If I ever label some singer/song-writer as the _insert cliché Dylan or the next Dylan, please shoot me with formaldehyde bullets. Or take away my internet-tube access, or fart in my general direction. Or something drastic. I don't know about you, but whenever I read an opening paragraph that uses that particular snowclone, I grit my teeth, and often stop reading. Human DNA is complex enough that nobody is like anybody else. We are all similar, some more than others, but no more than that.
Rant aside, Caetano Veloso has made some spectacular music, and some absolute crap. Always an interesting man though. This album sounds fun:
Caetano Veloso's Cê: Brazilian Crooner Ain't Suitable for Framing Just Yet “Brazil's Dylan” is the hack's tag for Caetano Veloso. Sure, he was the voice of his generation and weathered the attendant rhetorical junk, but while Dylan played at myth, Caetano became the golden boy incarnate for his country's most influential avant-garde movement, Tropicália. Dylan never held a gun to his own head on television and didn't go to jail for his art. Revolutionaries, though, are easier to love when pried from history and cramped . . . read more (By Mike Powell)
(hmm, Voice link seems to be broken. I'll check later)
Don McLeese writes:
The adventurous veteran rarely fails to surprise, as Caetano Veloso continues to confound the easy-listening expectations that surround Brazilian music. Co-produced by Veloso's son, Moreno, and featuring the crisp, edgy backing of a band of three musicians a generation younger than Caetano, this is his version of a rock album. The freshness of the arrangements appeals throughout, from the propulsive “Rocks” with its frenetic guitar break through the tom-tom throb and call-and-response vocals of “Waly Salomão” and the spoken word, soaring harmonies, and art-house atmospherics of the closing “O Herói” (“The Hero”). Yet the supple vocals, languid balladry, and seductive sensuality (at times so lyrically explicit in translation it might make Prince blush) render this very much a Veloso album above all else.
Tags: Brazil
Cê is letter "C" for Caetano. The LP has the same color scheme as "Uns." whose LP cover was different. If these crrretins knew so much about Caetano they would call him Caetano, not "Veloso." Chico Buarque de Hollanda is Chico, pronounced shee-co.
A friend of mine and I spoke about these comparisons long ago. We ended up establishing a parallel: Caetano is to Dylan as Chico is to Paul Simon.
Caetano wasn't alone in Tropicália. Gil, Gal, Os Mutantes, Torquato Neto, Tom Zé and Rogério Duprat were there too. As for buying a record, I will wait to hear from my Brazilian friends. I strongly disliked his "A Foreign Sound." From Nirvana to Cole Porter's "So in Love" it all sucked rotten eggs.