Portrait of Brazilian composer and singer Rita Lee.Roberto de Carvalho (RR SS)
Brazil mourns on Tuesday the singer Rita Lee, queen of Brazilian rock and psychedelia, who has died at the age of 75. Star of tropicalism with the band Os Mutantes, on the road and on stages since the revolutionary sixties, Lee sold tens of millions of records. Two years ago he was diagnosed with lung cancer. "She passed away on Monday night at her home in São Paulo surrounded by her family, as she wished," her relatives said Tuesday in reporting her death. The news has immediately become the opening of newspapers and television news.
Brazilian Rita Lee — her real name — was born in São Paulo on New Year's Eve 1947. His father was descended from Confederate Americans settled in Brazil and his mother, from Italians.
Instrumentalist, also actress and writer, Lee is celebrated by her compatriots as one of the greatest composers of pop in Portuguese, as a feminist and defender of rights and freedoms since the years of the dictatorship, when her artistic career started and censorship was a daily occurrence.
Os Mutantes was not his first group, but the first with which he had fame. The psychedelic rock band was created in 1966 by three teenagers, Lee and brothers Arnaldo and Sergio. "They looked like three angels," Caetano Veloso wrote when he first saw them.
And in that mythical 1968, os Mutantes with their electric guitars and she disguised as a pregnant bride accompanied Caetano Veloso when they raised the ire of the most intolerant purists with their song É proibido proibir because they considered them sold to the American empire, to Anglo-Saxon music. To the boos, Veloso responded with a diatribe that began with a "you are not understanding anything, nothing, nothing" that has been inscribed in Brazilian musical history. "If in politics you were like in aesthetics, we are screwed," he added to the university students who threw eggs and bottles at them.
Over the years Os Mutantes became a cult group and decades later their music was celebrated by planetary artists such as Kurt Cobain, Beck or David Byrne.
Rita Lee during her performance at the Rock in Rio festival on January 17, 1985, in Rio de Janeiro.
Rita Lee was undergoing treatment for lung cancer detected a couple of years ago. He wrote about this day, about how his death would be received, in his biography. The words and tone reflected well his personality, his sense of humor and his sarcasm: "When I die, I can imagine the words of affection of those who hate me. Some radio stations will play my songs without paying, for free. The fans, sincere, will wield my albums, they will sing Ovelha Negra [Black Sheep, one of his most famous songs], the televisions must already have prepared the summary of my career. In virtual networks, some will say: 'Wow, I thought the old woman had already died, hehehe."
And so it has been.
Fans will have the opportunity to say goodbye to her this Wednesday, when she will be veiled in the planetarium of Ibirapuera Park, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. She will then be cremated.
Os Mutantes were a key part of the Tropicalia movement, led by Veloso with Gilberto Gil. He has dismissed her with an affectionate tweet: "Rita, Anibal, goat.. whimsical, capricorn, friend... Rest, my sister." Chico Buarque has only written the name of the artist under an old photo of her on stage, cheerful, with red hair.
Rita Lee was a strong defender of transgression and believed that combining Brazilian popular music with international rock was as or more groundbreaking than the protest song where the universe of the short-sighted left began and ended.
At that time, the artist and her bandmate and then husband, Arnaldo Baptista, created a kind of hippy commune. Times when drugs were an essential ingredient of the creative process. Rita Lee had to undergo a few treatments to combat alcohol and drug abuse.
In that environment with an air of revolution, machismo was well rooted, so she did not hesitate to join the feminist cause soon. And when she was expelled from Os Mutantes, she proclaimed: "Although the Bolinha club said that, to make rock, you had to have cojones, it can also be done with a uterus, ovaries and without the typical feminist accent."
Lee, also named by his two sisters, was a tribute from his father to General Robert E. Lee, leader of the Confederates in the Civil War.
The queen of Brazilian rock and psychedelia leaves a husband, Roberto de Carvalho, and three children. And he wrote down the epitaph he wanted: "It was not a good example, but they were good people."
