When television viewers all over planet Earth turned their attention to Brazil in 2014 to watch the competition for the football (soccer) World Cup, they were repeatedly greeted with swirling helicopter shots from above, behind, and around the colossal statue of Christ the Redeemer looking down with outstretched arms over Rio de Janeiro and its environs from a spectacular mountaintop perch. In fact, it seems that whenever the world’s attention is trained on Brazil, television screens will be filled with swirling helicopter shots from above, behind, and around Christ the Redeemer. There is a very good reason for that: the vista is awesome. Really awesome. But Brazil, a huge country with more than 200 million citizens and an immense natural resource called the Amazon Rainforest, has a lot more than mountaintop magic to toot its stadium horns about. Here are just a few of Brazil’s claims to fame.
10Bossa Nova: “Tall and Tan and Young and Lovely…”
Stephanie Maze/Corbis“The Girl from Ipanema” went walking from the pages of composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and poet-playwright Vinícius de Moraes’s song sheet in 1962 into pop music history, becoming the second most-recorded song ever (after the Beatles’ “Yesterday”) and helping to popularize Brazil’s most-famous musical export, bossa nova (“new trend”). A union of samba (a Brazilian dance and music style—more on that later) and cool jazz, bossa nova is purposefully simple and played on a limited number of rhythm instruments, such as guitar, berimbau (musical bow), drum, or single-note piano accompaniment. Jobim and guitarist João Gilberto are usually considered the genre’s founders. Although legend holds that Jobim and de Moraes wrote “The Girl from Ipanema” on a napkin in a bar, it was actually an outgrowth of their work for a stillborn musical comedy that they undertook after composing songs for the popular motion picture Black Orpheus.
9Did Somebody Say Black Orpheus?
Dispat FilmsDirected by Frenchman Marcel Camus and released in 1959, this French-Italian-Brazilian coproduction turned international eyes (especially those in Europe and North America) toward Brazil. Many Brazilians, however, saw Black Orpheus as an outsider’s simplistic depiction of their culture that glossed over the deprivation and danger at the root of life in Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas (slums). Later films by Brazilian directors—such as Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981), about children struggling for survival on the streets of São Paolo, and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002), set in the Rio favela of the same name—provided more-unvarnished depictions of the Brazilian underclass. Still, Black Orpheus, Camus’s Oscar-winning transposition of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to 1950s Rio de Janeiro, based on a theatrical libretto by Vinícius de Moraes, introduced international audiences to the frenetic dance-filled splendor of Rio’s Carnival celebration and to bossa nova.
8While We’re at It…Carnival
Orion Press/Stone/Getty ImagesSpeaking of simplistic, it’s a little too reductive to characterize Carnival in Brazil as New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebration on steroids, but that hasn’t stopped travel writers from doing so. The four-day pre-Lenten Carnival is Brazil’s most famous and exuberant holiday, combining a Roman Catholic festival with the lively celebrations of people of African ancestry. Millions of Brazilians spend much of their year constructing floats and making elaborate costumes for Carnival parades in “samba schools,” each of which includes thousands of children and adult dancers and musicians. The samba schools in Rio de Janeiro engage in the most-extravagant expression of the festival as they party hearty mainly along Copacabana beach.
Tibor Bognar/AlamyIs capoeira a dance or a martial art? Kind of both. Let’s call it a dancelike martial art, even though its participants often engage in it as a competitive sport. The basic aesthetic elements of capoeira, brought to Brazil by slaves from west and west-central Africa, were recombined and reinterpreted to create a unique form of self-defense, both driven and disguised—as merely a dance—by its call-and-response musical accompaniment. That accompaniment is provided by ensembles that typically includeberimbaus, atabaques (single-headed, standing, conical drums), apandeiro (tambourine), an agogô(double bell), and sometimes also areco-reco (scraped bamboo tube). The fluid acrobatic movements of capoeira—which are intended primarily as means of escape rather than attack but can still be lethal—include high leg swings and aerial somersaults.
5Told You We’d Get to Samba
Andre Penner/APYou can’t get more Brazilian than the samba, the national dance (and the music in 4/4 time with syncopated rhythm that accompanies it). The samba originated in the state of Bahia among slaves and freed Africans, who took it with them when they migrated to Rio de Janeiro. There it was influenced by indigenous and European dance forms. The inhabitants of favelas organized themselves into the samba schools (effectively community clubs) that strut their stuff during Carnival. In the process, samba crossed the color line and rose to national popularity through the radio and recording industries in the 1940s. While the samba is also a ballroom dance, it really comes to life as a group dance, especially when performed by the ornately costumed samba schools during Carnival.
