Tom Zé: Estudando o Pagode

CML call number: CD/INTERNATIONAL/Zé
Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times: "'Estudando o Pagode' [is] an album billed as an operetta. Mr. Zé is the most avant-garde of the songwriters who emerged in Brazil's rebellious tropicalia movement of the 1960's, so his operetta is hardly a straightforward narrative. 'Estudando o Pagode' leaps through time, space and cultures; it's a series of arguments over love and power set to springy, sweet-and-sour pop. Since Mr. Zé has invented characters for his operetta, his flinty voice shares the debates with a gallery of women: sweetly romantic, contemptuous, furious, or screaming in what's either ecstasy or torture. In Mr. Zé's music, serious intentions are inseparable from playfulness and his mad scientist's love of crackpot systems. One agenda is never enough for a Tom Zé song; he juggles allusions and non sequiturs, familiar Brazilian styles and his own deconstructions. 'Estudando o Pagode' means 'Studying the Pagode,' and Mr. Zé often dips into the lilting, acoustic, usually macho Brazilian pop called pagode, which he finds both wrongheaded and seductive." (FWIW, the title could also mean "studying the pagoda.")