Interview and photography Margo Berdeshevsky

The hotel lobby is elegant and ultra modern in the city of light, Paris. I learn every corner of it, as I wait. I am patient. And I wait. I have an interview with Claude M’Barali, alias MC Solaar. I will wait for the Senegalese, Dakar-born French superstar of hip hop. He appears. Relaxed. Apologetic. An iconic figure whom some would dub the rapper’s Baudelaire. He is shy when I mention this. He would not presume. Then a slow smile. He is quite pleased.

Is he the sun in metaphor, or an exploding nova, or Icarus? No matter, my French girl friends are jealous. I’m potentially nervous. I’m a poet and he is a poet. That’s wonderful. But what I know of his genre is spare, and tinged by my aesthetic prejudices. I’m called a lyric poet, albeit with a hard edge, and an activist spirit. I have spent the last month speaking to aficionados, to Josh Litle, at work on a first major film about hip hop around the world, The Furious Force of Rhymes, which is executive produced by famed rapper CHUCK-D of Public Enemy; to David Siller, a young hip hop scholar preparing his thesis. I have carefully translated one of Solaar’s finest lyrics in order to learn this form from its inside out. I have come to the interview bearing a white rose, because when I was in Russia, poets always gave each other roses, and my translations, which I hope will please him for their poetic integrity. A copy of Fleurs du Mal, and all my bi-lingual bravado. He speaks an educated French, and Spanish, studies Russian, understands English, quite well. We speak in French.

There is a story I know of an elderly artist who is also a Zen master: a client comes to buy a drawing and is told to return in a year. The client agrees and returns in a year and is told to return in a month. A month later, he is asked to return tomorrow. The client arrives the next day and is told to wait at the door. He hears the master rattling and shuffling. Finally, after a moment, the master appears with a drawing in his hand and asks his price. “I waited a year and a month and a day for this, but it took just a moment!” “Yes, plus my entire life,” replies the old one. MC Solaar is a young master, and the story pertains. I write quickly, because of the music, he tells me. It’s much easier if you have the music, the rhythm, but I am fast. First, I have taken in “everything.” Do you never write before the music? Ah. I used to, he admits. But when I met the music, I changed.

“The Concubine of Hemoglobin,” lyrics that many judge as his masterwork on humanity, and war, he wrote in a proverbial half-an-hour. But the artist is in constant preparation. You save it up, absorb, and let it spill into the music. You know when it works and when it is false…I try to do things that have not been done … with no music, you would struggle … this word or that word? With music, it accelerates you, it forces you, and then you know when to slow down, break, begin. You know.” He calls himself a journalist of the daily life. A witness for his era. He speaks to thieves, thinkers, barflies, dancers, policemen, a blind singer, his young nephews, his mother, waiters, women; he reads each day’s newspaper, collects dictionaries, listens, and waits. He only writes when he is preparing an album. For “Concubine,” he entered the studio with only the title in his head. In 1994 there was war in the Gulf and Bosnia and political prisoner Kim Song Man was on trial in North Korea and Amnesty International was fighting for his liberation. Solaar had been paying attention to the world, and an hour later, the lyrics were wrought.

What is your genius? It’s the rhythm, he nods, and my interpretation. I know that by the eighth phrase, there has to be shock, poetry, even the excessive. My professors taught me that there must be a structure, a situation, a thesis, an antithesis, a point of view, a climax. And I become RAEL. He has watched for my response. I am an angel lawyer, he will tell me in the course of our interview. I am called RAEL, my vocation is to defend, a defending angel for a point of view. And it ends with regret, in which you realize there is something better. An Aristotelian formulation, I note. He beams. Oui. Oui. C’est ca.

I have always been against ” les processus qui mènent à l’élimination.” He is quoting from his “Concubine,” (I have always been against the processes that lead to extinction.) Solaar began his recording career at the age of twenty, and lived first in the ‘hood, but also in the non-xenophobic world. He cares about the universal that can help to teach and to penetrate perjury. He takes the precept of earliest hip hop culture to heart. It had begun with a common philosophy to recycle negative energies and create with words, with painting, which should be respectful, not destructive, and with dance. And if one had violent tendencies — combat them with rap. But today, that has changed. Rap means what people want it to mean, he seems sorry to say. But Solaar focuses on the universalism that he learned from his professors who lived through the French student protests of 1968. All men are equal. One honors the rights of man.

