Verdurada

I’m waiting at the end of the blue subway line at Jabaquara in suburbia south of the city for my contact into the straight-edge/hardcore festival Verdurada. Fred Freitas, 34, one of the founding members of the festival, arrives in skinny jeans and tattoos down to his elbow, and barely as soon as we escape the concrete gloom of the metro tunnel do we hear the din of distorted guitars.


      
We arrive at a surprisingly low-key, one-story community center and are ushered into a basketball court-size room, crowded with 600 punk kids brightly lit with ceiling strip lights. A four-piece band called Inspire is thrashing about in the middle of an ear-piercing set, the first two rows of adrenaline-high punk rock kids have rushed the stage, and the singer can’t be immediately seen under the cloak of the invasion. Eight-foot-high speaker stacks lining both sides of the stage roar out the music.


      
A fresh-faced punk wearing an armless denim jacket complete with spotless newly sewn-on badges and a Mohawk spike stands clutching a few band tapes and a variety of fanzines, including Prego, a punk rock comics rag. This is anarcho-punk rocker Alessandro, 19, from a city about 37 miles away from metropolitan Sao Paulo called Sao Roque (coincidentally pronounced “rock”). “Rock’s gone too commercial,” he states. “Here you can find good underground bands, people with similar ideas, and if I weren't here I'd be at Hangar 110.” Alessandro’s referring to a rock venue in Bom Retiro that regularly showcases bands from the genre and thus gets a loyal following.



      

And so begins the evening at Verdurada. The name of the event is an ironic pun on two Portuguese words: “verdura,” or vegetables; and churrascada, slang for BBQ party. The nomer reflects a distinctly Brazilian take on the straight-edge/hardcore lifestyle, with a vegan/vegetarian slant.



      

The event began over a decade ago as an invite-only house party for 30 friends by Freitas and his former band, who passed on its reins to Collective Verdurada, a group that includes 30-year-old UOL music journalist Pedro Carvalho. The organization’s since expanded the event, bringing with it lectures and debates on radical ecology, the Landless Rural Workers Movement and vegan nutrition, for instance; and sub-genres from metalcore, sludge, post-hardcore and thrash metal to even hip-hop and jazz but maintaining DIY roots. Casual meetings happen at hangout spot on Saturdays at Lotus, a veggie Thai restaurant. Pedro also cites Espacio Emproprio for gigs, coffee and books. Mate Por Favor gets the punk rock high nod for vegan/vegetarian food and Extreme Noise Records for hardcore CDs and vinyl.



      

The festival now regularly sells out of its 1,000 tickets, but it’s seen as many as 1,500 pass through in one night. Today's lecture is given by O Ay Carmela!, an anarchist collective based in Sé that offers community activities, an exhibition space and a soon-to-be completed library.



      

The DIY attitude is pretty clear—there are no sponsors’ banners in sight. A team in the kitchen is selling handmade bean burgers and Arab snacks for only R$4. At the end of the festival, around 10 p.m., the R$8 entrance ticket gets festivalgoers a free vegan dinner, a perk that will inevitably empty out the main hall filled with people checking out stands of records, band tapes, clothing, fanzines and political material.


For a country whose national music import is samba, this strong of a straight-edge/hardcore scene may be surprising. “When foreigners come to our city, they expect this Brazilian stereotype of samba and Carnival, which is actually foreign to us,” Carvalho explained. “Sao Paulo's a culturally diverse city, a mixture of different immigrant communities, and it's an industrial city. Samba didn't naturalize here as it did in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. We grew up on rock music.”


      
While thrash-metal headliner Violator sets up, the smell of marijuana starts to permeate the auditorium. Heads twist and turn in search of the culprit. I grasp the moment of semi-silence to talk to two straight-edge, tattoo'd girls: Mila, 19, a student from the university SENAC and Madhara, 20, a tattoo artist from True Love Tattoos, who have been attendees for the last seven years. They name CB Bar, Jive and D-Edge on Mondays as their hangout spots, plus a well-known vegan eatery called Vegacy with flyers and posters whose employees are vehemently straight-edge.


      
Violator plugs in at 9:15 p.m. and the band members immediately start head-banging in unison. The mosh pit opens up and as another wave of people rush the stage, a fight breaks out and everything halts. The momentary out-burst of aggression is calmed by various out-spoken collective members and the band kicks into a tongue-in-cheek rendition of a famous Brazilian pop punk track.


      
Word’s out that the food is ready, and a long line winds into the main hall while the band plays. It's an early ending in comparison to Sao Paulo's normal nightlife routine, but it’s the Verdurada, and they do things a little differently here.