Led by the singer and composer Tiaguinho, on stage, and the actor and businessman Rafael Zulu, in the strategic vision that supports the project, Tardezinha brought together, last Saturday, around 80 thousand people at the Olympic Park in Rio de Janeiro. Seven uninterrupted hours of samba and pagoda put together an experience designed for those who came just to have fun and find quality. An entire Brazil that sings affirming that there are languages that do not need to ask permission to occupy the center.
There are events that happen. And there are still events. Tardezinha no longer falls into the category of episodic shows. It is established in the collective memory as a continuous gesture, which grows because it understands its audience, respects its history and focuses on recurrence as a value. By treating the pagoda centrally, and not as a festive appendage, the project transforms presence into belonging and number into meaning. There, the crowd is not a mass, it is a community.
The numbers are impressive, but they don’t say much on their own. What matters is the mode. While major Brazilian festivals, like Rock in Rio or Lollapalooza, are structured around the logic of a multiplicity of scenes, genres and parallel experiences, Tardezinha bets on the opposite. Just a project. One language. Yet it mobilizes audiences that rival the country’s biggest events, without diluting identity, without negotiating essence.
This aesthetic choice is not naive. It is political, even if it does not announce itself as such. The pagoda, often pushed to the level of minor entertainment, reveals its power when treated with intelligence, care and long-term vision. A Tardezinha exposes an uncomfortable truth. There is no weakness in black popular culture. There is a weakness in the criteria that insist on measuring it based on parameters that never belonged there.
Read also
-
Rodrigo France
December 2. Samba day
-
Rodrigo France
GLA: A color defect, a hundred years of forgetting
-
Rodrigo France
Malês: the revolt that Brazil tried to erase is now on screen
This is perhaps why some of the major media still hesitate to qualify this success by the grandeur it conveys. Communicator Roger Cipó raises a necessary question. Why do events of this magnitude, when they arise from and are supported by black culture, need to prove more, grow more, and insist more to receive the same symbolic recognition that others receive with less? It is not a question of a lack of coverage, but of a recognition always postponed, always conditioned.
There is a layer that needs to be clearly explained. Tardezinha is run by two black men who control the narrative, the brand and the audience. Tiaguinho and Zulu do not function as an exception, they function as a paradigm. This shifts expectations, disorganizes hierarchies and puts under pressure a market accustomed to profiting from black culture without giving it the full role of protagonist. When success comes with autonomy, it bothers you.
Nothing is improvised. It’s a method. This is a sophisticated reading of the market. It must be understood that black art has always been conducive to experiences of excellence, but it has rarely been treated as such. A Tardezinha does not teach this audience how to consume culture. It recognizes it as producing meaning, value and permanence.
It is no coincidence that other artists began to follow the same path. Ongoing authorial projects, experiences that create ritual, belonging and recurrence. Tardezinha inaugurated a successful grammar that depends neither on international validation nor on the approval of ancient centers of cultural power. It is born whole, supported by those who consume it and those who create it.
Celebrating Tardezinha is much more than celebrating a crowded event. It’s about contesting the names of things. It is to affirm that excellence is also born from samba, the pagoda and black collective intelligence. Tardezinha has already made history. It remains for some to learn to call it by the right name: the greatest successful artistic initiative of recent decades.
About The Author
