From Nação Zumbi's DVD "Propagando".
" In 1992, in the Bar de Dona Edna, in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, the musician and cultural agitator Francisco de Assis França announced to his friends, “I mixed a hip-hop beat with a maracatu groove and it turned out awesome. I’ll call it mangue.” ‘Mangue’ means ‘wetlands,’ a type of landscape common in Recife, where lots of people take their livelihood from, especially catching crab. França, a.k.a. Chico Science, was surrounded by the central figures of a cultural movement that would become the most important engine of innovation in Brazilian popular music for the following 20 years, Mangue Beat. They had a few more beers to discuss the concept, and off they went, for the following months, to write manifestoes in Ecology, Music, Art, and Technology.
The movement was finally named “Mangue Beat.” Chico Science and his loose crew also wrote songs. When they recorded those songs, it was like a revelation for many: nothing in Brazilian music sounded like that before, and yet it was utterly familiar: hip-hop beats, heavy metal guitars, punk rock, funk, and the folk music of the Northeast, a region often seen as the cultural heart of Brazil.
The local rhythms of maracatu, coco, samba de roda, and ciranda were neglected by the urban youth, and yet for many playing rock didn’t feel authentic. For that generation Tropicalia sounded stale and too hippie and joyful. That 1970s mix of samba, bossa nova, forró and psychodelia was a marriage made in heaven. Mangue Beat’s hardcore rock anger and energy from the maracatu drums is a marriage made in hell ".... ( Eloisa Aquino, soundsandcolours.com )
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