Zé Ramalho - Admirável Gado Novo
People who don't know me very well might not be aware of this, but I don't feel that connected to Brazilian culture overall (or the culture of any other country, for that matter). This extends to cultural manifestations as well: if you want to know more about Brazilian music, or literature, or regional traditions, I'm the wrong person to ask.
So, a bit of background: I was raised in the caipira culture, which has its historical origins in the exploration/exploitation of rural Brazil. I'm from a very industrialized part of the country, 300 km from São Paulo, the largest city in the Southern and Western hemispheres (yes, it's larger than New York), but in a part of the country where deforestation happened centuries ago to open way for large swathes of farmlands (currently growing sugarcane and orange). My family never worked on a farm or anything, but the caipira culture informed our daily lives. And I never really felt anything about it.
I mean, it's a bit weird to think about: caipiras haven their own dialect/accent and music, but none of this was formative to my identity. I internalized the accent, but I switch out of it pretty quick too, and the music was, for the most part of my life, just background noise for parties with churrasco, just something that was there, playing to fill the occasional silence.
Despite this, every once in a while there was something that hit me kinda strongly, and this song by Zé Ramalho was one. The funny thing is that Zé Ramalho hails from the Northeastern Brazil, which has different cultural traits (after all, he's from a state 2,000 km away, or ~1200 freedom units), but his songwriting resonates with a lot of people. He used to write cordel literature, which is like... folk stories written in verse and sold in zine format, I guess, which would explain his lyricism.
Anyway, Zé Ramalho is very influential among Brazilian musicians, and he uses a lot of regional rhythms from his homeland in his compositions, which are clearly noticeable in this song. The Brazilian Northeast is poor (due to historical, colonialist reasons) and has a constant fight against droughts (yes, Brazil is not made only of rainforests).
The lyrics in this song talk about life's hardships of the masses that live under a surveillance state, and if that sounds a bit weird, it's because you have to take the previous information (poor, rural people, living in a dry climate) and contextualize it historically (the song was written during the Brazilian dictatorship). Despite all this, people try to be happy while dreaming of better times from the past, looking hopefully to the future.
In the chorus, he sings (translated literally) "Hey, ho, a cattle's life! A branded people, happy people". This is hard to translate because it's a super-specific cultural thing, but the closest in meaning would be something like "a dog's life", except that it's hopeful and trying to find happiness in the small things. Also, "cattle" in Brazil can be used derogatorily the same way as "sheep" is in English, as in "people are sheep", so it has double meaning (remember, dictatorship and all that).
So, lots of stuff going on lyrically, but the song is considered mostly a representation of working class struggles, sometimes against life's downturns, sometimes against systemic oppression, while remaining hopeful of a better future.
Fun fact: the name "Admirável Gado Novo" is a play with "Admirável Mundo Novo", which is the Brazilian title for a little known English novel called Brave New World. So... yeah. I guess the song title could be translated as "Brave New Cattle"?1 It was also part of a telenovela soundtrack, O Rei do Gado, where it was the theme of a social movement fighting for land reform that exists in the real world. The telenovela had some Shakespearian themes, with two large, influential families bickering against each other while their youth fall in love and all of that.
Anyway, enough context, here's the song. At the beginning, he says something like, "This is the song of the branded people, of a happy people. It's the 'Brave New Cattle', it's the Brazil we know", and then the song starts.
Maybe I should try to translate this song as an exercise some day.↩