![]() And that's sort of what she's leaving us with, which is amazing. RAY: That was not kind of the template of womanhood pop stars when she came into the world. Montana Ray says Lee's outspokenness set her apart. ![]() In 2021, when diagnosed with lung cancer, she joked about naming her tumor after then-President Jair Bolsonaro. GOMEZ SARMIENTO: As a pop star, she broke boundaries in the way she explored sex, politics and religion. RITA LEE: (Singing in non-English language). She said she was, quote, "in search of Brazil, Brazil, Brazil." GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Lee left the band in 1972 for a solo career. MONTANA RAY: She was really central to that movement and was hounded by the apparatus of the state police. Lee told The New York Times in 2001 that artists had to, quote, "be creative, but evasive, to avoid the repression." Montana Ray, a Spanish and Portuguese translator who teaches at NYU, says Lee refused to conform at a time when the regime demanded it. ![]() It was a countercultural scene that flourished during Brazil's military dictatorship. GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Combining rock, psychedelia and pan-Latin rhythms, the tripped-out trio formed part of the Tropicalia movement. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PANIS ET CIRCENSES") She played the piano from an early age and co-founded Os Mutantes as a teenager in the 1960s. But Lee became known for progressive politics as much as for music. Her father descended from American confederates who fled the South after the Civil War. GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Rita Lee Jones de Carvalho was born in Sao Paulo. OS MUTANTES: (Singing in non-English language). ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO, BYLINE: Rita Lee once told a Brazilian newspaper that her band, Os Mutantes, quote, "came from another planet to take over the world." That's kind of what it sounded like. NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento has this appreciation. My generation suffered the claustrophobia of a brutal dictatorship, and using drugs was a way to breathe airs of freedom.Brazil's queen of rock, Rita Lee, passed away this week. “I only regret my delay in realising that the ‘medicine’ had long since expired. “I recognise that my best songs were written in an altered state, and my worst too,” she wrote. She was a self-described rebel and “hippie communist” who was arrested for marijuana possession and did several stints in rehab. Rita Lee could not be accused of shunning the rock’n’roll lifestyle. She had a long string of hits, most of which are still adored to this day in Brazil, and her songs made frequent appearances on the soundtracks of South America’s beloved telenovelas. Rita Lee left in 1972 and forged a wildly successful solo career, backed initially by her band Tutti Frutti, and later by her husband Robert de Carvalho. Musicians as diverse as David Byrne, Kurt Cobain and Beck all spoke of being inspired by the band. Os Mutantes recorded two albums, their self-titled debut (1968) and Mutantes (1969) that reflected its aesthetic, before moving into more conventional rock territory. Changing their name to Os Mutantes (“the Mutants”), they met the singer Gilberto Gil, who drew them into the dissident artistic Tropicália movement.Īlso known as “Tropicalismo”, the movement, which found its clearest expression in music, fused the popular with the avant-garde and Brazilian and African rhythms with American and British pop and psychedelia. ![]() She joined an all-girl band, the Teenage Singers, then in 1966 – two years after a military dictatorship had seized power in Brazil – she teamed up with her fellow Paulistas, brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista, in forming a band they initially called Six Sided Rockers. She attended college but soon dropped out to follow a musical path. She was educated in a French-language school and became fluent in Spanish, French, and Italian, as well as Portuguese and English. Rita studied classical piano, but when it was time for the debutante ball that many Brazilian girls have to mark their 15th birthdays, she asked for a drum kit instead. Rita Lee Jones was born in São Paulo on Decemher American-Brazilian father, Charles Fenley Jones, was a dentist – the family spoke English at home – while her mother Romilda Padula, of Italian ancestry, was a pianist.
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