The rise of successful voices: discursive meanings and media strategies in contemporary brazilian society

Abstract

This text analyzes discourses about what could be called success as an aesthetic factory for the production of meanings by contemporary Brazilian media. More precisely, we describe and interpret the process of production of meanings in utterances constituted and formulated by the Brazilian media discourse, which manifestly deals with the voice of subjects whose success stems, in principle, from their vocal performance. Faced with this scenario, we investigate what is said and how the voice is enunciated in the discourse of success in current Brazilian society and the differences in the treatment given to the voice of those who appear in the media world. Specifically, what distinctions may exist regarding the production of meanings of successful voices when disseminated by the same diffusion vehicle. For that, we have two texts from the online newspaper Folha de S. Paulo with the titles “A primeira vez” (2015) and “Readers lament the death of Lemmy Kilmister, vocalist of Motörhead” (2015). As a synthetic result obtained from this investigation, it can be inferred that the discourse of success examined in the newspaper is based, to a large extent, on North American universalism, marking a recurrence in the diffusion of North American personalities whose fame must also be built in Brazil.