José Ramos Tinhorão (7 February 1928 – 3 August 2021) was a Brazilian journalist,éRamosTinhorã essayist, music critic, music historian and author of many books on Brazilian popular music. He was a lifelong detractor of the Bossa Nova movement, which he saw as pasteurized Jazz music assembled in the tropics.
Early life
Born in Santos, in the state of São Paulo, Tinhorão was the eldest son of a family of Iberian immigrants (his father was Portuguese and his mother, the daughter of a Spaniard). His father worked as a waiter, sold lottery tickets and had a laundry shop. After all, he was invited by a friend to work at Urca's casino, in Rio de Janeiro, where his family moved in 1937, when the boy was nine years old.
Career
Tinhorão got a bachelor's degree in law at the University of Brazil and in journalism at the National Faculty of Philosophy (Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia).
In 1951, while still an undergraduate student, he began working as a freelancer at Revista da Semana, a now-defunct Brazilian weekly magazine in Rio de Janeiro, where he signed his texts as J. Ramos. In 1952, he was taken by Armando Nogueira, his college friend, to work as a copy editor at the Diário Carioca, one of the most popular newspapers in Rio at the time.
It was there that José Ramos earned his nickname "Tinhorão" ("Heart of Jesus", Caladium bicolor), which refers to the name of a toxic ornamental plant that was accidentally incorporated into his own name. The nickname was given by Everardo Guillon, the newspaper's editorial secretary, but the definitive baptism, in print, came from the editor-in-chief, Pompeu de Sousa. According to Instituto Moreira Salles, which keeps the Tinhorão archives, the first article signed by "J. Ramos Tinhorão", at the Diário Carioca, was published on December 25 of that year. The author was shocked when he read: "Report by J. Ramos Tinhorão for the Diário Carioca". Laughing, the boss replied: "J. Ramos is a name for pickpockets. There's a lot of them in the phone book. There will be only one Tinhorão!"
Tinhorão stayed at the Diário Carioca until the end of 1958, when he went to Jornal do Brasil invited by fellow journalist Janio de Freitas to write for the Sunday supplement. Two years later, in the context of the creation of Caderno B, JB'''s cultural supplement, Tinhorão begins his activities as a researcher of popular music, commissioned by Reynaldo Jardim, creator of Caderno B, who asked Tinhorão to write a series of articles on the history of samba.
Music critic and researcher
In the 1960s, he would start paving his reputation as a grumpy and relentless music critic. A fierce opponent of Bossa Nova, he therefore faced several enmities against his staunch opinions. His harsh style is illustrated by a 1963 article for Senhor magazine: "Daughter of apartment adventures with the American music, who is undeniably her mother, Bossa Nova suffers from the same affliction as do many children from Copacabana, the neighborhood where she was born: she doesn't know who the father is."
In his standpoint, Bossa Nova represented, in urban popular music, the "sonic equivalent of the illusions of Brazilian socioeconomic 'updating' to the standards of the modern capitalism of the technological age". In the name of modernity, Brazil would reject popular forms and genres, with Bossa Nova representing a deaf class conflict, at the level of mass culture, which would result in the middle class being set apart from the working classes.
He adds: "Bossa Nova was not a winning move for Brazilian music. Brazilians offered Americans a new outlook on their own music. It's easier for the average American to listen to it. Why does Frank Sinatra sing Tom Jobim and not Nelson Cavaquinho? Because it simply wouldn't match."
With a Marxist background and labeled as a radical nationalist, Tinhorão introduced sociological analysis in his music reviews.
Faithful to historical materialism and dialectical materialism, he understood history as the chronicle of men in the world – and of their relations with nature and with each other in society. Since in a class society each social class projects its ideology on culture and cultural production expresses the ideology of the class that engendered it, then every culture in a class society is class culture.