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being surprised by the lyrics of songs I've heard a lot is not unusual to me. it happened most often with songs in foreign languages, when I learned the song before the language, but just the other day I paid attention to the lyrics of a song in my native language, that I must have heard very often, and was surprised by the words, what they meant, and the poetry in it
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one of my favorite apropos feelings are the epiphanies of finding easter eggs hiding in lyrics. this was often used by genius poets in Brazil during the dictatorship, to escape censorship. Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil famously sang Cálice (=chalice) for Easter, with a refrain that went "father, push away from me this chalice of blood-red wine". Cálice also sounds like cale-se, that means "shut up". the song got censored, and the gutsy musicians played it with instrumentals and lyrics reduced to "cálice/cale-se". another epiphany I had was when I realized the underlying meaning of "Não sonho mais" (I won't dream any more). in the surface, it sounds like wife telling her spouse of a horrible nightmare in which he was persecuted by an enraged mob, with scatological lyrics such as wetting the bed because of the dream, and begging to be pardoned for dreaming that, in stark contrast with the music. the hidden meaning came out by taking it as torture victim speaking to torturer
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Chico Buarque famously disguisedly addressed the military dictatorship with verses such as "in spite of you, tomorrow is going to be another day", "you can't stop the sun from rising". in "Vai passar", he purports the song to be about carnival parades; the title seems to refer to each of the groups that will parade on a most traditional carnival avenue, but an alternate meaning is that "it will be over", again referring to the dictatorship; the imagery of dawn returns, again as an alternate meaning: the verses are about the whole city partying "the evolution of liberty until dawn", where evolution is the term that refers to how a samba school presents its theme in the carnival parades, liberties being often taken in carnival, and sunrise marking the usual end of the parade. the other day I realized the alternate meaning: that the pursuit of liberty (vs the dictatorship) would grow/evolve/develop towards the end of darkness" genius!
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in one of the most beautiful songs ever, Beatriz, Chico Buarque hid a few other pearls: the lyrics at the lowest note of the song say "floor", and at the highest note they say "sky". in another of his moments, he wrote "Joana Francesa" with lyrics that mix and rhyme Portuguese and French, with a line that repeats "acorda" (wake up) a few times until it sounds like "d'accord"; and after a verse in French, starts another with "Geme", in Portuguese, that sounds just like "J'aime".
last night, I had another such epiphany that got me overwhelmed by emotion. I realized that Life is Beautiful, the wonderful movie by Roberto Benigni, had what I believe to be an Easter egg hiding in plain sight in the original title in Italian: La Vita è Bella. bella means beautiful indeed, but in Latin, it is related with both bellus (beautiful) and bellum (war, thus bellic). I cried for minutes after it hit me, and cried again as I told wife about it
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
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