They grow
’em weird in Brazil, and of all Brazil’s wonderfully
weird cultural exports, Tom Zé may be the weirdest and most
wonderful. Zé, who turns 70 this year, is one of the
founders of Tropicalia, a musical, intellectual, and political
movement that swept São Paolo by storm in the late
’60s and early ’70s with its delirious blend of
Beatlesque psych-pop; deconstructed native genres such as bossa
nova, samba, and forró; and Dada-inspired agitprop. An outsider among
outsiders, Zé has never enjoyed the name recognition of
peers such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Os
Mutantes, but his career has flourished in recent years, thanks in
part to Luaka Bop label head (and former Talking Head) David Byrne,
who tracked him down in 1989, when he was about to start working at
his nephew’s gas station. In subsequent years, the avant-pop
enigma released three albums on Luaka Bop (a career retrospective
in 1990 and two critically lauded full-lengths of new material,
1992’s The Hips of Tradition and 1998’s Fabrication
Defect) and toured the United States
with Chicago post-rockers Tortoise as his backing band. Zé’s describes his new album, Estudando O Pagode, as
an “unfinished operetta” about the oppression of women
throughout history; among the figures to whom the CD is dedicated
is Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century English feminist who wrote
A Vindication of the Rights of Women. If this all sounds a bit too heavy, a bit too Holly
Near, remember that we’re talking about Tom Zé, the
man known for “playing” bicycle pumps, chainsaws,
vacuum cleaners, and metal grinders; the man who once released an
album called Todos Os Olhos (All the
Eyes), the cover of which featured a
close-up photograph of a marble peeping out of an anus; the man who
makes other musical pranksters look like dispassionate dilettantes. Although the prospect
of 16 songs about the patriarchy might send even the most progressive
listeners straight into the arms of the Three 6 Mafia, rest assured
that this is about as far from Women’s Studies 101 as you can
possibly get. (And if you aren’t fluent in Portuguese,
you’re off the hook altogether.) The operetta contains many characters,
several performed by Zé and others by guest vocalists,
including Jair Oliveira, Suzana Salles, and Luciana Mello. Its
story is much too convoluted to paraphrase — something about
a mistreated black teenager who abuses his girlfriend, who later
puts herself through college by working as a prostitute — and
the setting shifts from the United Nations Security Council to the
Garden of Eden, a courtroom, and a gay and lesbian pride parade
outside the Vatican. Musically, Estudando is every bit as zany and chaotic as its plot:
Along with giddy loops and synths and other electro-pop trappings,
there are braying donkeys, sobbing men, climaxing women, and what
sounds like a chorus of midgets on helium. Distorted guitars
grapple with saws and children’s toys; curses turn into
prayers, and come-ons escalate to threats. Zé also
incorporates an instrument of his own invention, a kind of pipe
fashioned from ficus leaves, and the cavaquinho, which resembles a ukelele. The songs are
subverted variations on pagode, a type of minimalist dance music embraced by
the underclass and notorious for its misogynistic lyrics (think
São Paolo’s answer to crunk), but, really, you
don’t need to know any of this background stuff to enjoy the
songs, which range from the unequivocally lovely ballad “Duas
Opiniões” to the saucy, slap-happy duet
“Estúpido Rapaz” and the madcap pop masterpiece
“Beatles A Granel.” Chez Zé,
experimentation is always served with a generous side of pleasure.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2006.
