Tom Zé
Brazil's Cultural Cannibal Poops a Pearl

Six years since his last album, 62 year-old Tom Zé has released only his fifth album in his 30+year career. "Songs are inside of me, like pearls resting in oysters . . . it takes that grain of sand many years of rubbing before it becomes a pearl. That's why it takes so long for my songs to develop."

Last year [1998] marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Tropicalia: Ou Panis et Circencis, on which Zé contributed the satiric antidevelopment anthem "Parque Industrial" where laughing children repeat the mantra, "made in Brazil." In 1968 Brazil was throbbing with multiculturalism. With so many ethnic groups crammed into dense megacities such as Sao Paulo, there often came rifts. The Tropicalista movement, founded by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes and Zé, took on a traditional role as artists mending cultural rifts in untraditional ways. The artists loosely shared an aesthetic philosophy that promoted artistic appropriation ("cannibalism"), which plundered music from around the world (free-jazz skronk, psychedelic guitar, lounge basslines, African percussion, and classical violins), and regurgitated it as something distinctly new and exciting. It was an anarchic melting pot that eschewed borders and encouraged the mixing of classes, races and nationalities. It was an avant-garde modernist rebellion that offended both the left and the new right-wing military dictatorship. Like Boukman Eksperyans in Haiti, these artists literally risked their lives for the music. Zé had been jailed twice and had numerous encounters with police at shows. Veloso and Gil were jailed and then forced to live in exile in London for the remainder of the '60s.

Even among the Tropicalistas, Tom Zé was a black sheep. His dadaist pop, while catchy to ears bred on '90s postmodernism, was too disjointed for most people. His records remained largely ignored and in the late '80s he was about to get a job pumping gas when David Byrne sought him out and released a collection on Luaka Bop in 1990 (Best Of Tom Zé: Massive Hits). Zé is fairly bitter about being ostracized by the Brazilian record buyers. "After five years, Tropicalia was being forgotten, and after ten years I was being taken out of pictures, like Stalin used to take people out of pictures," Zé told Billboard. His overdue recognition will likely come from the artists he influenced, including Tom Waits, Beck, the Beastie Boys and more techno and drum 'n' bass artists than you could shake a stick at. Beck paid tribute to the movement with his recent single, "Tropicalia." And in an ultimate '90s-style validation, artists such as Tortoise, Stereolab, the High Llamas and Sean Lennon have remixed songs from his new album, Com Defecto De Fabricacáo (Fabrication Defect) to be released in January, 1999.

With cover art that recalls the classic Funkadelic covers drawn by Pedro Bell, Fabrication Defect picks up the ball where George Clinton dropped it in the '80s in battling the "placebo syndrome," a condition where people become robotic, and decidedly unfunky due to bad music and worse politics. Zé asserts that the people in the slums of Sao Paulo, and the Third World in general, have been converted into "androids" by First World colonialism and capitalism. While corporations would like to keep their workers impoverished and mindless, the "androids" display "defects" in the forms of curiosity, dreams, raging hormones and the urge to dance. Zé graciously encourages their "defects" by creating art from consumer and sonic refuse like toys, cars, whistles, commercial jingles, and homemade instruments made of household appliances. He once constructed an instrument made of triggered typewriters, blenders, radios and floor sanders that took up two Volkswagen buses. "The sound was so beautiful," remembers Zé, "it brought tears to the eye."

"Esteticar" is a twisted samba that clearly illustrates his mission statement: "Hold on to your seats milord / The mulatto baiao / (he's blacktie-ing himself) / tuxedo-izes himself in / the Esthetic of / the Arrastao." "Arrastao" is a dragnet-like technique used in urban robbery, where a small group fan out and run through a crowd, taking people's belongings. Zé claims this "esthetics of plagiarism" will end traditional music composition as we know it and inaugurate the "plagi-combinator" era.

While there are plenty of traditional choruses, rhythms and melodies, there are also instances of dissonant weirdness that may be jarring for the average listener, not unlike early Captain Beefheart. Like Beefheart, Tom Zé weaves his political concerns through a wreath of irreverent riddles, ironic humor and playful, nonsensical language. His love of language is rooted in lullabies his mother sang, e.e. cummings-style word games and Russian literature, which he studied at the University of Bahia. There he also studied classical composition, developing an affinity for Stravinsky and Bartok.

But Zé's music is not all politics and intellectual avant-gardisms. The overwhelming impression left by listening to Fabrication Defect is whimsical fun and buoyant beauty. Much of the album is accessible. You don't need to know Portuguese to appreciate the sounds of the lovely language, and the lyrics are translated on the sleeve notes. You'll find some moments so breathtaking that you'll want to learn Portuguese, such as in "Juventude Jovali"-"The wine of open legs / soaks the offerings on the altar / screams, sperm and handcuffs / The fury of pure lavender." The gorgeous, shimmering guitar of "Curiosidade" transcends language barriers, and "Emere" evokes expressionist violins that could have come out of sessions for Van Dyke Park's 1968 album Song Cycle. The album closes with "Xiquexique," a mesmerizing techno-accordion odyssey that stretches from Andalucia, Spain to rural Louisiana.

For the uninitiated, the best introduction to Zé's magical world would have been the aforementioned 1990 collection of his '70s work, Best Of Tom Zé: Massive Hits. Unfortunately it is currently out of print. Either way, Fabrication Defect is a necessity, one of the best releases of the year. And hopefully just the beginning of Zé's revitalized career.

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Reviewed by A.S. Van Dorston
02.01.99