3From “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” to Cinema Novo
Twentieth Century-FoxLong before Black Orpheus brought Brazil to movie screens in North America, Hollywood had presented a different kind of caricature of Brazilians in the person of Portuguese-born “Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda, a singer-actress who became a star in roles such as “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here (1943). Partly in response to that stereotypical presentation of Brazilians but much more as an attempt to depict the country’s social, political, and economic problems, the national filmmaking movement Cinema Novo (”New Cinema”) arose in the late 1950s and flourished until roughly the early 1970s. Determined to reflect real life, Cinema Novo filmmakers borrowed from Italian Neorealism as a well as from the low-budget aesthetics and auteur approach of the French New Wave. Cinema Novo’s leading light was Glauber Rocha, the director ofBlack God, White Devil (1964) and Antônio das mortes (1969). His films often portrayed Brazil’s history and social-political upheaval in a stylized violent manner.
2Tropicália: I Knew Beck Didn’t Make That Stuff Up Himself
Ringo Chiu—ZUMA Press/AlamySocial awareness was also at the center of the Brazilian musical style called Tropicália, which burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. It was typified by the landmark albumTropicalia; or, Bread and Circuses(1968), which collected recordings by the artists who proved to be the style’s prime movers: singer-songwriters Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé as well as the group Os Mutantes. Tropicália mixed traditional Brazilian rhythms (borrowing especially from bossa nova) with electric guitars and rock influences and, in the cases of Zé and Os Mutantes, dove into psychedelia and experimental music. Tropicália’s social criticism wasn’t very popular with Brazil’s military government, and, after being arrested and jailed for several months, Gil and Veloso went into exile.
1Football: Just One Name
Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesIn the end, as in the beginning, it all comes down to football (I know…soccer), which nobody plays quite like the Brazilians. Easy…I hear you Germans, Italians, Argentines, Spaniards, and all the rest of you. I said like the Brazilians, as in with a seemingly effortless grace and balletic athleticism. And they have won five World Cup championships (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002). Actually, in Brazil, soccer still comes down to a single name, Pelé (short for Edson Arantes do Nascimento), arguably the greatest player in the history of the game, though a parade of single-name stars are on the tier just below his in the pantheon of Brazilian greats, including Romário, Ronaldinho, Marta, Garrincha, Cafu, Sócrates, Ronaldo, and Zico, to name just a few.
The 20th century saw the fall of many monarchies and their replacement by republican forms of government around the world. There are still a significant number of countries and smaller political units that retain monarchies, however. These six countries are some of the smallest kingdoms of the world. Some are led by hereditary rulers, and others by leaders chosen by the people.
Adrees Latif—Reuters/LandovUntil the late 20th century the isolated Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, covering 14,824 square miles (38,394 square km) in the Himalayas, was an absolute monarchy. It had no law codes or courts, and the king ruled autocratically. In the late 1990s, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk relinquished his absolute power and encouraged democratic reforms. In 1999 the government of Bhutan allowed television broadcasting and Internet use for the first time.
4Tonga
Torsten Blackwood—AFP/Getty ImagesThe kingdom of Tonga, made up of 170 islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean that total just 289 square miles (748 square km) in land area, has been a constitutional monarchy since 1875. One of its most noted monarchs was Queen Salote Tupou III, who ruled from 1918 until her death in 1965. She was beloved not only by Tongans but also by the people of Great Britain, to whose notice she came during the 1953 festivities in London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Salote distinguished herself by her warm and dignified demeanor and her refusal to put the top up on her carriage as she rode through the rainy streets of London in the Coronation Day procession, smiling and waving to the crowds as she mopped rain from her face.
3Brunei
Holger Leue—Lonely Planet Images/Getty ImagesThe wealthy, oil-rich Islamic sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, has its sultan as both head of state and head of government. The Islamic sultanate, which has a total area of 2,226 square miles (5,765 square km) was proclaimed only in 1984; for nearly a century prior to that it was a British protectorate. Beginning in 1990, the sultan encouraged the people to adhere more rigidly to traditional Islamic principles, and in 2014, Brunei made international headlines for its adoption of the strict penal code of Syariah (Shari’ah) law for criminal cases.
2Lesotho
Lesotho is a mountain kingdom with an area of 11,720 square miles (30,355 square km) surrounded entirely by the Republic of South Africa, which has an area of 471,359 square miles (1,220,813 square km). The country, a constitutional monarchy, owes its existence to the Gun War (1880-81), a South African conflict in which the Sotho people of Basutoland successfully fought for their independence after the kingdom was annexed by the colonial powers of the Cape Colony. The eventual result of the war was the Cape Colony’s transfer of responsibility for Basutoland directly to the British government in 1884. Its distinct administrative status meant that Basutoland did not become part of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and it finally achieved independence from Britain in 1966 as the country of Lesotho.
1Swaziland
Siphiwe Sibeko—Reuters/LandovKing Mswati III, the current ruler of Swaziland (area: 6,704 square miles [17,364 square km]), in southern Africa, was one of some 60 sons of King Sobhuza II by one of his 70 wives. By his 40th birthday, King Mswati had more than a dozen wives himself. The opulent lifestyles of the Swazi royal family pose a sharp contrast to those of the general population, which has a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS as well as hunger and poverty. Cattle are an important part of Swazi life; they not only provide work and milk but also serve as a store of wealth and are given in bride-price. The traditional center of Swazi life is the royal village at Ludzidzini, where the king has a sacred cattle kraal.
