For a musical capital, Goiânia is a very quiet city. In the hot afternoon hours, the metropolis of 1.5 million inhabitants, built 1,000 kilometers from the coast, in the very center of Brazil, takes on the air of a ghost town. Cars whiz between ugly concrete towers and faded Art Deco buildings. Pedestrians are rare. From time to time, small mandore ibises appear, scarlet eyes, gray plumage. Not a song comes from their beaks. And yet, the capital of the state of Goiás is the center of one of the most powerful cultural phenomena that contemporary Brazil has known, the sertanejo.
Literally, the music of the sertão, the hinterland, the remote region of the interior, far from the coast and dedicated to livestock farming. A country of Brazil which therefore has its capital, its national day (May 3) and now crushes with its hegemony the other famous styles of the country: samba, bossa-nova and popular music… but also cultivates sulphurous links with agribusiness and the extreme right.
According to data from Spotify, the thermometer of musical hits, seven of the ten most listened to artists in Brazil in the last decade on the streaming platform belong to sertanejo, as do eight of the biggest hits. Local country singers (and their subgenres) came out on top on the portal in twenty-four states of the federation (which has twenty-six plus the Federal District), in 2023, and today they bring together up to 16 million monthly listeners on Spotify, compared to just 4.2 million for Caetano Veloso, the “god” of tropicalism.
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Yet, who in Europe knows Di Paullo & Paulino? With 2.3 million monthly listeners, this duo is almost as popular as the great Chico Buarque. At 67 and 63, the two brothers with cowboy hats and flowered shirts are old hands at sertanejo. From their base in Goiânia, and aboard their double-decker bus, they crisscross the country for thousands of kilometers. “We like to play in the small towns in the interior rather than in the capitals,” the friends say in unison from their recording studio in Goiânia.
In unison, Elias Antônio de Paula (aka Di Paullo) and Geraldo Aparecido de Paula (Paulino), are almost always. The brothers spontaneously combine their voices, obeying the classic structure of the sertanejo that is the dupla, with a first high tone and a second lower tone, set back. “The vocation of the sertanejo is to console the children of the sertão who have migrated to the big cities and have longing [nostalgie] from their native land,” Paulino insists. “Sertanejo has long been marginalized, considered a redneck thing,” Di Paullo deplores.
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