Elis Regina / Antônio Carlos Jobim: “Águas de Março” Observe Evaluate

For me, Regina’s joyous, defiant burble is the thought on the coronary heart of the track: that there’s a form of bliss in surrendering to life’s movement that lies past any human try at defining its that means. Listening to it not too long ago, I used to be reminded of “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a 1979 Robert Hass poem through which a speaker confronts the semiotic notion that assigning phrases to things degrades them, that “every explicit erases / the luminous readability of a common thought.” “Speaking this manner,” he realizes, “all the pieces dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, girl, you and I.” All the pieces dissolves, too, within the “Águas de Março”: sticks, stones, timber, individuals, pouco sozinho. But as a dashing river carves a canyon, every explicit in Jobim’s stream shapes the luminous readability of a common thought—the ever-present “it,” an idea knowledgeable by seasons and animals and anatomy however by no means fairly made concrete. By the top of the track, it feels pointless to attempt to seize “it” in language: No matter “it” is, it’s nearer to Regina’s snicker than any phrases in Portuguese or English can describe. Taxonomizing life with language, the second appears to recommend, is uproariously useless. Even the music itself eludes seize, and sits within the area between—take, for instance, the opening plinks of a deliciously desafinado piano, chirping like a thrush caught between keys.

Elis & Tom wasn’t a right away success. The file reportedly bought solely 40,000 copies in Brazil; after a number of performances collectively, Regina and Jobim parted methods, Regina careening towards a cocaine behavior, and Jobim towards a second marriage with a lady youthful than Regina. In 1985, struggling to help his household, Jobim licensed the rights to “Águas de Março” to Coca-Cola for a six-month contract that occurred to overlap with the “New Coke” fiasco. An advertiser’s job is way extra literal than the artist’s, and the chance the admen noticed in “Águas de Março” is apparent sufficient: The tune was catchy, worldwide in an period when globalization was in vogue, but malleable sufficient that, with some smoothing-down, it may develop into convincingly all-American. And the punchline was teed up. By no means as soon as in “Águas de Março” does Jobim flip the order of his “It’s…” sentences to “…is it.” However for Coke, funneling this record of pictures in the direction of one definitive and glossy declaration—Coke Is It!—was the business’s raison d’être.

Whereas Coke was weathering backlash for altering its system, Jobim confronted censure amongst fellow artists for “promoting Brazil to Coca-Cola.” It was hardly stunning that artists could be upset—america had legitimized the junta, and Coca-Cola was a globally acknowledged image of consumerism that artists internationally and at house in Rio often subverted for political critique. The convenience with which Jobim’s composition slotted into American capitalist tradition might have proved the suspicions of left-leaning Brazilian youth that bossa nova was a maddeningly apolitical artform, missing the cultural urgency of MPB songs like Regina’s 1979 hit “O bêbado e a equilibrista,” a rallying cry for the re-democratization of Brazil. And what Jobim bought was bigger than Brazil—he’d cashed in on the open-ended promise of “it,” scrubbing his collaged panorama of life in order that Madison Avenue may redraw it of their picture.