Sao Paulo's counterculture.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Ojo!

THE ONLY CONSISTENT in the career of independent music producer Luiz Calanca has been change, and in recent years, it's come at, an increasingly bewildering pace. Since he opened his record shop in 1978 in one of the most popular shopping centers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, major music trends have come and gone, just as the technical format of recorded music has evolved from the LP to cassette tapes to compact disks and other digital media.

But changes in the music business have been only part of what Calanca has had to keep up with. His store, Baratos Afins, was the first such specialty shop to establish a foothold in Shopping Center Grandes Galerias (Avenida Sao Joao, 438). Built in the 1950s, the swank shopping arcade was known for its collection of fashion boutiques, jewelry outlets, and other high-end retail stores stocked with luxury goods for the city's well-heeled consumers. Then, Calanca was the sole guerrilla entrepreneur in the midst of some of Sao Paulo's most staid, establishment merchandisers. Today, although he still sports the shoulder-length hair and the well-worn T-shirt and jeans of his youth, Calanca finds himself in the role he likely never envisioned in the late 1970s--that of the shopping center's senior resident and, by default, a representative of the commercial center's storied past.

"Today, young people come into the shop, take a quick look around, and then, as if they are in shock at seeing images of jazz and traditional Brazilian music artists, stomp out muttering brega [the Brazilian Portuguese word that denotes cultural trash]," Calanca says. "They don't know that I produced the first album of metal music featuring Brazilian artists [S.P Metal, 1984]. And they don't stay long enough to realize that we carry some of those artists. They see what they consider to be tacky, inconsequential music and head for the door."

Not that they will have far to go to find just what they're seeking: Today, the five-story complex in the heart of Sao Paulo's old city center just a block from the municipal opera house boasts over seventy highly specialized shops featuring the latest alternative pop music. And that's just the beginning. In recent years, the mall, today known throughout...