic Portuguese pop rock bands, from the 1980s to the present. This work has a fundamental purpose based on a primordial heuristic principle, which consists in demonstrate how the all kind of art forms in this particular case the pop rock music are at the same time a subject and an object of social intervention, by demarcating its own specific and defined space in the denunciation and disclosure of the social problems and in the contestation, in the protest and in the revolt faced to social reality. The approach of 39 songs of the bands Mão Morta and Xutos & Pontapés allows us to analyze several demonstrations which have not only the purpose on denunciate the reality, but also intend to speak/act for/in reality; in this case, the incitement refers to the action, which is fundamental to demarcate a specific space: not only a thematic producer but also a contemplative object (a mirror) of social reality. That is why a mirror is more than a mirror it is the social reality: a denunciation and a protest field, a field which is a creator of its own thematic/problematics; problematics which are insurgents and demarcated because they agitate and transform reality, by the lecture that they do on this reality and which constitutes simultaneously a integrant elements of a collective identity that is a result of a significant process of self-reflexivity.