It’s often a sign of how iconic an artist has become when their trademark traits turn into a cultural gag. Think of Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips, Michael Jackson’s piercing “hee-hee,” or young Justin Bieber’s side bangs. While undeniably outstanding, these quirks have all, at some point, edged into parody so much that not only do people mimic them in jest, but the artists themselves risk becoming caricatures when they perform them again. It’s almost as if, to become larger than life, an artist must accept the inevitability of mockery. But the very things that people laugh at, exaggerate, and even use against them are also what make them iconic. In Brazil, an example of this is Joelma.
Whenever the Pará native is cited as an idol or an inspiration, the references associated with her the most are the famous bate cabelo (a dance move where she tosses her hair up and down), the way she belts out “CALYPSOOOOO” in her songs, and her towering boots. These features helped etch Joelma into Brazil’s cultural zeitgeist. But Joelma isn’t merely an entertainer; she’s a singer, choreographer, dancer, and creator. She is the woman who brought the culture of the North of Brazil to all other states and regions through the rhythm known as calypso. Even as some ridiculed her.
The genre brega introduced Joelma and her then partner Ximbinha to Brazil in the late 1990s. They founded the ensemble Banda Calypso, performing a more pop-oriented, spectacle-driven version of Pará’s beloved genre. Musically, Joelma and Ximbinha’s brega is a hybrid of many genres and elements from and outside the state of Pará: guitarradas, cumbia, merengue, zouk, lambada, and rock’n’roll. To distinguish their musical style from other variations of brega, and even to sidestep the stigma of the term, they branded their genre as “brega calypso,” borrowing the name from the Trinidadian genre. While Ximbinha was widely respected as a musician within Pará’s traditional guitar playing scene, Joelma was the main star. She choreographed every performance and designed her own costumes, combining lively dance routines with powerful vocal performances full of melismas in her own style, cultivating a stage persona that made audiences want to see that magnetic blonde woman commanding the show.
The band’s popularity first spread across other Brazilian Northern states, including Pernambuco, where other forms of brega were also consumed. It eventually reached the entire country, outgrowing its regional peculiarities. Without the backing of record labels or expensive marketing strategies, Banda Calypso built its success independently, producing and distributing its own CDs at concerts. In a 2007 interview with Folha de São Paulo, anthropologist Hermano Vianna described Banda Calypso as evidence of “a new reality in the Brazilian cultural industry,” where artists were breaking free from the logic of record companies and getting on TV because of their grassroots success.
But with national exposure also came attacks. In the 2000s, the success of Banda Calypso was something that intellectuals and elites from the big cities could hardly stomach. Joelma became a joke, with many Brazilians avoiding confronting a deeper truth: that the face of Brazil was not only MPB and bossa nova sophistication or modernist literature, it was also the flamboyant, sweaty, joyful, unabashedly “tacky” rhythms of the peripheries of the Northern regions, which were longtime symbols of Brazil’s poverty and social underdevelopment. No wonder the name of one of the most popular musical genres in these is also the Brazilian Portuguese slang for “tacky” or “in bad taste:” brega.
The more the Banda Calypso rose, the more they became a scapegoat for everything they deemed wrong with popular taste. Indigenous, Amazonian, women, gay, poor, brega, Joelma, Ximbinha, they were all legitimized by the people through Banda Calypso. Yet many Brazilians could not accept that these were also a part of Brazilian identity. As the alternative rock music producer Carlos Eduardo Miranda once famously said: “Calypso is the truth of the Brazilian people. While they are musically interesting, they are also ‘super brega,’ and that’s exactly Brazil’s face.” Even figures who had devoted their careers to celebrating a “popular Brazil” refused to embrace Joelma and Calypso, like Ariano Suassuna, author of the play Auto da Compadecida. His works sought to elevate the poor and northeastern Brazilian traditions into high culture, yet he dismissed the band outright. “The face of Brazil is not ugly or tacky [like Banda Calypso is]. It’s beautiful,” he said in response to Miranda’s statement.
“The face of Brazil [is] not only MPB and bossa nova sophistication or modernist literature, it[‘s] also the flamboyant, sweaty, joyful, unabashedly “tacky” rhythms of the peripheries of the Northern regions.”
However, the criticism never had any impact on the average Brazilian, and Banda Calypso remained one of the rare cultural phenomena to emerge from Northern Brazil, a region often overlooked, stereotyped, exoticized, or reduced to clichés about the Amazon rainforest, its Indigenous populations, and its poor living conditions. Joelma never diluted this origin. When asked by producers from São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro to hide her paraense identity, she proudly entered the stage screaming: “Straight from Pará’s Belém, THIS IS BANDA CALYPSOOOO”! To her, it was “a cry for freedom.”
Nowadays, Joelma is finally recognized as one of Brazil’s biggest performers, often crowned “the queen of the North” and “the queen of Pará.” In 2023, her solo track “Voando pro Pará,” a song about the tourist spots in the city of Belém, unexpectedly went viral on social media. It reignited Joelma’s career, and the song became a new anthem for Pará citizens, just like Banda Calypso’s “Dançando Calypso” had been over 20 years ago. For an artist once dismissed as provincial, Joelma now stands as one of the most powerful ambassadors of Amazonian culture, and often uses this spotlight to uplift other Amazonian genres and artists too. She also embraced the term brega, which is one of the main foundations of Brazil’s modern pop music.
As fellow Pará native and acclaimed MPB singer Fafá de Belém once said in an interview: “When Joelma arrived in the music industry, she was already Joelma. She didn’t want to be anyone, dress like anyone. She wasn’t trying to be or copy anyone. She was always Joelma.” In the end, by refusing to follow trends, Joelma ended up setting them. She became not only an icon of her homeland and its culture, but also taught a lesson to an entire country that had long refused to look at itself in the mirror.
