The Decibel - Move over Let It Go, we’re talking about Bruno

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

As part of our picks of the top stories of 2022, we are re-airing this episode about one of the top songs of the year. This episode originally aired on January 24.There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’ stuck in their head, and those who don’t … yet. The Disney song is a viral sensation and unexpected hit from the 2021 film Encanto.Michael Birenbaum Quintero is an ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor at Boston University. Even he agrees it’s a catchy tune, and explores its musical influences along with the movie’s wider representation of Colombian and Latin American music and culture.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi listeners, we're doing something a bit different this week, and we're looking back at the biggest news stories of the year. Today, we're actually looking back at one of the biggest songs of the year. From Disney's Encanto, We Don't Talk About Bruno spent five weeks in the number one spot on the Billboard 100 chart. It became a major trend on TikTok, and it was also the most streamed song in the U.S. in the first half of the year, with nearly 630 million streams. Working on this episode meant that I actually listened to this song over and over again, and so it was also my number one song on my Spotify Wrapped this year. We're re-airing this episode from January, where we do, in fact, talk about Bruno. Hope you enjoy it.

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. If you're a parent of a kid under the age of nine or ten, I bet you know all about what we're talking about today. But in case you're not, it's the biggest song from Disney in over 25 years. From the Disney movie Encanto, the track We Don't Talk About Bruno has beaten even Let It Go from Frozen, topped the charts, and gone viral on TikTok. It's been translated into over 40 languages. The song is sung by a Colombian family full of magic. It's about an uncle who lives in the walls of their home, muttering visions of the future that no one wants to come true. So they, well, don't talk about Bruno. No, no, no. So it's something which is kind of we recognize at the same time as it's absolutely updated.

It sounds very modern. And of course, it has these like very appealing, catchy, funny lyrics with the different characters' voices slipping in, saying funny things about this Bruno person. Michael Bierenbaum-Contero is an associate professor of music at Boston University, and he'll break down how Disney is and isn't representing Colombian music with this catchy tune. This is The Decibel. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. Of course. Thanks for having me.

First of all, do you like this song, We Don't Talk About Bruno? This is a very catchy song. This is a really well-crafted pop song, earworm. It's funny. Yeah, it's kind of annoying how appealing it is, which means it's very appealing. So, you know, I have mixed feelings, but I really like it at the same time. Yeah, I didn't know it until this week, until our producer Cheryl brought it to our attention. But I can't stop singing it either.

So I know what you're talking about. Before we jump into things, can you just tell us what you study exactly? Sure. So I'm an ethnomusicologist. Ethnomusicologists study music in a cultural, social, and historical context. My own research is about Afro-Latin American music. I have a book about Black Columbians and Black Columbian traditional music. Okay.

So it's probably not every day that you talk about Disney songs, but today might be an exception. Can you just give us briefly, what is this song really about? So it's kind of like an exegesis, this like slow revealing of this mysterious character of Bruno. And it's sung by different members of the family, which is one of the things that's really appealing about it. It sort of switches voices and all these kind of characters slip in and, you know, say funny things, rats across his back and, you know, all of this stuff.

As a sort of musically, the way that it's set up, it's a, you know, it's, it's a very modern sounding piece. It has elements, different sort of electronic elements and so on, but really at its base, fundamentally, we don't talk about Bruno as not Colombian music. The chord progression, the sort of musical DNA of this song is built off of Cuban music, off a pretty old style of Cuban music called Guajira or Guajirasom. Yeah. Can we just break this down a little bit then? What is it about this style of music and the way that this song is put together that really makes it so appealing and so catchy to people? Well, the thing about the song that I'm interested in is the fact that the song references all of these sorts of musical ideas and musical tropes about Latin America. So on the one hand, there's something about the song that, you know,

has what people will recognize as a kind of Latin tinge or Latin flair or something that sounds like it comes from the Spanish Caribbean, which it does. But at the same time, it's also very familiar for audiences anywhere. I mean, I don't know if you've heard of the many memes that this song has launched. There's the YouTube video of the song being sung in multiple languages. In all of these different places, all throughout the world, Cuban music and particularly this Guajiro Son song is very familiar. So it's something which is kind of we recognize at the same time as it's absolutely updated.

It sounds very modern. And of course, it has these like very appealing, catchy, funny lyrics with the different characters' voices slipping in, saying funny things about this Bruno person. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of voices, as you've mentioned there, that kind of layer on top of one another there. And each character seems to have a slightly different style, too, something unique there. Are there kind of a blending of different styles that you're hearing as well within the song? Yeah, I mean, I would say that there's a kind of hip hop influence in the way that the, you know, that the beat is structured. But if you listen to the bass, and you listen to the

bass line, it's a pattern that we can find in salsa that we can find in jazz that we can find in Cuban traditional music. And it's all over the place. This is through, you know, movie soundtracks, we can find this, you know, think about the, just to pick something at random, the theme song for Sex and the City. Right. It's built off of this, you know, it's a kind of jazzed up version of a, you know, a Cuban three chord jam, a Cuban Montuno is the name for that. So this is also built off of a Montuno. The usual Disney hits are the big power ballads, the ones like Let It Go or Colors of the Wind. Do you think this, I guess, maybe caught Disney

by surprise a little bit that this became such a hit? I think it totally caught them by surprise. I mean, you could tell if you look at the soundtrack that, you know, they put forward this song Dos Oruguitas, I think is the name of the song, the ballad song that they put up for consideration. And then they have another song that they have another very important Colombian singer, a sort of rock pop singer named Carlos Vives. It's a song called Colombia Mi Encanto. And I think that they probably thought about that one would be the big moneymaker in Latin America and that they would sort of put that up to circulate there. It's very produced and it's very, you know. But sometimes popular taste kind of picks up on weird things

and especially in meme culture and sort of viral culture i think the reason that this song kind of really got launched over the top is through tiktok and tiktok has done that um with all different sorts of soundcloud rappers and so on and so forth and if that is to say with um songs that aren't necessarily part of the corporate music industry i mean they're part of the corporate music industry. I mean, they're part of the corporate music industry, but they're not necessarily what Disney, this, you know, huge cultural sort of industry juggernaut is trying to put forward. Let's talk a little bit about the kind of the social and the cultural references in this piece as well, because the movie Encanto does try to integrate Spanish pretty seamlessly into even into the English version, right? We use abuela for grandmother without having to, abuela, abuela. We use abuela for grandmother without even, you know,

having to translate it. It's understood. Do you hear the social and the cultural references that make sense, I guess, in the song? Well, in the song itself, you know, there's not a whole lot of sort of cultural references to things, you know, maybe about the guy who was mad at Bruno because Bruno told him he would grow a gut and he grew a gut. Maybe that resonates, but that's just with me as someone who grew a gut. But, you know, I think that the film itself does take on, you know, successfully or unsuccessfully is another question, but it does take on, I think, issues that are really important. movie is basically built on the aftermath of people being displaced by violence from their homes, which is a very, unfortunately, a very common and a really powerful kind of archetype in so many different Colombian families. And so I think that in many ways, there are big themes that are being taken on by the film. How do you think the film handled those big themes?

It's a Disney film. And so, you know, they're going to deal with things in a particular sort of way within a sort of Disney narrative arc. There are ways in which they were very, very careful to include Colombian cultural references and Colombian music in the film in a way that was going to really sort of make Colombians, you know, in Colombia or elsewhere in the world, like really happy and really proud and sort of feel seen and recognized and so forth. On the other hand, you know, you'll notice that we don't talk about Bruno and some of the other things that are kind of more well known about the film itself are not Colombian at all. Right. So, you know, We Don't Talk About Bruno sort of references a kind of pan-Latin American sort of musical style that's recognizable to people because it's more based on Cuban music. So in a certain way, it's kind of playing a little bit fast and loose with some of the

specific references and then with some, what you could argue are kind of stereotyped references to sort of Latinidad or, you know, outside of Latin America visions of Latinidad in general. But I do think that the question of having as a really, really central part of the film, the experience of a family being displaced from its land, like so many Colombians have been displaced from their land and are still being displaced from their land, is really powerful and is really worthy of being commended. Let's talk about how Disney handled this, I guess, then, because in the past, Disney has been criticized for the way it misrepresents culture, especially looking back at, you know, movies from 30 years ago. How do you think Disney did here? One of the things that I thought was really funny was there's a moment in which I think the

