Jup do Bairro and Linn da Quebrada first met at a festival in São Paulo through mutual friends. It didn’t go well, Jup says while we wait for Linn to join our Zoom call. “I looked at her and joked: Is it Linn for linda?”, meaning beautiful in Portuguese. “I remember she rolled her eyes and I thought: Yikes, game over!”
But the two musicians kept running into each other. “Linn often performed at the same parties I was invited to and since we both lived far from the city centre, we’d always wait for the bus together,” Jup says. In the end, they became close friends and eventually musical partners.
Today, both women are swimming against the tide that has flowed through the Brazilian music industry for decades. Though Brazilian music has always been shaped by black culture, the highest earning musicians are still mainly white and cis – people such as Marília Mendonça, playing the sertanejo style influenced by mainstream American country, who made headlines earlier this week after making a transphobic “joke” about one of her bandmates kissing a trans woman on a night out (she later apologised).
So Linn and Jup’s music, a combination of vulnerable lyrics, tongue-in-cheek statements and genre-bending dance rhythms, is more than just infectiously brilliant. In Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil elected an enemy of the LGBTQ+ community who describes himself as a proud homophobe; 130 trans people were killed in the country in 2019, more than anywhere else in the world. But these artists refuse to be bound by fear, or societal rules.
In one of the opening scenes of Tranny Fag, a documentary centred on her life, Linn proclaims that she “broke Adam’s rib” to become the “new Eve”. She grew up a Jehovah’s Witness in a religious household, and is now writing her own testament. “My shows are both sacred and profane,” she declares, explaining that her songs explore a series of contradictions: “They’re about creativity and destruction; about being the doctor and the monster.” DJ and producer Badsista, a queer woman who helmed the musical direction of both Linn’s debut album Pajubá and Jup’s new EP Corpo Sem Juízo, is similarly unconstricted. “We’re continuously drawing from different influences, especially from the music that felt really important to us growing up in working-class neighbourhoods in São Paulo, from hip-hop DVD compilations featuring Mariah Carey and 50 Cent, to pirated [Brazilian alt-rock singer] Pitty CDs, to [Brazilian melodic hardcore band] CPM 22.”
Though all three friends believe it’s important to see working-class people like them reflected in pop culture, they’re also wary of buzzwords such as “representation” and the music industry’s emphasis on individualism. Linn believes that because “representation” promotes the idea that one trans or black person can speak to a range of different experiences, it also fosters a competitive environment between artists, who know that the Brazilian music industry does not want to create spaces that are big enough to accommodate real diversity and change – and numerous black or trans musicians. “They sharpen [their] knives and hand them to us,” she says. “And because we’re starving, they assume we’ll eat each other,” adds Jup.
Linn and Jup believe this is a strategy engineered by a system that fears strength in numbers. “Jup, Badsista and I are powerful as individuals, but when we join forces, that’s when we become dangerous,” says Linn, with Badsista agreeing: “I kept waiting for someone to do something that moved or inspired me, but I began to realise that I’d have to do it myself. When I started working on Pajubá and on projects like Trava Línguas [with Linn and Jup] and Bad Do Bairro [with Jup], I saw that we were doing something different. Now, we’re noticing that other people have started doing the crazy things that we did. And that’s what it’s all about”. The three see it as their mission to open up new spaces, mental and physical, that are big enough for others to create art and stimulate social change.
According to Jup, music is the perfect medium for doing this. “There’s a reason why, when a conservative government takes office, the first cuts they make are to the arts and culture budgets. It’s via art and culture that people promote new ways of understanding, create new possibilities and contest [the status quo],” she says.
Sure enough, Bolsonaro duly cut arts funding early on in his tenure, and dissolved the standalone culture ministry. But from samba to tropicália to baile funk, there have always been voices in Brazilian music resisting these repressive politics, and Linn, Badsista and Jup are continuing this tradition. “Because the system we’re in is so narrow, we have to come in through the cracks,” explained Linn. “And as we come in, we also widen these gaps so that more and more people can start occupying them, too.”
In an effort to bolster new talent in the industry, Badsista co-founded Bandida, a feminist collective aimed at giving a voice to other women in the country’s electronic music scene, especially those who are black, queer and working class. Through Bandida, members can access networking opportunities, attend DJ workshops and get experience playing parties around São Paulo. Badsista says she wants these women “to profit from the same things [she] is profiting from, like being treated with respect and getting better pay”.
But, as Jup notes, the simple act of playing or listening to music has the potential to challenge dominant narratives. In a country “where history is constantly erased”, and where black and trans people in particular seldom get the opportunity to access their own past, “telling [her] side of the story” and passing it on to future generations feels radical.
Though her songs on Corpo Sem Juízo span a number of genres – from baile funk to metal – Jup’s knack for telling vivid stories is evident throughout. In tracks such as Transgressão, for instance, she likens her ups and downs to a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis, outlining her journey over a dreamy synth beat.
Linn’s lyrics are equally as hard-hitting: “I got all dressed up so they’d clap for me / but so far, I’ve only been laughed at,” she sings in the distinctly samba-infused track A Lenda. In the song, it’s not exactly clear who “they” are, but it feels like Linn is talking about power and powerful people in all kinds of places – from music industry executives to conservative politicians in Brasília – who benefit from keeping things the way they are. Such people, she tells me, are bound to lose their grip on power. “They can already hear our footsteps as we catch up behind them, and we’ve been doing it so well that they don’t even know.”
It’s a hopeful assertion, but not unfounded. Linn, Badsista and Jup’s efforts to create new cultural spaces are powerful political statements with tangible repercussions, and it could be that everyday forms of resistance – via art that beckons us to question the status quo, grassroots initiatives such as Bandida and the formation of support networks between artists – may prove to be the most effective.
Badsista notes that although trying to play the music industry’s game is exhausting, showing up to parties with supportive people such as Jup and Linn changes everything. “We’re constantly getting knocked down through bad pay, unnecessary bureaucracy and people who question our skills,” she explains. “But when we arrive together, it makes everything easier.”