Tom Zé

It has been several years that I have been listening to Tom Zé - a happy, blissful love affair with his clicks, tones and melodic jolts. Tom Zé comes closest to distilling a feeling I have of ‘being’ in my skin, and his fusion of sound, humour and poetry fills me with sweet waves of contentment.

“When I saw
That the Plaza of the Afflicted
Wasn’t wide enough
To hold my affliction
I went to live at the Station of Light
Because everything was dark
Inside my heart”

He plays with and breaks down sounds and meanings, rebuilding and destroying at the same time. There are a couple of academic articles about him I just found:

Tom Zé and the Tropicalist Experience

Tom Zé - Perfect Sound

“When I arrived from the stars
I entered the earth
Through a cave
Called birth

I was a ship
   a bird
   from a Hail Mary
And like a beast
  that roars
I entered the atmosphere

And spit, squeezed
A vegetable morsel
Forcing my way through
The barrier
Bleeding, tearing
Climbing the hillside
Inverted orgasm
I screamed when I saw
I was already breathing”


Zé radically illuminated the possible, but inevitable, horror of self-realization with the song “Nave Maria” (from Brazil Classics 4). The title is an obvious play on the Catholic phrase; Catholicism is the principle European-derived religion of Latin America, and its annual and repetitious rituals were criticiZéd by the Tropicalistas. Maria represents the mother, and in this song Zé seems to portray her as real mother, spiritual mother, and perhaps the cultural European mother of Brazil. This tale of a screaming birth, an “inverted orgasm,” in which the baby struggles and crawls through the bleeding barrier of the vagina, only to scream when reality first confronts him, can be taken as an allegory of Brazil and its long, harsh struggle to break free of its past and enter the future. Zé is saying Brazil must kick and scream to get on the other side. *(from the second link above)*

He does of course have a website (in Portugese), and there are some nice reviews of his work available. David Byrne who (quite rightly) loves Tom Zé, has him as an artist for his label Luaka Bop.

I’m making it clear to confuse you,
I’m confusing you to make things clear.
I’m illuminating so I can blind,
I’m going blind so I can guide.

Posted by Ian at April 28, 2003 01:55 AM | TrackBack §