(Deixa Falar, the first samba school)

The following comes from the slightly controversial book “Politically Incorrect Guide to the History of Brazil” (I’m translating the title, and I did the same with the excerpts below). For the book’s untranslated section on samba, go here.

The TL;DR is that samba went from being impure to being pure, from being heavily influenced by foreign styles to being authentically Brazilian (more specifically, from poor and black Brazilians living in the favelas).

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During the mining of what was exotic in Brazilian culture, the first batch of samba was too cosmopolitan. During the 1920s, Pixinguinha, Donga and Sinhô took lots of criticism because their compositions seemed not very Brazilian. In 1928, the critic Cordeiro, from the magazine Phono-Arte, condemned foreign influence in two of Pixinguinha and Donga’s compositions: “We can not help but notice that in their songs there is not a perfectly…