I had planned to talk about a 'feel-good' song in today's column, but in view of the ongoing situation in Egypt, I thought it would be more appropriate to post something related to the period when Brazil was under a military dictatorship in the 1960's and 1970'. In fact, it connects with one of John Protevi's posts on the matter, urging American citizens to contact the White House: as is widely known, American support (in particular the CIA's support) was crucial for the existence of so many gruesome dictatorships in Latin-America at that period, and here again the same seems to apply to Mubarak's 30 year-long dictatorship. So the song of this week may be viewed as a reminder that yes, it is possible to restore democracy, as today Brazil is a democratic country (although of course still plagued by corruption and oligarchs). Yes, things can get better!
(Also, on a practical note, let me add that next week's column will be posted on Sunday, not on Thursday, as I am going on holiday tomorrow, hopefully with no internet around!)
Last week’s column featured a song sung but not composed by Caetano Veloso. In fact, however, the majority of the songs he sings are of his own composition (with the exception of his phase singing Latin-American classics in the 1990s, and a phase of jazz standards in his 2004 album, A foreign sound), so it makes sense to present one of his own songs here too. In the comments following that post, somebody mentioned a song from one of his very old albums of the early 1970s, to which I replied that this was a most interesting period of his career. The song of today, ‘If you hold a stone’, is taken from the same 1971 album entitled ‘Caetano Veloso’.
Some of you may know that, as much of the rest of Latin America in that period, Brazil was under a military dictatorship from the late 1960s to the early 1980s (the first democratic elections after the dictatorship took place only in 1989!). Many, many people (including many artists) were forced into exile abroad. One of them (after months of imprisonment) was Caetano Veloso: he lived in London from 1970 to 1972, and there he recorded the album featuring the song of this week. One of the interesting things about this album (and also of the subsequent album, ‘Transa’) is that many of Caetano’s compositions in it are in English, whereas his mastery of English was not exactly what could be considered fluent at the time. In a sense, the strangeness of the lyrics is one of the features that make the songs so compelling.
In fact, the whole album is about feeling deeply, incurably homesick. In ‘London London’, Caetano expresses his appreciation for the place welcoming him under the circumstances. But most of the other songs express his longing to go back home; in one of the songs, called ‘Maria Bethania’ (the name of his sister, also a singer), he says: “Maria Bethania, please send me a letter, I wish to know things are getting better.” In ‘If you hold a stone’, this week’s song, Caetano took as his starting point a traditional folk song (more like a chant, really), ‘Marinheiro só’, and gave it a rendition in English (not simply a translation of the original lyrics). ‘Marinheiro só’ is already a song about homesickness, about the sailor (‘marinheiro’) who says ‘I don’t belong here’. The lyrics in ‘If you hold a stone’ are in fact a mixture of English and Portuguese, and at some point he sings in Portuguese:
Eu não vim aqui
Para ser feliz
Cadê meu sol dourado
E cadê as coisas do meu país
(I didn't come here
To be happy
Where is my golden sun
And where are the things of my country?)
As I wrote in comments before, this song was for years (and still is) a major homesickness-inducer for me; it doesn’t get much more poignant than this.
Another interesting bit of information about Caetano’s period in London is that he received substantial financial support from Roberto Carlos, another Brazilian singer. Roberto Carlos is the singer of the masses, known as ‘The King’, and is still widely popular with the poorer and less educated. He was not particularly vocal against the dictatorship (some say he should have been more vocal), but he was happy to help fellow singers in exile such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. By the way, Roberto Carlos wrote a song about Caetano being in exile, ‘Debaixo dos caracóis dos seus cabelos’ (‘Under the curls of your hair’), which Caetano then recorded in his ‘Circuladô ao vivo’ album of 1992.
Ok, so after having written the column, I realize that youtube does not have 'If you hold a stone' available! To be more specific, it does, but it is the only song of the whole album where I get the message "Content not available in your country". Grrrrr... Here is the link, in case somebody is luckier than me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B33vXxUpMz8&feature=BF&list=PL3C36B2A7D0047918&index=4
So instead I am going to post one of the other songs of the same album that I mentioned here, 'Maria Bethania'.
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