Elis Regina / Antônio Carlos Jobim: “Águas de Março” Monitor Assessment

For me, Regina’s joyous, defiant burble is the thought on the coronary heart of the music: that there’s a sort of bliss in surrendering to life’s circulate that lies past any human try at defining its which means. Listening to it lately, I used to be reminded of “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a 1979 Robert Hass poem by which a speaker confronts the semiotic notion that assigning phrases to things degrades them, that “every explicit erases / the luminous readability of a common concept.” “Speaking this fashion,” he realizes, “all the pieces dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, girl, you and I.” Every little thing dissolves, too, within the “Águas de Março”: sticks, stones, bushes, folks, pouco sozinho. But as a dashing river carves a canyon, every explicit in Jobim’s stream shapes the luminous readability of a common concept—the ever-present “it,” an idea knowledgeable by seasons and animals and anatomy however by no means fairly made concrete. By the tip of the music, it feels pointless to attempt to seize “it” in language: No matter “it” is, it’s nearer to Regina’s chuckle than any phrases in Portuguese or English can describe. Taxonomizing life with language, the second appears to counsel, 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 direct success. The document reportedly offered solely 40,000 copies in Brazil; after just a few performances collectively, Regina and Jobim parted methods, Regina careening towards a cocaine behavior, and Jobim towards a second marriage with a girl youthful than Regina. In 1985, struggling to assist 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 much 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 might 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 listing of photographs in direction of one definitive and glossy declaration—Coke Is It!—was the industrial’s raison d’être.

Whereas Coke was weathering backlash for altering its components, Jobim confronted censure amongst fellow artists for “promoting Brazil to Coca-Cola.” It was hardly shocking 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 residence in Rio recurrently subverted for political critique. The convenience with which Jobim’s composition slotted into American capitalist tradition could 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 offered 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 might redraw it of their picture.