Bio
Gustavo Souza Marques, also known by his stage name Gusmão is an ethnomusicologist, drummer, and beatmaker. Marques’ main research interests are postcolonialism, critical race theory, media studies, performance and popular music (mainly hip-hop) in the Americas.
Marques served as a postdoctoral fellow with the ERC CIPHER Hip Hop Interpellation project at University College Cork, National University of Ireland, where he was the Latin American and circum-Caribbean specialist for the global hip hop knowledge mapping project. His book, Beyond Gangsta: Tyler’s Reimagining of Hip Hop, examines the musical work of Tyler, the Creator through the lenses of critical race theory, postcolonialism, media studies, and performance studies. It is under contract with Bloomsbury as part of the series New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media.
In his masters, Dr. Marques developed a pioneering ethnomusicological study on the Duelo de MCs (MCs Duel); the biggest street hip-hop battle to happen in Brazil which is held in his hometown Belo Horizonte city. At that time, Gusmão was the drummer for live hip-hop band Julgamento but also joining Duelo as a freestyling rapper, enriching his research on rap music and hip-hop culture as a scholar. Now Dr. Marques is focused on teaching, expanding his views on hip-hop in the Americas and continuing his career as a beatmaker which he started in 2018 with his debut beat tape “A Cor da Casca” (The Color of the Shell).
Since his arrival at the U-M, professor Marques has been gathering forces to start a hip-hop community within the School of Music, Theatre and Dance (SMTD). Under the provisory name Hip Hop Coalition, Marques and other scholars from the Dance department (namely lecturer Krisilyn “Tony” Frazier and graduate students Kiana Cook and Timothy Tsang) are planning to launch this idea on January 2025 in which professors, staff, students and the local, national and international hip hop community will have a voice and space to share not only their thoughts but their artistic and cultural productions filling the gap between hip hop scholarship and practice in the academic environment. Marques and his colleagues are very excited about this idea, hoping for a brighter future for hip hop studies, practice and culture at U-M.
On the arts practice side, Gusmão produced the legendary Mexico City rapper MC Luka’s album Japomex (2024) which features other renowned Mexican rappers such as Sociedad Cafe. Gusmão also produced singles for MC Luka including “Lupita Taco Shop, Vol. 2.” (2024). His next scholarly project lies at the intersections between magical realism, ecomusicology, and transmodernism in hip-hop across the Americas.
Gusmão is also producing his new beat tape Urso Futurismo. The album combines Brazilian music genres such as samba and bossa nova with Caribbean styles such as Jamaican raggamuffin aided by some fragments of alternative rock music. These different musical elements all go under the umbrella of experimental American hip-hop which is a persistent feature of Gusmão’s musical work. 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, Afro-Futurism and iconic hip-hop album covers relating the figure of the bear to academia such as 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 (and a critique) to 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. The first single “Samba Triste” (Sad Samba) is now available on his YouTube channel and the whole album will be released in January 2025.
