O Caminho Do Bem. Tim Maia. 1975. Seroma Discos.

 Translated into English as The Pathway to Good, Tim Maia’s paradisiacal hymn to Brazil’s UFO cult Rational Culture is a richly textured evocation of after hours disco mythology: the cavernesque darkness of the air conditioned interior, the early morning gravitational fatigue just before your second wind kicks in, the quaalude induced, rollercoaster rhythms of drug comfort. The music itself, though of secondary concern in the disco experience, inevitably proves to be of grave consequence if only because our expectations, contrary to intelligence gathered from previous disco excursions, are set unreasonably high during sobriety. Not for nothing did Morrissey once exhort the record buying public to hang the DJ. Hang the blessed DJ. Yet disco was the site where strangers became family; not the loving strangers with whom you shared address and DNA but the dysfunctional one who knew to give you the proper space to self-isolate while disassociating. In translation from the Portuguese, Maia’s lyric is a non sequiters grab bag made up of cult related jargon and generic religious instruction; though these disjointed lines sometimes veer in the direction of pop sloganeering, Maia’s only concern as their author was religious propagation, not artistic expression, so the lines, lacking any tension, simply fall flat. What gives O Caminho Do Bem its strength is rhythmic durability, and Maia’s flexibility as an artist, bouncing steadily from the camp of cult dogma into camp itself, that wily offspring of irony and self-indulgence, always reluctant to be legitimized or even defined, and that in disco found mass exposure though, true to its nature, remained camouflaged by the pop art it so generously fueled. Today, camp is still indelicately shy of the overly obvious, appearing unpredictably for instance among a current political class desperately striving to appear normal while rabidly thirsting for a national fascist leadership. In 1976, Maia left Rational Culture, later expressing a two-fold disappointment with how the cult had failed in its initial promises before and after his joining. A pair of lyrics from Maia reveals all we need to know of the severe limitations of cult logic and its application to human behavior. “Love from a sweet paradise…where good always shines, not evil,” and “In a nature where there is no regulation good cannot exist,” are both fantasy reductions of the complexity of human psychology intended to manipulate the childish mind that dares to believe either one as precepts for living. Such falsehoods would never fly in a disco setting. They’re the reasons we take drugs.