In the beginning, other rappers did not quite understand MC Solaar, because he is a man who does not hide emotions. His eyes follow with the eagerness of a child who has seen a little of heaven, a lot of hell, and aims to comprehend the universe, but it will take time. He is in no hurry and he will take his time. He is an improvisor. Rap is much like jazz to him. He has never kept an agenda. It’s all in his head. As a boy he never did his homework, but he speaks four languages. Solaar is a poet of the streets, a philosopher, a committed-politically-cogent, and educated being in a world of chaos. He is, like others, afraid of the world he is party to. He has done homework and soul-work on the human condition. This much, I can see. His lyrics contain all of these elements, and a climactic moment where the earth and the soul tilts; a realization of true regret, and an attempt to rise above it into some venue of hope. By midnight, we have exchanged our poetry, and read some Baudelaire - “Litany to Satan” and “Laments of an Icarus” - become poignantly apt. He has cited his love for Jacques Prevert, Leonard Cohen, Georges Brassens, Serge Gainsbourg, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. All poets, thinkers, and anti-totalitarians.

“I cannot do rap like the Americans.” Other rappers, he will admit, American rappers, are afraid to say that they are afraid or that they can weep. In American rap, there are no losers, and this is a loss, he elucidates. “They are afraid to show themselves with the emotion that goes with that. They brag…but if they dared to explore ‘the loser’ … I understand why they don’t do this in the U.S, because they see themselves as too strong.” They wear their gold chains and they are violent or they are misogynist.

A title on his last album, Cinquième As is “Solaar Weeps.” He cites it with pride, as though he were re-composing it before my eyes. Then, he runs through nearly all of “Concubine of Hemoglobin,” from the February ‘94 Prose Combat, his second album which sold 800,000 copies, 100,000 in its first days. It ends with the phrase - It’s so hard to say, but …I’m scared. On the disc, there is the sound of an ocean for the opening 30 seconds before he comes in very calmly with words. Now suddenly, he breaks into the staccatos of “… Balancer des rafales de balles normales et faire des victimes/ Dans les rangs des descendants d’Adam …” performed for himself, for me, as though to inspect his own poetic craft. Prose Combat was dubbed “a jazz-funk-rap adventure.” Cinquieme As includes crossover lyrics in Spanish, English, French, musical lyricism, jazz riffs, and all the extra that is his inventive streak. He is known as an innovator, and would counsel the young to quit the “group” mind and to be unique. With an international career and discs available in 20 countries, even in English language markets that are normally shut to French artists, actually, he will admit that what he does is not rap.

It is “talking over.” Poetically, I understand this to describe a kind of spoken word poetry, performed over the music. Oui. Oui. No, the American rappers, I don’t like, ideologically. Musically, ok. But not ideologically. I’m for creativity. When I want to do rap, I can do it, I know all the styles, I learned many tricks. You take a mic and you yell and scream, you yell at women, that’s rap-rap-rap.

Why is what he does not rap? Because I have no slogan. It is not demagoguery. I say don’t be a victim of a musical style. Don’t only repeat “mortel, mortel, mortel,” (death, death, death, deadly, fatal, lethal) in every line, and yell unintelligible lyrics. Tension, hate, violence — no. There’s enough racism. Are you aware of the paradoxes? In a synagogue, are you going to yell, let’s go? Excuse me, I’m international. It’s always the same thing in every line: a pistol, a missile, a woman … le rap-rap-rap. In Solaar Pleure, he writes a hero’s fantasy of a man who wants to combat evil. In the beginning, he had the words “the emperor is crying,” in his mind. From his own melancholy at the time, he heard the drum beat. He stands up to make the sounds, a one man orchestra, suddenly, so I may hear; he scats, he plays with an onomatopoeia, he speaks out the way he composes, how he likes his rhymes to be like coals whitening in a fire. His character dies and leaves for paradise. And he cries. “I see demons, blood, and fires mixing/ I pray when I’m this terrified. Satan’s lauging. Solaar’s weeping …”

A complexity of thought explores everything from a chaos theory of creation to the dada-ists, the surrealists, millennial hope, the durability of comprehensible rap, the ephemeral, in art. He pauses often, as though to search his own honesty. He stands at the window holding his present, his past, his reflections, and his shadows. What I write today should have meaning in 2090. And what else can he do, or would he do? Music. That’s all. I cannot be a banker, he says in all seriousness. Music, I can do that, peacefully. Hollywood? No, not all that sitting around and drinking coffee. Yes, he writes other texts that are perhaps too complex for rap, for now, that would not please his audience or his producers, but perhaps later, perhaps later, he will. A novel? Oh la la, that would take too long.

His is not a rap of exclusion, he has said, but a rap of opening, and inclusion. Not a rap that excludes women and girls. He sees no interest. When I write, it is to make myself understood. I have no desire to say we’re 10, 20, 100, 100,000 but this is only ours. I wish to share with no matter whom. Someone aged 24 today has a right to know rap. Some other, a law student has a right to listen to rap. I make rap for the 94, the 91, the 16, for everyone. That is my style. Underground and popular as the metro, he has said. I am a man of openness.

Born in 1969 in Dakar, third of four children, his father is from Tchad. Yes, he would say, Africa is his nest. His mother is his personal myth. His lyrics show his notable respect for women. He has her to thank, and he says so. She followed the beautiful, the hard work for her children, 2-3 jobs, my reference is always her, wherever I am, I did nothing. My myth is the opposite of the tower of babel, the opposite of show biz. My myth is my mother.

At the age of six months he was brought to a “Banlieu” of Paris called St. Denis, the suburban enclave which has birthed so much of a disenfranchised youth today. But Solaar was blessed, or different. At twelve he was taken to live with an uncle in Cairo, registered in a French school, and stayed for nine months. His spirit began its unfolding. When he returned to France he passed his baccalauréat and began to study languages. He was born lucky, he says. His nationality is French. He has the French educational system to thank for his fine knife-edged intellectual development. He has himself to thank as well. He is a scholar. He has received the Order of Merit of Senegal; he gave it to his mother.

He has returned many times, as often as possible but never for long enough — to his African nest for its spiritual milk and its “normal life.” He always returns to Paris with some word spoken that shifts his life. An approach to music and the poetic. A mission to write the truths of his roots, the slaves, and the colonized. He has returned and returned to his teachers in Indonesia, for the arts of self control, breath, interior force, spiritual and magical disciplines, and an ongoing personal quest. He is fascinated by Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Penchak Silat, the Indonesian martial art. The ancients he has met there are the real thing. A man in Java said - I can walk through a forest without making the leaves move. I remember, this is not a man in a hurry. He is a contemplative. He knows what he knows and what he does not. And he watches with the wide eyes of a child from another continent, maybe even, another realm.

I return with him to the notion of myth. Is Icarus, in fact a player in his personal mythos, flying too near the sun? Well, Yves Montand’s film about Icarus is his favorite movie, but he prefers the symbol of the phoenix - fire and rebirth. Then, is Solaar the sun, or a metaphor? His own earliest “tags,” scrawled upon sidewalls of Northern Paris were Soar. Then, eventually, SOLAAR, because graphically, the name spelled with a double “a” looked more balanced, and it did not sound American. Also, such a name, with its hint of power, demands that he shall not dare to be negative.He is an icon, not John Lennon, but perhaps as loved in France. In his ancestral home, they listen to him on the radio and shout “Bravo.” In the Northern suburbs of Paris, where he was formed, the young of color and disenfranchisement tag graffiti-murals of his lyrics. They rap songs as spoken word, poetic truth of the new millennia and hip hop as a rhymed radical home culture.Percy Shelley once said “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world because they create human values and the forms that shape the social order.” MC Solaar, poet, fine boned hands shaping like dark birds, describes action when he speaks. His eyes are all black shine. He will not look at a camera. He is processing everything and appears to be in a conversation with that speaker inside his brain that urges him on with a certain longing for what is honest. He repeats a question, a reply, to make certain of his own meanings. And he wants wisdom. To have it and to give it. He wants time. He uses biblical metaphor and allegory so that his themes will be accepted and broadly understood.You write in several of your lyrics about Paradise, I prepare the question. What is Paradise? Happiness, he says, simply. The sunshine I saw as a child. That all is well. I tell small stories and I place my stories in Paradise or in the biblical places, so that people can say, oh, this is true. Besides … I see Paradise. I can see it. I like things that are partially hidden. Yes, he is afraid of being a human being in these times, and of mankind’s intelligence. Of war, and earthquakes, and energy, and armies. When you are a child, you know that anything can happen! Then what is it, to be human? Ah, to give hope to people, to show them that they may have a choice. I quote W.S. Merwin’s small poem that claims, “On the last day of the world I would plant a tree.” And what would MC Solaar do on such a day? Ah, … I would make my first prayer.  I’d go and see my little nephews, my mother, to give them hope. But I would not tell them anything. And what would he tell himself? I’d write a page to say here is what I have done, here is what we have done. But not with rage. No rage. I’d look for energy. I must think of his words in Solaar Pleure: I was never a hero, just a man of bone and water/ Now a soul lost and soaring, no more need for the pen.And what gives Solaar his energy? It’s crazy, it’s vain, but I love what I do. It’s perfect to be this free. To make sometimes beautiful little stories, sometimes not so beautiful, based on reality. To make love stories. … I’m called Monsieur X, she’s called Mademoiselle Y… He launches into a lyric he is working on, Monsieur X has waited two years to call her, she says come, he arrives with the roses, she is kissing another, and he abandons his flowers.  Does he have particular rituals as some writers do? He pauses longer than the other times. Well, 18 h, (6 o’clock in the evening) is my best time to write. At that time, everything goes well. But it hardly ever happens. Then, there will be a certain music, or rhythm. Or I will ask for a particular music. I will write. I will look. I will write. Then I go away from it and I come back and have a little vodka, and look at it again. Then I correct, I see what I have that is beautiful and what is not so good. I don’t write a lot. Only five albums. At one time, I thought that is enough, I can stop now. But no. Yes, I bought a notebook for ideas … but when I reread the notes, I could understand nothing! And also, I read books. Right now I am reading about the science of the bible, the true and the false. I’m interested in integrated science.In his lyrics, the language is definitely a vernacular French. Once I have translated it, I feel a bit like a tagger, myself. I have dared to put my name beside another one on the wall. An artistic merging and play of word and identity has begun. I show it to Solaar. He reads it standing up, walks around the room with a fresh cigarette and my page in his hands. He smiles as slowly as a teasing sunrise. He is pleased that I have found the rhymes, the subtleties. Oui. Ca va! C’est du Hip hop! Oh, la la.It is getting very late. I now have hours of micro cassettes to transcribe and consider. But I stay on to join him and his friends to drink vodka and politics! To pat the new baby in the belly of his old friend’s young wife, they will leave shortly for her home in Vietnam because they do not wish to raise a child in the West. I listen like a welcome fly on the wall to Claude MC Solaar and his old friend, fighting about politics in low tones the way only the French can. When they have challenged each other as much as they can for one night, they laugh and embrace, and I have to go home and transcribe my exploding notes into tamer stars.I head off into the Paris night thinking about what the young filmmaker, Josh Litle, had said to me about the poetic idiom he found in rap. And the hip hop scholar, David Siller, who said that there are evolutionary links between French poetry and French rap. How a “tag” that he saw, AC2N, meant “Assez de Haine,” (Enough hate). How he can think of no other music that has touched so many people, globally. And how MC Solaar, a literate boy marginalized by his peers, found a bridge between a notion of community, rap and poetry, and entered a dialogue with the two. How it speaks for those who would otherwise have no voice. How an intellectual in a commercial medium wants to speak to children and workers and intellectuals. A very French concept, actually, of égalité. A distinction I’ve been quickly taught by my aficionado colleagues: hip hop is the culture while rap is the commercialization of it. MC Solaar is a commercial success and a hip hop poet. And that is a rarity.Josh Litle compares great rapping as being structurally very similar to Jazz. Rap and Jazz share as their basis the concept of the soloist - an individual who performs a linear piece on top of a rhythm section. The art of both forms is largely in the “phrasing” (jazz term, in rap it’s called “delivery” or “flow”). This is the performer’s style of rhythmic delivery of ideas. In Jazz these ideas are melodic and harmonic (musical), in rap, ideas are literary (verbal). The instrumentalist is substituted with the vocalist.In jazz, the soloist is almost always improvising or as it sometimes is referred to, as “spontaneous composition.” This is not always the case in rap. Most raps are composed before the actual performance. However, many M.C.’s (rappers) can improvise raps on the spot, this is called “Freestyle.”Another significant difference is the “arrangement,” the sequence of song sections, such as verse, chorus, bridge, and “harmonic progression,” the series of chords that forms a song section. Jazz borrows from and builds upon European classical harmonic progression. European harmonic progression is driven by the need for dissonance (tension) to resolve (release). Rap is built on short, repetitive progressions that are more reflective of African non-harmonic (rhythmic) traditions. This, in conjunction with an oral storyteller (rapper) on top of the rhythm makes rap at least structurally more closely linked to African music than Jazz, which is more of an Afro/European musical fusion. There are some schools of thought in rap that seek the total elimination of harmony and melody, reducing the music to rhythm and words. These concepts are reflective of the general ideology of rap, which is that the WORD is king.In terms of the relationship of rap to poetry, the main difference is rhythm. Rapper Chuck-D states that the difference between Spoken Word Poetry and Rap is that rap is interlaced with the beat (repetitive rhythm), whereas Spoken-Word is linear and alternates between rhythm and arhythmia. Another difference is that rap is often a street-level discourse, utilizing the slang and mentality of the poor and usually non-white. Most poetry comes from an educated literary tradition. In this sense, one could say that rap in content is closer to a poet like Charles Bukowski than it is to Walt Whitman.I hold Josh Litle’s analysis beside my own long hours with Solaar, bright flares, in each hand. Founded in social consciousness, this form has its own rules and regs, does not have as much time for subtlety, relies more on wordplay than on metaphor, though when the metaphors work, they can be wrenching. The idiom is different. As an example of political commitment and poetry - meeting, Solaar achieves.As I near my flat in the heart of Paris, on a bridge named for King Louis Philippe, there are a dozen banlieu boys doing hip hop for coins, dancing on their bones, on hips and shoulders and elbows, against the city of light’s night, as backdrop. And for MC Solaar, whose eagerness to save with words while still feeling the sidewalks of life - there is no horn held weakly. There is the strength of a man who can walk in a jungle without rattling leaves, and young enough to learn still more.Interview and photo (c) 2003 Margo Berdeshevsky.

Stones are much slower than animals. Plants give more smell when the rain falls. When winter comes, swallows fly to summer. Pigeons love corn and breadcrumbs. The rains come from water the sun evaporates. When people come from far away they carry bags. When fish swim together they form a school. Larvae become butterflies inside cocoons. Toes keep you from falling. The wise keep silent while others talk. The machines for making nothing aren’t broken. Monkey tails work like arms. Dog tails work like smiles. Cows eat the same food twice. Pages were written to be read. Trees can live longer than people. Elephants and dolphins have a good memory. Words can be used in many ways. Matches can only be used once. When glass is very clean you almost don’t see it. Gum’s for chewing but not swallowing. Dromedaries have one hump and the other kind has two. Midnights last longer than mid-days. Turtles are born in eggs but they aren’t birds. Whales live in water but they aren’t fish. When we brush our teeth they get white. When hair gets old it gets white. Indian music makes rain fall. The bodies of the buried dead fertilize the earth. Cars take many curves to climb the ridge. Kids like to ask questions about everything. Not all answers fit in a grown-up. (translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels) 

As pedras são muito mais lentas que os animais. As plantas exalam mais cheiro quando a chuva cai. As andorinhas quando chega o inverno voam até o verão. Os pombos gostam de milho e de migalhas de pão. As chuvas vêm da água que o sol evapora. Os homens quando vêm de longe trazem malas. Os paices quando nadam juntos formam um cardume. As larvas viram borboletas dentro dos casulos. Os dedos dos pés evitam que se caia. Os sábios ficam em silêncio quandos os outros falam. As máquinas de fazer nada não estão quebradas. Os rabos dos macados servem como braços. Os rabos dos cachorros servem como risos. As vacas comem duas vezes a mesma comida. As páginas foram escritas para serem lidas. As árvores podem viver mais tempo que as pessoas. Os elefantes e golfinhos têm boa memória. Palavras podem ser usadas de muitas maneiras. Os fósforos só podem ser usados uma vez. Os vidros quando estão bem limpos quase não se vê. Chicletes são pra mastigar mas não para engolir. Os dromedários têm uma corcova e os camelos duas. As meia-noites duram menos do que os meio-dias. As tartarugas nascem em ovos mas não são aves. As baleias vivem na água mas não são paeixes. Os dentes quando a gente escova ficam brancos. Cabelos quando ficam velhos ficam brancos. As músicas dos índios fazem cair chuva. Os corpos dos mortos enterrados adubam a terra. Os carros fazem muitas curvas para subir a serra, Crianças gostam de fazer perguntas sobre tudo. Nem toas as respostas cbem num adulto.  

ARNALDO ANTUNES has been doing music, poetry, performances and interventions in other media since 1980. He has published five books: OU E (1982); Psia, Ed. Expressão/Ed Iluminuras, São Paulo (1986/2nd edition); Tudos, Ed. Iluminuras, São Paulo (1990/3rd edition); As Coisas - Jabui Poetry Prize, Ed. Iluminuras, São Paulo (1992/3rd edition) and 2 ou + corpos no mesmo espaço Ed. Perspectiva São Paulo (1997). In 1982 he founded the rock group Titans (Titãs) and performed with them until 1992. They released seven albums by Warner/Brazil, winning many gold and platinum L/P’s. In 1993, after leaving the Titans, he released NOME, a multimedia project developed from his poems and songs. Recently Arnaldo took part in the event Dentro Brasil (Inside Brazil), with a poetry-installation, an exhibition of his visual poetry and the video NOME, alongside a multimedia installation by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto and a program of 23 videos by Brazilian video artists, at the Long Beach Museum of Art in California.     

[ Pressure ]  

When I see you climb the walls I climb them too
No way out of the cosmic mudhole!
No way out of the telephone booth
The classroom, the igloo
No way out of the church, the temple, the mosque
The A train the D train the noisy bar the department store
No way out of the tunnel
Out of the river the lake the ocean the bay
Of the movie theater the motion picture screen
No way out of the doctorate the M.A. the B.A. the PhD.
The toolshed, the library
No way out of Africa, of Europe, out of Asia,
No escape from the guitar, the bassguitar
No escape from the mailman, the endless mail,
No way out of Christmas, of New Year´s
No way out of the sleeping bag no way no way
No way out of the organic vegetable garden
The deep ravine,
The glistening valley,
The starry night,
The zoo, no escape
The coat hangers no escape
The history of Russia no escape
No way out of prison
No way no way
Out of money even if you’re out of it
The Great Chain of Being, no escape
The Magnetic Field, no escape,
No escape no escape
No way out of brain chemistry
Or pain killers or pain
No way off pleasure
The rainbow, no escape
The World Trade Center no escape
My window no escape
No return no way off
No way out of midnight black midnight now coaxing midnight
gentle midnight no escape 

Audio sample: Anne Waldman with Pani Pavlova Band performing ‘Pressure’, with Arjana Shameti on Czech vocals. Track adapted by Arjana Shameti. 

[ Pratitya Samutpada ]

Do you know this term, my friend?
Which describes the coarising & interconnectedness
of all living things?
If you do this to that, this happens
Or that to that, that happens
Or this to this to that to this to that to that
to this to this to that to that to that, this happens The sun shines
The dreamer lies down in a suit of fresh clothes
The rain falls on her book of runes
The book gets wet
The seasons come round again
The weapon she dreams of turns back
on her in the hands of the person
she never considered in her plot to save the worldAh, web-life, I bow to the book-
magical syllables waiting to be caught
I bow to the mind behind it, the tender grass
I bow to the weapon, to the person who wields it
so it dissolves in the handThis to that to this to that to that to that to this to that
To that to this to this to this to that to that to this to that
By this merit may all obtain omniscience.     

[ Verses For The New Amazing Grace ]

The grace of all the bards who pen
Their words do transport me
Sweet vowels & consonants strengthen
Goddess Poesy’s legacyHeart-pearls roll off the poets’ tongues
Who chant in praise of Love
Troubadours blest with hearty lungs
Esoterics zapped from aboveSapho’s bite & Shakespeare’s wit
& Dante’s mystical climb
Dickinson’s rhyme, bearded Whitman’s breath
Are etched in genetic spineAnd if the planet cease to spin
Sad universe go silent, dark
Ancient poetry’s echoes will make a din
Rekindle the primordial sparkO I bow down to Christ’s thorny crown
All sacraments meant to heal
The Buddha’s smile, old Yaweh’s frown
And Allah’s consummate zealBut poetry’s a Goddess sent
To save a wretch like me
She strums the strings of life’s desperate edge
With her haunting melody.

Audio sample: Anne Waldman with Pavla Jonssonova performing ‘Verses For The New Amazing Grace’ by Anne Waldman (track in English and Czech)

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR REKINDLED DYING ART FORMS in his ncredible Talk to Her, a theatrical tour-de-force sprawled across a two-hour cinematic landscape. Reviving ballet, silent movies, and bullfighting, he gracefully shoved back instant-gratification culture’s impatient dogma, reminding us of beauty in temperance, dedication and determination. The film was utterly beautiful; Almodóvar’s fierce softness a contradiction necessarily poignant.

It’s no surprise, then, that Talk to Her’s highlight featured one of the world’s most socially prolific, gut-wrenchingly tearful songwriters. At 60 years old Brazil’s Caetano Veloso continues to record his homeland’s most important music, a natural fusion of sound and poetry, his opaque acoustical backdrop and crystal, almost androgynous, vocals still stopping audiences silent in their tracks.

It wasn’t the first time the pair had worked together - after meeting in Madrid in 1994 Almodóvar asked Veloso to contribute a track for his The Flower of My Secret. Veloso offered a recording of Simon Diaz’s “Tonada de Luna Llena,” used for the film’s closing scene. It was midway through Talk to Her, however, that the Brazilian balladeer crooned a full rendition of “Cucurrucucu Paloma,” a moment so biting and romantic MTV could only dream a video so grand.

Veloso is one of the world’s few living troubadours of global renown. For 40 years — since his first musical assignment scoring the play O Boca de Ouro in 1963 — he has melded poetry with music so powerfully his potent lyricism caused Brazil’s government to exile him in 1969. Today, living in a time (2003) and culture (America) whose top hits could very well include the lyrics “Overthrow the Government” and/or “Democracy in Inaction,” the idea of banishment seems quite archaic. Media ostracizing, parental warning stickers, even jail time mark our societal reactions; but booted from our boundaries for words?

Co-founding the Tropicália movement alongside Gilberto Gil and Gal Costa in 1967, Veloso’s aim was to redefine Brazilian music, taking traditions started by his inspirations (among them, Bossa Nova legend João Gilberto) and propel the culture’s artistic heritage ahead. Tropicália was a reaction against both the oppressive limitations imposed by the government, as well as lack of musical innovation. Drawing from the anthropophagic philosophy of modernist Oswald de Andrade, partial agendas included reprocessing foreign information to create original art, as well as establishing common ground between urban citizens and rural neighbors, closing the economic rift.

In other words, Veloso wanted to feel something other than the militaristic government’s agenda, and he wanted his culture to do the same. Obviously this was not the politicians’ platform, and on December 27, 1968 Veloso and Gil were arrested for supposedly disrespecting the national anthem and Brazilian flag. Having their heads shaven at Army Headquarters in Marechal Dedoro, they were temporarily imprisoned and banned from making public appearances. After performing two farewell shows in July, 1969, the pair left for exile in England, not returning for almost two years.

While this brief history barely touches the surface of Veloso and Tropicália’s importance, it gives an overview of the power of the spoken (written or sung) word. While Veloso’s creative bent stretched into theater, film, politics, and obviously concert, at root was his piercing use of imagery and rousing calls to social revolution. To this day his lyrics walk a brave line between romantic ecstasy and anarchic motives, the two blending seamlessly. His sense of community and charity puncture each syllable, his voice a harmonic reflection of the swirling poetry inside his chest.

Is there any irony that many of history’s exiled have been poets? On one side exists government, backed by armed forces, thousands of soldiers brandishing guns, knives, scientists with nuclear and atomic knowledge, policing units and prisons able to contain endless dissidents. On the other: a human and their word choice. The humor lies not in the political motive of exile, but in the mass fear of introspection; that is, a poet is a mirror, and few want to be reflected upon.

What else could explain a governing entity banishing their citizens? Imprisonment is a wicked display of cruelty; exile cuts physical roots from body, a true severing of umbilical from amniotic. Had they expected Veloso to cave, lay down forever his pen and voice and lead a suburban life in Chelsea, London; maybe pick up a job in office or baking bread around the corner? After his initial shock (in which he contemplated suicide), Veloso’s lyrical fire was stoked; by the time he returned in January 1971 to attend his parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, his journals were full of new verse, his voice strong — and piercing — as ever.

Veloso’s catalog is a roving, explorative testament to deeply progressive, social poetics. His most recent album, Live in Bahia (Nonesuch), features two discs of some of his most beloved, important works to date; in this single collection one begins to understand the depth of Veloso’s influence. “Tropicália,” the theme song of their movement (with Veloso himself claiming rights: “I organize the movement, I lead the carnival, I inaugurate the monument on the central plateau of the nation”), sounds as vibrant today as the 1967 original.

Veloso’s songs contain more footnote than lyric. “Sugar Cane Field Forever,” for instance, is only three lines long but points to a plethora of subjects: the Tropicália movement in general, Bahia’s once slave-owning population, the singer’s long-standing appreciation of the Beatles. Every track is loaded with historical relevance, inevitably pointing to one of the most dangerous aspects of literate culture — the attempt to define poetry, to confine art within singular context.

With Veloso’s universal appeal (though rooted in social and physical events), the temptation to constrict “meaning” of his words is fatal. True, any poet who can incite revolutions certainly has a message. But there is something so primordially basic, so moving in his voice mere words fail to convey, or capture, the grandness of his work. When tears fall across Marco’s cheek in Talk to Her, one need not understand Portuguese to be moved by his quiet beauty.

