“O Trem Azul” by Ronaldo Bastos and Lô Borges

Singalong 018: Living musically in Brazil

“Coisas que a gente se esquece de dizer” [Things we forget to say]

Here's a song from Minas Gerais, as performed by Lô Borges on the original Clube da Esquina. You might not know or care about Brazilian music, you may also not understand Portuguese. Or maybe you do, and this is right up your alley. Either way, “O Trem Azul” is as good as any other place to start. It’s a big world.

The first version I heard was by Elis Regina on her over-the-top live album of the same title, which was taken from a bootleg cassette from one of her last concerts, shortly before she died of a heart attack. I’d say that her “Trem Azul” is an album that can only be appreciated if you’ve traversed the Elis rabbit hole and are coming to the end of it, just like she was that night.

But let’s talk about Elis some other time.

I've always been a sucker for Brazilian melodies. They're just made for singing, and Brazilian composers put a premium on intricate chords and surprising turns of harmony. “O Trem Azul” moves around harmonically in a characteristically unconventional way that was emblematic of the Movimento Mineiro. It’s super chromatic but also open-sounding at the same time. Some would say it sounds expansive, others might say “get this out of my ears”. You do you.

“Frases que o vento vem às vezes me lembrar” [Phrases which the wind comes to remind me of sometimes]

You, if you’re coming as a tourist, might have heard about Samba being the "main" form of Brazilian music. Just like you might hear people speak of Tango as Argentina's main musical export. If you show up on a plane and sign up in your hotel for a curated musical excursion around town, that's probably what you'll go see. You'll go home and tell your friends you heard some cool Samba music on your trip. “Brazil was amaaaaazing” etc. Another sticker for your suitcase.

But Samba is played differently in every single Brazilian town. Tango is merely the folk music local to Buenos Aires, it’s hard to find it at all once you leave the capital. You’ll hear myriad genres in these countries, all of them continually cross-referencing one another. Generic terms like “samba” and “tango” are only useful in the shortest of shorthands, totally useless for any true music fan.

We miss a lot if we simply look for styles and genres. Samba is an easy word to remember when you're looking down at the "third" world from the "first", building a little World Music™ catalog in your head. It might seem satisfying to put simple labels on things, but you'll remain a tourist. So let’s take a little trip inland.

“Coisas que ficaram muito tempo por dizer” [Things which went unsaid for a long time]

The Movimento Mineiro is impossible to accurately contextualize without at least a cursory familiarity with Brazilian culture of the late 60s and early 70s during the second dictatorship. (Yes, there were two.)

I'm not the historian to give you the proper overview but I can generalize: in the USA we had a young Boomer™ generation which was mad about Jim Crow and Vietnam. You could say they were generally uncomfortable with the the rigidity of their upbringing in the 50's, a rigidity resulting from the awkward mix of unprecedented post-WW2 prosperity, the mostly-unhealed war trauma carried by their parents, civil discord, political polarization, and the whole country's ongoing lack of accountability for our racial legacy.

I wasn’t there, but it seems like the boomers were barely able to hold it together.

It's all been mythologized to death, along with the music of that time. Psychedelia and mysticism figured very heavily in our boomer generation's cultural explorations, fueled by a general rejection of their inheritance and their desire to build a new, more open and liberated society.

Google all of that if you need to, but you likely don't.

In Brazil, however, you'd have found an entirely different situation. Youth culture there took a lot of inspiration from the Beatles, from jazz and from the generally future-leaning thirst for liberation that was in vogue at the time.

You might say there was some trickle down culture too: Brazil had a hippie scene too, man. It was called Tropicalia.

Google that too, but first: imagine how a hippie movement might play out under an actual military dictatorship? Without the big booming postwar economy. Without tons of flashy new consumer tech flying around.

“Na canção do vento não se cansam de voar” [In the song of the wind, they never tire of flying]

Dictatorship? Yes. The mean, angry part of the country had taken full control, and one of the ways they exercised this control was to conduct a wholesale purge of politicians and intellectuals from the other side. Thousands of citizens were taken from their homes and never heard from again. Gone. For 21 years, everyone lived with the very real possibility of getting kidnapped, tortured and permanently disappeared.

So instead of glammy televised love-ins and encampments, young Brazilians had to do a lot of that shit in secret. And they did, but mostly by the coast: Rio, São Paulo.

Meanwhile, the kids from Minas Gerais were country. Imagine the Pennsylvania of Brazil. Mining country.

Growing up around Belo Horizonte, Lo Borges and Márcio Borges met Milton Nascimento, Wagner Tiso and Toninho Horta. They were all far enough from the coast to do their own thing. They made music which gave voice to a lot of unexpressed creative undercurrents, threads which didn’t weave seamlessly into the coastal styles.

They dug the Beatles, but they also dug Baroque music and Duke Ellington. They were psychedelically influenced, but primarily they were South American. Their songs had a nakedly yearning, elemental quality to them. A style was born, their album became a hit, and it sparked a movement.

“Você pega o trem azul, o Sol na cabeça / O Sol pega o trem azul, você na cabeça / O Sol na cabeça” [You take the blue train, the sun on your head / The sun takes the blue train, you’re in your head / The sun on your head]

They called it the Movimento Mineiro. It was totally distinct from the tourist stuff: not on the postcard. These album covers featured less exposed skin, more questions, more loneliness. And the songs contained many, many more major 7ths and augmented chords.

The song "O Trem Azul" by Lô Borges expresses the complexity of human communication, telling of things we forget to say and phrases brought back by the wind. The lyric alludes to thoughts and emotions left long unsaid, echoing in the song of the wind.

The chorus, "Você pega o trem azul, o sol na cabeça" can be interpreted metaphorically: the "blue train" symbolizing your journey through life, your head illuminated by the sun. The song reflects on lost opportunities and unexpressed sentiments, urging us to pay more attention to the feelings we repress, which resonate within us and affect our lives. The wind reminds us of our forgotten words and the importance of fully expressing ourselves.

Living in Brazil changed my life. Let me try to sing you one of their songs: