In “Eu Also Vou Comclamar”, released in 1976, Raul Seixas was already laughing at the MPB people who made a lot of money with the protest songs against the Dictatorship. And, without much ado, he “threatened” to stop doing shows to complain with poor rhymes in the studio’s air conditioning.
But now to be successful
To sell protest records
Everyone has to complain
I’m going to take my foot off the road
And I’ll also get into this move
Asking for forgiveness for the obviousness, it was these somewhat prophetic verses by Raul Seixas that came to my mind when wasting precious 13 minutes of my life to listen to two examples of this old trick that is posing resistance to make easy money. The first song, “Hymn to the Nameless”, has endless 13 minutes and something. And no, I don’t think the 13 minutes are for nothing. After all, if there’s one thing these artists nowadays don’t master, it’s subtlety.
About “Hymn to the Inominável”, before commenting on some excerpts from the torrential song I have to say that the composers Carlos Rennó and Pedro Luís missed a great opportunity to coin the pun “Hinminable”. It would be much more catchy. Although they must have taken into account the musical and literary culture of the public given to hear these things to come to the conclusion that puns, even the worst ones, are light years away from the ability to understanding of a generation educated on the basis of Paulo Freire.
The song begins with Wagner Moura, the eternal Captain Nascimento, half singing, half complaining, half tapping his little finger on the corner of the table, half crowing verses: “’I am in favor of the dictatorship’, he said/ ‘From pau de arara and torture’, he concluded”. Is the journalistic tone of the song to give it any credibility? And I don’t know about you, but I’m really lazy about this conversation. Of that macabre nostalgia. This, by the way, was the greatest harm that the dictatorship did to the country: it gave rise to an entire generation traumatized by the table. I don’t understand why they weren’t traumatized by the misdeeds of leftist dictatorships.
Then, after using the archaic form “contradict” (instead of “contradict”), someone enters to … No! I can’t go on thinking that you, the reader, may not have paid attention to the previous sentence. I said that the composers used “contradict” instead of “contradict”. Do you notice the concern of these people in communicating with their supposed public?
Continuing. Someone enters to half sing, half declaim, half whimper, half say nothing: “And in the real, the incredible, the unbelievable / Entered like a nightmare, unhappy / To the angry sound of an unreliable voice / That says and lies and denies itself and it is said”. To rhyme “unbelievable” with “unreliable” is really the work of some poetry prodigy. Could these lines have been by Pedro Luís or Carlos Rennó? Did they toast when they found the rhyme?
There, in order, there is a stanza about racism, about “non-innocent injury” (whatever that is) and about Indians. There is a part in which the authors boast of their own genius and, as if they were facing a vintage Censorship Commission 23, they give a wink to the listener who, at these times, is still did not puncture the eardrum. Look at how they “deceived” the imaginable censorship by omitting the president’s name: “The unpronounceable is pronounced like this / Just like the name that such ‘hymn’ never says / From the inhuman being, the nameless being / From which a thousand vile pronouncements emanate” . Close to that, Chico Buarque’s folly with the pun line “get that one shut up away from me” seems like something worthy of applause.
Plforiwy23t6,flgjihtyw8565wtdkoodnhja. Sorry. It’s just that I laughed too loudly and ended up scaring Catota. Did I mention that the “anthem” has unbelievable 13 minutes and broken ones? In the tiny probability of having heard this song, even the boring David Gilmour must have found it boring. The song (the quotation marks are implied) continues talking about the suffering of homosexuals, saying that cattle are better than bolsonaristas (all with “poetic subtlety”) and culminates with the chorus:
But who will you say that it is no longer imaginable
To raise the country back from the ruins?
What a ruin, my son?! The one that Dilma got us into?! – I want to ask, but then I remember the “but” that adorns good economic news. And I also remember that an artist is an artist only because he lives in a bubble of stewardship and flattery and because he never learned the rule of three. Speaking of mathematics, then music speaks of it, science. Then environment. Attention to the verses: “And so he denied and denied the undeniable / The evidence that science sees and says / Of the felling and the demonstrable burning / By satellite images”.
I could go on describing and commenting verse by verse, stanza by stanza. But life is short and, for the rest, I have to talk about “Bolsominions”, by Chico César. For journalistic duty, therefore, I will close this part of the chronicle by informing that the song still has an anti-police discourse, it says that “what solves are cannons, revolvers” (huh?), continues talking about weapons, then abruptly changes to ICU and Covid, turn left (always to the left) to talk about books and laugh at Jair Bolsonaro’s Portuguese mistakes and curse everyone for being ignorant. And a chorus comes in.
Calm down, I’m done. In fact, it was already over. But I have just come across a stanza full of profanity and references to feces that, curiously, ends with “The rotten smell of your rhetoric / Eschatological spreads across the country.” Freud would say that this was written in front of a mirror. And, in this case (only in this case), who am I to refute Freud?
The music of trezzzzzzzzzzzzze minutes counts with unbelievable 30 “interpreters”. It was supposed to be 13, but I think it would show a lot. I even thought about mentioning everyone’s name here and, in this way, maybe I could get the attention of the Google algorithm. But I gave up because my reader doesn’t deserve such punishment. And, what’s more, it’s time for the intertitle and analysis of a song that, surprisingly, manages to be even worse than the 13 minutes of ” Hymnable”.
Reggae almost protest punk
Chico César, author of the immortal lines “Ô amarrara dzaia soiê / Dzaia dzaia/ Aí iii iinga dunrã”, describes the song “Bolsominions” as “an almost protest punk reggae, in the style of Peter Tosh or The Clash”. I don’t know about you, but I was punk of life when I read this nonsense which, however, is not even the worst. After all, in the text in which the singer talks about his most recent creation, he begins by warning hypocritically and cynically that “this is a song in defense of the Christian faith”.
Then the music begins. Reggae is the same old thing, right? The part of the “protest punk” Chico César reserved to the letter. Remember that this is a “song in defense of the Christian faith”. Which, however, already begins by saying: “Bolsominions are demons”. It is only in Frei Betto’s Bible that maybe (maybe!) something like “love your neighbor as yourself – unless he votes for Bolsonaro”. And what about, right ahead, the dehumanizing verses that compare Bolsonaro supporters to “shame / Who grazed absentmindedly”?
Over six minutes, Chico César has time to say that Bolsonaro’s supporters President Jair Bolsonaro exhibit an “immodest stupidity” and are terrified of “instructed laughter”. Learned laugh is the one who has a PhD? Then the song continues with a verse written by a five-year-old child having a tantrum on the floor of the mall: “the stock exchange without values”.
The last verse is revealing because it exposes the leftist belief in a Mythical squid who, heretically, will save us. In it, Chico César says that Christians who vote for Bolsonaro have “the blood of a cockroach and the anger / Of all humanity that does not want to be saved.”
I, because I want to be saved (not because Lula or any other politician!), I end the text here. In the end, there wasn’t even time to talk about Adnet’s version of Martinho da Vila’s “Mulheres”, the misogynist song that feminists hate just because the composer is a PT on all fours. It’s for a next opportunity.
