The more one explores music, the more one discovers how open borders create the most interesting ideas and those living at the borderline have unique perspectives to share. Proof positive: Bebeto Alves’s forward-thinking “milonga” music. It’s his Danço Só – E Fico Assim Mais Oriental Me Invento Toda Manhã, created at the nexus of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, that pointed to the possibilities of embracing one’s place in the world.
Bebeto Alves took an unlikely journey to any kind of stardom. His love of music didn’t come from watching television or listening to music but by journeying to the cinema to discover how music interacts with visuals. Born in 1958, in Uruguaiana, Rio Grande do Sul, at the Brazilian border with Argentina, Bebeto’s humble beginnings pointed to a life lived in the poorer side of this small urban border city, where its distance from the rest of Brazil led to fruitless efforts to pick up most of the larger Brazilian culture. And what he could pick up on the radio, to fill that void, were those radio stations from Argentina and Uruguay, that sang in a sort of language a bit alien to their experience.
Back then, it was the accordion-driven music of the pampas, the milonga, that Bebeto could not escape from hearing. Yet, amongst friends, the few radio stations they could pick up that played rock and jazz, led them to share records, to explore groups like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and eventually, led Bebeto fall in love with the “protest” music of reggae musicians like Bob Marley. In due time, he realized that he had to escape his city to experience any kind of culture.
It was in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, that he’d attend university and fall in with an artistic crowd – full of poets, architects, and artists – and befriend like-minded musicians like Carlinhos Hartlieb and Ricardo Frota, who were at the vanguard trying to figure out just how they could make their voices heard in an environment where Brazilian censorship was slowly (but surely) thawing. In those early days, in the mid ‘70s, the traditional music of the area was the last thing they wanted to explore but in it they understood was something uniquely theirs – if they could reshape it.
Performing and creating under the group, Utopia, Bebeto took his first tentative steps in reimagining the music of the gauchos in a more contemporary fashion. By the time that group disbanded, Bebeto had gained enough notoriety to go solo and be thought of by his record label as a promising prospect.
In the beginning, Bebeto was an artist caught between a few worlds. On records like his self-titled debut, Bebeto created songs that could slot perfectly between the mannered, conservative sphere of the country-lilting songs of his province, and the more outwardly-influenced, liberal music of the rest of Brazil. Wherever possible, electric instrumentation and experiments with jazz, funk, and reggae would peek through, but never enough to fully derail a track charting careening down the “middle-of-the-road”.
Parts of Bebeto’s early career was spent trying, searching, for a way to retool some of the influences he grew up with. The influence of folk rock and MPB (Brazilian Pop Music) had put such a heavy stamp in the production of his music, that other releases like 1983’s Notícia Urgente and his artistic nadir, 1985’s Novo País, found Bebeto increasingly losing the plot on what exactly was his voice and where he wanted his music to go. Was his role to be the next Djavan or simply be himself?
In 1987, out of contract and on the skids with the music business, Bebeto began to find his voice. Under the influence of more experimental music and the rise of new forms of art punk, reggae, and jazz, Bebeto took a Tom Waits-ian turn. He’d jettison off his previous glossy verb, adopting a rougher, more lived-in vocal phrasing. Likewise, he’d abscond from the overly-produced sounds of his studio past and start again, by creating a live album where the raw sounds of a new kind of hard-nosed music could express a more human form of his music-making. 1987’s Pegadas, recorded live in a bar, in Porto Alegre, brought him back to the more communal form of interacting with the music.
You hear on songs like “Rasa Calamidade”, “Críticos”, and “Depois Da Chuva” a certain swagger that fit Bebeto’s vision far better. With albums like this, Bebeto could roll-in drum machines, synths, and introduce ideas from dub, and not skip a beat…yet, still hold a certain space, a certain contour that spoke of his Rio Grande do Sul. By choosing to find a way to make milonga music, urban, just like how he understood Uruguaiana, growing up, he could reach a new audience hungry for a new direction.
The brilliance of 1988’s Danço Só – E Fico Assim Mais Oriental Me Invento Toda Manhã is simply how it harnesses all of Bebeto’s hidden strength, his live, raw energy, into all sorts of intimate experimentations that translate to a studio record. And rather than treat the studio as a way to adorn his music, on this album, Bebeto was finally able to use the studio as an instrument, casting soundscapes and arrangements that finally brought his idea of “music between the borders” to life.
“Inimigo Oculto” plops you perfectly into the scene. Overdriven and loud, full of half spoken-word mutant funk and raw no-wave jazz, it’s as far from Bebeto’s debut album as one can imagine. Playing to an audience of one: himself, Bebeto was able to create an urgent, sprawling, record that spoke to a different audience.
Songs like “Nós Não Vamos Dormir” reimagine the sound of Stiff Records for those in gaúcho regalia. Others like “Tô”, featuring the incomparable Renato Borghetti on accordion, mutate milonga’s tango-esque rhythms through the prism of sample-based grooves, twisting it until it becomes something sharing musical lineage more with PiL than POA, introducing us to Bebeto’s exploratory homeland sound.
Rhythmic heavies like “Que Se Passa” and “Tendência” inspire comparisons to Lou Reed, Talking Heads, and Ian Dury. In Bebeto’s own way, this kind of sonic truth-telling concentrated fairly hidden moods into new staccato tones of noise and singing that still sound like little-else.
Bebeto spoke of feeling inspired by Caetano Veloso’s Transa, how Caetano took the hypnotic music of the Nordeste and used it as a canvas to roll-in loneliness, protest, and experimentation, as a guiding light. By taking ownership of his music, Bebeto could – on songs like “Tassy” and “O Mapa” – express new forms inspired by the larger world around it and speak to what’s behind his ideas more intimately.
So in some Porto Alegre studio, songs like “Amor Anfetamina” a floating, torch song unfurling all sorts of in-between feelings and ideas, far more suited for people living an increasingly more in-between world. In this, Bebeto’s freest music, somehow, he created a gorgeous novo anthem that floats like a specter over its land, speaking to a deeper connection to it than we imagine.
In the end, in a world where we no longer have Bebeto around to guide us, I think this music still points to just what’s possible when we embrace what’s beyond our frontier.