Now on sale
Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Email article | 
Digg it | 
del.icio.us |
Print article
Arnaldo Antunes. Photo: Marcia Xavier. All photos courtesy of Arnaldo Antunes.
We listen to Arnaldo Antunes on the radio and on CD; we watch Arnaldo Antunes on stage and on TV; we read Arnaldo Antunes in books and magazines; he is in the theaters and art galleries; he is by himself and with a group. His presence is at once quiet and impressive, violent and smooth, refined and pop.
It all began in São Paulo’s underground circuit in the early 1980s. Antunes was a vocalist with the band the Titãs (Titans), and its leading lyricist. The Titãs’ heavy sound, multiple influences, sharp lyrics, and astonishing stage presence turned the band into a rock bastion in Brazil.
But Antunes’s lyrics went well beyond the standard of rock and roll. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the sentimental exploration of certain bands and singers: the emotional overflows, the calculated grief, the love or generational dramas of the messy rocker aesthetic. By contrast, Antunes’s lyrics were sophisticated poems that could be unsettlingly surrealist, dadaist, or minimalist, that were always well constructed, but also capable of releasing the spontaneity of singing and dancing. The violence and power of the songs came, above all, from this conjunction: on one side, a rigorous, intellectually audacious force, in constant dialogue with literature, poetry, cinema, and the tradition of Brazilian song; on the other, the accelerated pulse, irony, and wrath exploding out of the lyrics, the vehemence of either screamed or deliberately contained singing—like a machine’s voice—and the might of the musical instruments, which appeared to want to demolish what they had themselves erected, the references to rock’s universe.
In 1983, a year before the Titãs launched their first record, Antunes published a letterpress edition of OU E (OR AND), his first book of visual poems. His second book, Psia (Psst) appeared in 1986, the same year the band released its record Cabeça dinossauro (Dinosaur Head), a huge success. When Antunes decided to quit the group in 1992, his music, poetry, and visual arts gained momentum. Books, albums, art shows, readings, performances, sound tracks, individual works, collective works—so many projects followed that it would take several pages to try to give a reasonable overview of Antunes’s accomplishments. And while quantity and multiplicity may impress, one is also equally attracted to the quality of everything, and by the existence of a unity that seems to link, subtly but with an undeniable force, the creator’s different sides with those of his creations. Another poet from São Paulo, Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), once wrote, “I am three hundred, I am three hundred and fifty.” Antunes isn’t any less.
In Antunes’s writing, one can glimpse a thread of other writings, which go from the seventeenth century (the satirical baroque of Gregório de Mattos) to the nineteenth (the experimental cosmopolitanism of Sousândrade or the acrid morbidity of Augusto dos Anjos) to the twentieth (the radical synthesis of Oswald de Andrade, the constructivism of João Cabral de Melo Neto, the visuality of Concrete poetry, and Guimarães Rosa’s reconstruction of speech). All that filtered by a singular, contemporary vision, capable of becoming a diction in itself.
Antunes embraces both the legacy of Bossa Nova—in his music, with its structured spontaneity, there are noticeable traces of Vinicius de Moraes’s lyrics and the singing style of João Gilberto, who gave songs intimacy and the spontaneity of speech, valuing emptiness, cuts, montage, and the colloquial—and that of the Tropicalista movement with its radical merging of national and foreign elements, the archaic and contemporary, and high and low culture, as well as its synthesis of all the multiplicity and hybridism of Brazilian cultural miscegenation. As if this weren’t enough, Antunes also embraces the romantic music of the ’50s, and rock and post-rock already merged with reggae and funk.
In all of Antunes’s output there is a flow between poetry and song, book and record, singing and silence. The underlying sign is always the word, which enables the crossings between different languages and which is, without doubt, the element Arnaldo Antunes privileges in everything he does.
