Belchior's song

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By GUILHERME RODRIGUES*

The struggle of Belchior's hoarse voice against the melodic order of the other instruments brings a spirit of the artist's “Wild Heart”

To Marcela, who taught me to live again.

1.

Music produced in Brazil seems to have been, at least since the 19th century, a point of analytical conflict, tensioning between its deep roots in the country's social and psychic formation and the poor elaborations that seek European similes to establish supposedly transversal concepts – such as the division between high and low culture and its similarities. Machado de Assis himself, a very musical writer (as Antonio Candido already wrote:[I]) dealt with this in his work, whether with the popular tradition in stories such as “The Machete”, “A Famous Man” and “Terpsichore”, or with the tradition of the ballroom pianos of the Rio de Janeiro bourgeoisie in the novels Esau and Jacob e Aires memorial.

José Miguel Wisnik, in an exquisite study,[ii] sought to argue how Machado de Assis' work produces a representation of Brazilian music as a phenomenon that is mixed between erudite and popular, and that the slave trait – the maxixe – would have been repressed in other forms such as the polka. In this sense, Machado de Assis' work would present a mestizo and mulatto trait that is fundamental to its understanding, insofar as his writings demonstrate a Brazilian culture that vacillates between the European tradition and the national traits that are tensioned between the social classes.

It is already possible to perceive here that there is something peculiar about musical formation in Brazil, which cannot be reduced to ahistorical or very generic concepts. In more recent works, Rodrigo Duarte has argued how Adorno's reading, for example, cannot account for certain musical expressions produced in Brazil, such as hip hop – hence his conceptual formulation of “aesthetic-social constructs”, which would seek to describe some contemporary aesthetic phenomena that present, on the one hand, elements of cultural commodities, but which at the same time are constituted by a critical foundation that has as its horizon a dissolution of the hegemonic modes of the same cultural commodity.[iii] Perhaps this is an interesting way to also understand the songs of Brazilian music produced between the 1950s and 1990s, and not just João Gilberto's bossa nova, but also the tropicalists and even Belchior.

The criticism that some intellectuals such as Roberto Schwarz and José Ramos Tinhorão produced towards tropicalism is well-known, pointing out that its musicians were unconsciously aligned with the “policy of skipping steps proposed since 1964 by the Minister of Planning, Roberto Campos, with his plan to liquidate and absorb the rudimentary structures of national production through the import of foreign industries and technology packages.”[iv]; this to the extent that they appropriated electric rock music along with what would be a kind of thanks to popular.

Such criticism, which also extended to a tradition also called post-tropicalist, as is the case of Belchior, loses sight, however, of the critical foundation of this musician's work, for example, which looks to a horizon of another sensitive formation, passing through a profound link between the literary and musical tradition produced in Brazil (and elsewhere) and the contemporary tension of a disidentification of the subject, produced, including, by the melodic form of the song itself.

Belchior's music has always been placed in these points of tension, of a composer who sought a certain strange and disidentical element, which places both the subject who sings and the other who listens in a position of instability. Take as an example the song “Divina Comédia Humana”, recorded on the album All senses, from 1978. From the title, the song suggests a dialogue with tradition, and even quickly glancing over the lyrics-poem you can register a quote from sonnet XIII of Milky Way of Bilac.

Although obvious, however, all these references seem to be displaced towards a strange and unstable terrain – let’s see. Remember, first, that the song begins with an anguished subject who hears love advice from an “analyst friend of mine”, a subject of supposed knowledge, if we want to use Lacanian jargon: happiness would not be found in a casual encounter, or in a sensual affair. But it is in the following stanza that we will see the true analytical act: the lyrical self retorts to this subject of supposed knowledge, with a formulation of a free desire: “I want to stay glued to her skin night and day”.

The interlocutor then changes to what appears to be the beloved girl, while the poem enunciates the desire for enjoyment in this love, even if it is not eternal – “since it is a flame”, Vinicius de Moraes would write. The song ends with yet another interlocutor, for whom the lyrical self affirms a productive power of the song that comes from a “no”.

