Trickster is trickster, hooker is hooker: the exaltation of trickery in Moreira da Silva's music

Abstract

This paper analyses the characteristics of the Morengueira Kid, a personage of the Brazilian popular music who was immortalized by Moreira da Silva. Morengueira Kid is the stereotype of a malandro, which can be defined as the “professional of the ‘easy way’” (DAMATTA, 1994), i.e., someone who get things done by shortcutting the official procedures, being generally lazy and not necessarily licit. The typical malandro materializes what Antonio Candido (2004) calls “the dialectic of the malandragem”, a kind of interchangeability between a world of order (socially accepted behaviors), and a world of disorder (illicit attitudes). From this clash between the allowed and the forbidden arises a certain absence of moral judgment, because for the malandro’s perspective there is a relative correspondence and fluidity between both worlds. Considering this thin (and relative) line that separates the licit and the illicit, the malandro would not suffer moral conflicts.