Antônio José Santana Martins was born in Brazil's Bahia region in 1936. We know him as Tom Zé, and at age 70 he's still making resolutely avant-garde music, or "spoken and sung journalism," as he calls it. Zé has never had much use for artistic boundaries, and his history of creating challenging and sometimes outright weird records always kept him on the fringe of Brazilian music. It wasn't until David Byrne discovered his records in the late 1980s, ultimately making him the first signing to the Luaka Bop label, that he gained international fame as one of Brazil's most inspired sonic troublemakers. At the time, he had been making a living in his hometown at his nephew's gas station.
Nearly 20 years later, Zé occupies a revered space in Brazilian culture and music well out of proportion to any sales or popular notoriety he managed to compile in his heyday. But Zé's latest opus, Estudando o Pagode, is worthy of acclaim purely on its own terms. It's an ambitious, flawed, and ultimately vital work of astounding creativity that's in some ways even more radical than the recordings he made in his thirties.
Musically, the album is exactly what the title says it is: A study of pagode music. Pagode first developed as a sort of recreational, improvised music for samba musicians to play at gatherings and has evolved into a dance music of the street-- something of a rural analog to the baile funk that's become well-known in the last few years. Zé claims to have chosen this form largely because, like baile funk (and, for that matter, Tropicalia), it is widely reviled by the Brazilian middle classes. Of course, a guy like Zé was never going to play it totally straight, and the music is shot through with the influence of rock, funk, and hip-hop. The lyrics in pagode frequently objectify women and Zé explicitly confronts this aspect of the style and subverts the music's normal focus.
Lyrically, Estudando o Pagode is a complex, layered operetta featuring a cast of characters ranging from supernatural beings to everyday people. The overriding theme is the oppression of women by men throughout history; much of Zé's drama centers around a male character who, when attempting to shed paternalistic ideas, can't help bringing his own traditional associations into play. So the use of pagode music as the basis for the album is both ironic and culturally astute: It keeps the album firmly rooted in popular Brazilian forms, while using a traditionally macho music to denounce the subjugation of women.
Does this all sound complicated enough for you? Estudando o Pagode certainly sprawls, but it does so in the same way Rio, São Paulo, and Brasilia sprawl: Alternately in patterns and haphazardly, overflowing with humanity at all points, and messy at the edges. And unless you speak Brazilian Portuguese, all of the album's pretense-- it comes with a full libretto, and press copies also included mock Cliffs Notes-- will be confined to the accompanying booklet. That leaves you with the wild musical mélange cooked up by Zé and producer Jair Oliveira, and it never gets boring or too inaccessible. Male and female vocals, sung and spoken, alone and en masse, share space in the constantly shifting arrangements, where acoustic guitars, hand percussion, and jerry-built instruments like piles of metal and rolled ficus leaves mingle with programmed drums and mangled electronic tones. Vocals are pitch-shifted, donkeys and orgasms are imitated and simulated, respectively, while "Mulher Navio Negreiro" includes voices approximating the sound of wind.
The record opens with "Ave Dor Maria", riding a hip-hop beat topped with heavy descending guitar riffs and all manner of whizzing, fractured electronics, and Zé doesn't betray his age at all with his aggressive vocal delivery. Elsewhere, his singing ability sounds barely the worse for wear, and though he's never been thought of as a "singer" so much as a maverick, he deserves credit for making his average pipes do some pretty extraordinary things. Zé received formal musical training in college, and here he seems to use every ounce of it to subvert normality, using unusual chromatic piano runs in "Quero Pensar", otherwise one of the catchiest, most harmonically traditional songs on the album.
What really makes the album work is that the music transcends the underlying intellectual conceits. For instance, the scene that "Duas Opiniões" corresponds to, called "It's Ridiculous to Cry", includes a conversation in the Garden of Eden and a revelation of gossip in the court of angels, but on the level of pure listening, it sounds like a damn nice Brazilian ballad. Likewise, "Elaeu" couches its gay-rights message in an instantly memorable pop song, warped at the edges by swirling electronics.
Bottom line, Estudando o Pagode is an impressive album, musically, conceptually, and lyrically, and the cast of musicians and singers Zé assembled delivers on his singular vision. Whether or not this appeals to you depends on a lot of things, from your appetite for foreign-language music to your appetite for music guided by a Dadaist sensibility. If you're a newcomer to Zé, you'd probably be better off listening to Luaka Bop's 1991 Brazil Classics, Vol. 4: The Best of Tom Zé compilation first (I recommend this mostly because of the difficulty of finding his 1970 self-titled album). But in spite of its imposing premise, this album is surprisingly approachable and undeniably unique.