family is all sitting at the dinner table. And at a certain moment, the main character, someone asks her for something and she points at it with her mouth like, like this, right? This is a very Colombian, I think probably Latin American thing to do, right? If you have your hands full, and somebody says, Where's the thing you point with your lips like this, right? So there's a moment at which that happens in the film. And I was like, wow, they really sort of went out of their way, um, to, to capture these particular things. On the other hand, you know, there are ways in which, um, you know, the family is in some ways idealized, you know, there's, there's ways in which, which, you know, there are all sorts of different complications, you know, in life in Colombia. You know, Colombia is a wonderful, wonderful country. I love it very, very much. But it's also a country with a lot of violence. It's a country in which,

you know, sometimes it can be very machista and so on. And, you know, these are not elements that you saw within the family, but on the other hand, like it's a Disney film, you know, you're not going to have necessarily all of these issues within a Disney film. So it's, it's always going to be somewhat airbrushed because, um, the ultimate, you know, priority here is to, is to sell, um, you know, sell movies and, you know, get kids to buy whatever Encanto dolls and so on. And apparently to launch this, you know, this cultural juggernaut of we don't talk about Bruno. Michael, you yourself has been working at promoting Colombian music and culture in your

career. I guess what's the importance of a mainstream children's movie like this, representing, trying to represent a culture and being so widely watched and the song so widely listened by people all over the world? Yeah, I kind of wonder whether in some ways it's a it's a missed opportunity because the things that are popular and recognizable about Encanto are not necessarily the things that are specifically Colombian. They hired some really, really wonderful Colombian-American musicians in New York City. Edmar Castaneda, Morris Cañate, Erika Parra. These are all really, really wonderful musicians. And, you know, they were very careful to include these really, really Colombian, in some ways, like kind of deep cultural, you won't notice that it's there.

So one thing, if you're watching the movie or you're listening to the soundtrack, some of the songs have this really warm accordion sound, right? There's like an accordion that's in there. Now, for a non-Columbian or a non-Latin American, accordions means like, you know, polka or Lawrence Welk or some sort of like corny 20th century, you know, vaguely Central European sort of thing. But for Colombians, the sound of accordion is very much associated with Colombian music and associated with Colombia. The sound, this particularly warm accordion sound sounds for a lot of Colombian people the way that a particularly like warm, twangy sort of guitar sound sounds for country music fans, right? So, you know, for a Colombian, you listen to some of these songs with this particular accordion sound, and it sounds like, you know, grandma tucking you into bed with a cup of warm milk.

So the Colombians are happy, but the question is, do non-Colombians understand that or hear it or find it appealing? Not necessarily. So, again, Disney is not trying to promote Colombian music. They're trying to find a way – they're trying to find a setting for the story that they want to tell. So it's not necessarily on them to promote Colombian music or promote Colombian culture. It is on them to not get it wrong, right, to not totally misrepresent it. And I think that in that sort of limited set of goals, they did a pretty good job. Is there anything specific that you felt was really missing from the movie, though, or that you really would have liked to see that wasn't there? I did appreciate that they had Afro-Colombian characters.

I thought that that was interesting. I thought that that was important. That's not something that would have happened probably even three years ago. As someone who's particularly close to and attached to Afro-Colombian culture, I wish that it had been more prominent. Colombia is a country that has many different regions. And in each of

the regions, there's, you know, different food, there's different architecture, people look different racially, people speak differently. So there's no film that's set in Colombia that could capture all of Colombian reality. And the fact that they chose a country which is not as recognizable, it's really powerful that they chose to set this movie in Colombia, even if they couldn't necessarily include all of the sorts of realities that take place in Colombia. To bring it back to this song,

We Don't Talk About Bruno, that has so many unique vocal styles and types of music in there. Do you have a favorite part of that song? Can you sing that part? Your favorite part? Seven foot frame, rats across his back. Yeah, that's great. So I hope I didn't lose you any podcast listeners by singing. No, that was that was awesome. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. This was really interesting. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. This was really interesting.

Yeah, thank you, Menaka. It's been great. That's it for today. I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White and Cheryl Sutherland. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Prochenza is our executive editor thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow