Calice. Chico Buarque. 1978. Philips.

 Human sensuality, so intrinsic to the routine of modern experience that to not take the function of our senses for granted would task us with immeasurable complications. Enforced separation from, or mutilation to, one’s sensory organs is a common authoritarian governmental tactic, and is, without having to venture too wild a guess, happening even now. On June 14, 1971, Stuart Angel,  member of the urban guerrilla group MR-8, was arrested by officers of the Air Force Information Center and tortured, his mouth forcibly attached to a jeep’s exhaust pipe and his body dragged across a base courtyard. When Chico Buarque sings Calice’s penultimate line in Portuguese—“I want to smell diesel smoke”—memorializing the resistance fighter’s horrific death, he’s already recounted in Baudelairian detail—“Being very fat, the pig no longer walks. After being used a lot, the knife no longer cuts.”—the nightmare of life during a military dictatorship. As if to stress what is lost in the oppressive atmosphere of censorship and compulsory nationalism, Calice’s lyrical imagery is a kind of grim reminder of surrealism’s origins in a time of mass carnage and social upheaval; its creators taught us that the search for beauty during wartime, though not impossible, will cost us untold mental stress. Buarque’s vocal strength is uncanny; his artistic focus never wavers. Because he is witness to human terror, he does not look away; neither does the listener. His singing voice holds its share of tension, which in turn becomes the drama of the record’s fantastic narrative; Buarque only allows himself one moment of overt, unsentimental emotionality, during the song’s opening chorus, which quickly gives way to a deliberative authority whose grip upon the listener doesn’t slacken, and that, by way of a just discernible acceleration of tempo, gains a terrible momentum the closer Buarque pushes himself towards Calice’s unsettling climax. Having emptied the chalice of its “blood red wine,” the singer experiences what he calls “this Homeric drunkenness of the world,” that all-consuming madness already within us, which strips us of all clarity of the senses, and keeps only our starkly exposed vulnerability intact. Like Coltrane’s Alabama, Calice is a sublime record of a  crime against humanity, told from inside the experience with such heartrending tenderness that it has the power, if taken seriously, to adhere you to the side of peace. Beauty is a way forward. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, and c
Read more

Blues Is King. Marshall Crenshaw. 1985. Warner Bros.

  Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music of Marsha
Read more

Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. BeauSoleil. 1988. Arhoolie.

  A modicum of sadness is built into BeauSoleil’s rendition of the Lawrence Walker ballad Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. It’s the emotional center point around which the song revolves, illuminating the record’s good faith by fixing the listener’s attention on the band’s collaborative dynamic, the process by which they draw poignancy from each instrumental performance. Every pop record is an implied contractual agreement between artist and listener, with listener consenting to his role as subjective recipient of the commercial audio product. The basic nature of this role is subject to change over a period of time as the listener’s relationship with the record changes, given, but not limited, to issues of personality maturity. Typically, the consumer role will fall into one of two camps: either the faceless, one-of-millions mass audience whose pop experience is often social or the cogent individual whose expectations of the pop experience are more personal and long lasting. The most signifi
Read more