The composition will further complicate this panorama presented, with regard to its melodic and harmonic lines. In the version released in 1978, the song begins with keyboard and guitar, and as it progresses, it gains instruments: the bass enters the analyst's speech, like a serious piece of advice, which is countered by the drums entering in a danceable ballroom rhythm, as if the lyrical self were pulling the girl he loves into the dance. The laughter and sighs that are recorded alongside the song give the form of the joy that the lyrical self enjoys after contesting this supposed knowledge.

The 1990s version, recorded with just voice and two guitars, includes an even more significant element – ​​which underlies practically all of Belchior’s work –: there is a rhythmic irregularity in the singing, which does not accompany the other instruments, as if the voice were fighting against the order imposed by the rhythm of the guitar. Hence the difficulty of so many interpreters of the musician, who, in a frustrated way, fit the melody of the voice into the guitar, subjugating the force of the “no” sung at the end of the song. This, after all, is the power of non-identity – a concept so dear to Theodor Adorno, ironically – the singing that does not allow itself to be tied down, like the love of this lyrical self, which only allows itself to be enjoyed in a free elaboration, of one sticking to the skin of the other, night and day.

Now, we might ask ourselves what this actually has to do with Comedy of Dante, the Human comedy of Balzac, or the Milky Way by Bilac. Well, let's see that, before Belchior, the three texts are quite disparate, in practically everything. In this sense, the song already produces a true montage in the best modern taste: de-potentiating its original materials, reorganizing them through the strange, which gives them another power: realized, in short, by negativity.

Remember that it is Dante who walks through Hell and Purgatory until he frees himself from the authority of Virgil, his poet-master, so that he can meet Beatrice, in a divine joy, albeit brief, in Paradise. Comedy Balzac's work, very different from Dante's, is not so called because of any Aristotelian tone or divine revelation; the French author in fact provokes the 14th century Florentine poet by writing a set of prose about worldly customs – but it is also in this world that finite and very powerful love finds its beautiful formulations; these are works like The thirty year old woman, Eugenie Grandet e lost illusions in which this could be seen. Finally, it is in Milky Way in which we find some of the most beautiful love poems by Olavo Bilac, who dreams of climbing to the stars and coming down from there to meet his beloved, because “only those who love can have ears / capable of hearing and understanding stars”.[v]

Even though one can reference why such works are there in the song, one should not lose sight of Belchior's negativity: all this material from tradition appears crossed by irregular singing, by the rhythm of the dance and, above all, by an analytical break in supposed knowledge. The poetic subject reformulates the entire reference, which now operates within his desiring formulations, of someone who does so simply because he loves. It is by “leaving depth aside” that this lyrical self produces the rupture that, finally, a song of this nature is capable of making in the fabric of sensitivity.

2.

The struggle of Belchior’s hoarse voice against the melodic order of the other instruments conveys the spirit of the artist’s “Wild Heart.” The song that bears this name, recorded on the album of the same name, is a truly wild movement, which uses the typical instruments of a love song – the saxophone in particular – to produce a call that seeks to “always leave certainty aside / and risk everything with passion; / walk the wrong path for the simple joy of being.” Taking risks, then, is part of this love, which, as Drummond once wrote, is the “desired risk.”[vi] This passion that comes from Belchior's music is reminiscent of a certain creative power that can be seen in great poets and musicians – this power, in short, meets the impetus of a composition whose process is one of criticism of the musical material itself. After all, as Belchior himself sings, there is a risk that only passion can give, but it is with passion that one can encounter the world, which is close by, “on that road right there in front of us”.

* Guilherme Rodrigues He holds a PhD in Literary Theory from Unicamp's IEL.

Notes


[I] Candido, Antonio. “Music and music”. in: the literary observer. 4th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Gold on Blue, 2008, p. 27.

[ii] Wisnik, Jose Miguel. Machado Maxixe: the Pestana case. São Paulo: Publifolha, 2008.

[iii] cf. Duarte, Rodrigo. “Disartification of art and aesthetic-social constructs”. in: Viso: notebooks of applied aesthetics: Electronic aesthetics magazine. v. VI, no. 11, 2012, pp. 1-10.

[iv] Tinhorao, Jose Ramos. Brief history of popular music according to its genres. 7th ed. New York: Routledge, 34, p. 2013.

[v] Bilac, Olavo. Poems. 1rd ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001, p. 53.

[vi] Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. clear riddle. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2012, p.


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