Gustavo Souza Marques (also known by his stage name Gusmão), assistant professor in the Department of Musicology, has released a new instrumental hip hop album, Urso Futurismo (2025), which is available now on his YouTube channel. The album includes collaborations with musicians from Brazil, Ireland, and the United States. It combines Brazilian music genres such as samba, bossa nova, and baião with Caribbean styles such as Jamaican raggamuffin, aided by fragments of alternative rock music. These different musical elements all go under the umbrella of experimental American hip hop, an apt descriptor of Gusmão’s musical work.
Cover artwork for Urso Futurismo, the new album by Gustavo Souza Marques, also known as Gusmão
The first single, “Samba Triste,” is accompanied by video animation exploring the main concepts of the album, according to his U-M faculty profile: “The concept of the album is open and broad – there is no definitive answer – encompassing tensions between nature and technology but also echoing bits of indigenous cosmologies, Afrofuturism, and iconic hip hop album covers relating the figure of the bear to academia such as with Kanye West’s albums The College Dropout (2004), Late Registration (2005), and Graduation (2007). The title and the creative use of the bear is also a reference to (and a critique of) Gusmão’s own path as an artist from the Global South expanding his reach into the ‘developed’ Global North, where bears are typically present. As a racially mixed artist, Gusmão intended to connect and value diverse perspectives in his album’s concept.”
Gustavo Souza Marques. Photo: Chris Boyes
In addition to teaching and producing his album, Marques has been working to form a hip hop community at U-M known as the Hip Hop Coalition, alongside Krisilyn “Tony” Frazier (lecturer in dance) and graduate students Kiana Cook (MFA ’26, dance) and Timothy Tsang (MFA ’26, dance). Visit Marques’s faculty profile to learn more about his research and music.