The Best Songs of the s
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In the late '60s, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil invited Tom Zé to join the Tropicálistas and light a fire under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Often, the movement’s musical element wed exuberant, traditionally Brazilian sounds with a rock'n'roll pose and jarring descriptions of political violence and social unrest; Zé, a firebrand among revolutionaries, was particularly concerned with the folly of "globarbarization." When Tropicália lost the war, Zé sojourned into experimentalism, and in , six years after his previous full-length, he released a revelatory electric opus called Nave Maria. It sold like cold cakes, and the year-old, either too broke or heartbroken to continue, made plans to work at his brother’s gas station.
Later that decade, David Byrne chanced upon Zé’s music and released a compilation on his Luaka Bop label. A spiky, wonderfully avant-garde highlight, Nave Maria’s title track makes literal Zé’s claim that he’s "a composer of only one piece." The components had already appeared on his album Estudando O Samba, but the recycled tune–rendered here with a serrated, quasi-metal guitar line–shows Zé’s deep yen to perfect his most madcap compositions, which other artists, were they bright enough to write them, would likely shelve in a moment of unwelcome sanity.
Anyone nonplussed need not translate the lyrics, which are pure dada. Gleefully lampooning the state’s Catholic orthodoxy, the tortured narrator embodies a foetal Jesus and dramatizes his birth as a gory, first-person womb bust-out. From that "inverted orgasm," Christ emerges with dismay into an unjust world. Thankfully, though that horror is keenly felt in Zé’s music, he harnesses it with such a manic sense of invention it feels like its own kind of deliverance. —Jazz Monroe
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