Brazilian music is famous worldwide — from bossa nova, to choro, to samba.

Bossa is cool, choro is amazing, but my favorite things about samba is that despite being “pop music” it still has complex rhythms and harmonies.

My top favorite thing is the prevalence of the 7 stringed guitar and their use of counterpoints (i.e., parallel melodies).

I love how what (I think) started as guitarists just playing harmonies, turned into them improvising bass lines and counterpoints every once in a while, which eventually became them doing MOSTLY counterpoints and bass lines and barely playing the harmony lmao.

These bass lines and counterpoints, from what I understand, are often times arpeggiations of the chords and so forth, but they add such an amazing effect to the music.

Examples:

  • paddirnEnglish
    70·
    2 days ago

    Murder ballads. I don’t know that it’s a genre of music per se, so much that it’s a subject that people have sung about across different genres. It’s just so antithetical to what we normally consider music, normally it’s love songs and such. Epic examples include:

    • In the Pines (famously covered by Nirvana)
    • Violent Femmes - Country Death Song
    • Mack the Knife (Louis Armstrong version is the best)
    • nickwitha_k (he/him)
      10·
      1 day ago

      I’m also a fan.

      Of note Nick Cave has an album filled with pure brutality named “Murder Ballads” that can be a bit hard to get through for me, not for musicality or style but because it succeeds at embodying that term, “brutality”.

    • Bo7a
      20·
      2 days ago

      Check out amigo the devil - Half his songs are this subject matter. And he is VERY good.