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CD Review
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Nashville Scene, CD Review >>
Raw Elegance
Gorgeous new album by Brazilian singer Seu Jorge challenges prevailing notions of sophistication
by Edd Hurt
If bossa nova remains, as the writer Julian Dibbell describes it, “a free-floating signifier of intercontinental savoir faire,” then Seu Jorge’s Cru (Raw in English) finds Brazilian music at an internationalist moment that embraces the idea of sophistication even as it pokes holes in it. Covering Serge Gainsbourg and Elvis Presley, mixing bossa nova languor with hip-hop percussion and wah-wah guitar, and decrying breast implants as the useless trappings of luxury and wealth, Jorge combines highly aestheticized, stylish music with politicized lyrics to produce a record that is beautiful and sexy, and more than a little spooky.
Although Jorge has been a star in his native Brazil and in France for years, U.S. audiences first became aware of him as the singing sailor Pelé dos Santos in Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Jorge’s Portuguese renditions of Bowie classics like “Rebel Rebel” and “Life on Mars?” added needed verve to the movie’s attenuated narrative, and placed him squarely in the tradition of Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Elis Regina, all of whom have interpreted Anglophone pop.
Unlike Regina, whose take on the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers” is florid and all but unlistenable, or Gil, whose 1967 “Sunday at the Park” is a Brazilian “A Day in the Life,” Jorge is not a particularly accomplished singer. But the contrast between his somewhat rough voice and the elegant samba-hip-hop arrangement of “Bem Querer” (“My Dear”) makes for enjoyable listening. The song’s harmonic sophistication gives the performance a spacious quality not often found in rock ’n’ roll.
While his reading of Presley’s “Don’t” is interesting if hardly compelling, Jorge’s interpretation of Gainsbourg’s paean to suicide “Chatterton” stands with Veloso’s A Foreign Sound cover of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” as exemplary recontextualization. The original was a great joke. Jorge’s version, which references Kurt Cobain and former Brazilian President Getulio Vargas (himself a suicide in 1954) is altogether darker, closing with a strangled yelp that says it all.
Elsewhere, “Fiore de la Città,” which Jorge sings in Italian, is gorgeous post-bossa subtly touched with electronica. “Mania De Peitão” (“Large Chested Mania”) is Jorge and producer Gringo da Parada at their most minimalist and innovative, and this tale of a woman whose enhanced charms “darken the moonlight” reveals Jorge’s commonsense politics: “But what people don’t know / Is that this tremendous cyclone 20th century muse / Is a silicone trap.”
“Large Chested Mania” is an admirable expansion of pop subject matter. On “Eu Sou Favela,” Jorge, a former resident of Rio’s notorious hillside slums, asserts that “The favela is not only a refuge of thugs / They are only modest people, discriminated against.” His is an internationalist pop message that ought to make us rethink our notions of sophistication. 10/13/05 >> go there
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