It is of little irony, then, that Veloso’s work is both revolutionary and romantic. The genres are inseparable; to be a poet of one is to work within the other. Both politics and relationships speak to the potential freedom of humanity. The opportunity to build within another, create community based on respect and trust, and evolve is the foundation of both society and family. Two of Pablo Neruda’s most loved collections span these topics: Canto General, his political opus, and The Captain’s Verses, a starry-eyed, heartfelt classic. His pen was sword and sooth, a soft lover tempering the flames of hell within. Veloso carries the same weaponry. [more in Rattapallax issue 9 ]

Derek Beres was the managing editor of Global Rhythm and has written for The Village Voice, Urb, Trace, Relix, and Blue. He is currently working on his first book, Global Beat Fusion, about the electronic fusion of South Asian classical music. He is a globa l beat DJ and plays nationally as part of the Globesonic crew and is one-half of DJ duo Baroque Monad. He also served as a featured journalist for the “Picks of the Week” segment on Metro TV’s The Daily Beat and has recently launched a clothing line, Bhakti. He is also the music editor of Rattapallax. For more info check www.earthrisearts.com.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS NOT THE FUTURE. IT IS THE MOMENT. Romantics need not worry, for, to dispel the mystique, there requires as much human input and creativity into making a progressive, inspired club cut as any piece of music. Computers are yet another extension of earthly possibility; sounds rendered are further progress into our potential.

The Now Sound of Brazil references an incredibly expansive electronic revolution occurring for our southern neighbors. This dozen-deep compilation on Six Degrees Records (licensed from Brazil’s Zirigulboom/Crammed Discs) features top-notch artists stretching bossa nova and samba sounds with futuristic vision, poignant, tasteful melodies adrift in an electronic landscape.

The next phase of national music - a move to the dance floor via digital a la Tropicália to politics — Now Sound presents artists pushing sonic boundaries with experimental groove tunes. Not that the experiment is unknown; Brazil has long been a hotspot for getting down. Swerving from acoustic, soul-moving dynamics to upbeat, explosive anthems made infamous in club and football games alike, rhythm is not acquired, it’s genetic.

Steady textures of percussion mesh with lilting vocals throughout Brazil’s history. Now Sound features top artists doing such: Bebel Gilberto, Bossacucanova, Trio Mocotó, and Zuco 103, as well as two posthumous tributes via Suba (aka Mitar Subotic), the great producer unfortunately killed in a studio fire in November 1999.

The disc opens with Suba’s “Tantos Desejos (Nicola Conte remix)” a brilliant downtempo club cut capturing the essence of electro-fusing. Weaving jazz sensibility into bossa-layers, featuring the soft-spoken vocals of Rosalia de Souza, it’s the kind of song to sit back with and nod, tap out the rhythm and float into gorgeous instrumentation.

Segueing into the Bossacucanova track, we hit full-on samba jazz (epitomized later by the Trio Mocotó track “Os Orixás”), turning from digital to live players. Integrity maintains through Now Sound, be it performance or technological-driven; in fact, the most interesting aspect of this collection is how brilliantly the two fuse, as if no separation existed. “Influência do Jazz” moves easily into Peter Kruder’s beloved remix of Bebel Gilberto’s “Tanto Tempo” (also featured on the incredible global beats compilation Sultan32 Presents: Earth N Bass), a titled, bouncing track led by a phased-out bass loop contrasting light piano tones.

From here the disc varies, maintaining a strong lounge feel rooted in chest-opening rhythms. The Brazilian/ German/ Amsterdam connection gets wicked with Zuco 103’s “Outro Lado (Charles Webster remix),” and Cibelle, featured vocalist on Suba’s early Brazilian work, plays backbeat on “Dia de Yemanjá.”

The Now Sound is, as far as titles go, pure marketing. Its attempt to define a movement gives it a point of reference, but (as with most artistic expressions) cannot define or limit the smooth, softly expressive music being imported from down south. A boggling contradiction to the economic and social disparities the country has faced, this compilation points to the great testament of human will: light in the face of darkness, yielding in forceful collapse. And, most of all, a shimmer of hope sung through a divided nation in cultural braise. — Derek Beres 

Derek Beres is the managing editor of Global Rhythm and has written for The Village Voice, Urb, Trace, Relix, and Blue. He is currently working on his first book, Global Beat Fusion, about the electronic fusion of South Asian classical music. He is a globa l beat DJ and plays nationally as part of the Globesonic crew and is one-half of DJ duo Baroque Monad. He also served as a featured journalist for the “Picks of the Week” segment on Metro TV’s The Daily Beat and has recently launched a clothing line, Bhakti. He is also the music editor of Rattapallax. For more info check www.earthrisearts.com.