|
|
|
 |
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Sunday, January 08, 2006
NINE OUT OF TEN
Caetano Veloso
Transa
Philips : 1972
[Buy It]
MARIA BETHANIA
Caetano Veloso
Caetano Veloso (1971)
Philips : 1971
[Buy It]
HELP
Caetano Veloso
Joia
Philips : 1975
[Buy It]
NEOLITHIC MAN
Caetano Veloso
Transa
Philips : 1972
[Buy It]
The twin occasions of the Soul Jazz label finally re-packaging the music of the Tropicalia movement into a handy single disc coupled with my remembering that I hadn't read (though quickly remedied) Tropical Truth, an excellent first-person narrative of that frightening and fantastic time in MPB (shorthand for Brazilian Pop Music) by its main mover Caetano Veloso, leads me to revisit the man. Often called the John Lennon of Tropicalia (though I think Veloso shades more towards being its Jean-Luc Godard), save that Lennon never got locked up by military police for his thought-crimes, Veloso's place in the panthenon derives only in part from his music. The book goes into painful detail about his time in prison, the censor of the press (which never once reported what happened to the pop music star), and his subsequent exile to London until 1972 along with fellow musician Gilberto Gil. All for a casual lie told by a nightclub owner, something to always keep in mind come arguments for citizen spying programs and presumed innocence.
A blip of ten or so sixties pop albums within an 18-month period that have proven themselves to be evergreen, inspiring a new generation of songsters (not limited to Talking Heads, Beck, Nirvana, DNA), justice can't really be done to Tropicalia here (unless James and Alex want to give me a few days), but all of the albums from Mutantes, Gal Costa, Gil, and Tom Ze in that window of time are most highly recommended.
To help better understand what he's up to in his native tongue, here are a few tracks of Caetano singing in English, along with relevant quotes from Tropical Truth. The diction and accent are off, sometimes intentionally so, but one can hear the type of subtle wordplay, poetry, and rhythmic nuance that Veloso brings to his muse.
On Godard: "I came away (from Breathless) amazed at the supple rhythm and the poetry of atmosphere...yet it did not seem so rigidly controlled."
"To this day I think that the unbalanced way I handle music...displaying complexity where nothing but the simplest thing is expected, and naivete where one would look for sophistication, comes from having refused to impose a method on myself, all on account of having no faith in my musical ability."
"I thought that since we were being bombarded with [the English language] all the time, we had the right to use it as we could...with our own poorly learned English, making it the instrument of protest against the very usage being imposed on us."
"Even after I fell in love with the lyrics of Cole Porter...with the diction of Frank Sinatra...I could still, during my London exile, find in that childish ignorance of the language a basis for my caricatures of British and American accents as two versions of a dog's voice."
posted by beta
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
