One of the 716,238 Brazilians killed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to official statistics, the composer and poet from Rio de Janeiro Aldir Blanc Mendes (September 2, 1946 – May 4, 2020) is so immortalized in Brazilian music – due to the strength of the work he built as a lyricist with fundamental partners such as João Bosco, Guinga and Moacyr Luz – that, in poetic license, it can be said that Aldir does 80 years old today, Wednesday.
Strictly speaking, the Rio bard would be 80 years old, as he left the scene six years and four months ago, at 73 years old. But Aldir Blanc's music is sung so much that, yes, the verb can be conjugated in the present tense.
Architect of ingenious, imagery and sometimes surrealistic lyrics that seemed like Rio delusions, or things from the cinema, ready to be filmed to generate a clip or a short film, Aldir Blanc was a composer with his own and inimitable syntax in MPB writing.
As a keen lyricist, the poet stuck his knife into the flesh of Brazil with verses that chronicled a country as violent as it was sensual. It was as if Aldir Blanc's work had been an anti-exaltation samba of Brazil, like the masterpiece “Nação” (1982), a partnership with Bosco and Paulo Emilio presented to the country during Carnival in the enlightened voice of singer Clara Nunes (1942 – 1983).
With a green and yellow fate, the poet spewed the blood of the victims of a Brazil that lives in an (undeclared) state of civil war in lyrics that normally followed the cadence of samba, among occasional forays into bolero, the rhythm of “Dois pra lá, Dois pra cá” (1974), and other musical genres.
A distinguished chronicler of Brazil's quarrels, Aldir Blanc was a lyricist who wrote on a razor's edge, sailing the seas of the late Guanabara as a master of verses that recounted unhappy pages in the history of Brazil and the privacy of homes that were not always sweet. The controversial samba “Gol anulado” (1976), the target of recent discussions on social media for portraying domestic violence against women on football game days, exemplifies the virulence of the chronicler's pen.
In Aldir's songbook, blood spurted both from the body stretched out on the floor in “De frontal pro crime” (1974) – a samba that exposed the daily violence in the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ) – and from the heart trampled by ingratitude and disappointment in love.
If Aldir came into the world with forceps, painfully removed from his mother's belly in a prolonged birth that would leave consequences for the mother and (perhaps unconsciously) the child, his entry into the world of music occurred naturally. A promising drummer who became part of the group GB-4, Aldir ended up becoming a lyricist full of rhythm who fell into the swing of the melodies for which he wrote verses.
The first partnership, with Sílvio da Silva Júnior, was opened in 1964 and, six years later, it generated the first success of Aldir's songbook, “Amigo é para essa things” (1970), a samba with melancholic lyrics written in 1968 in the form of dialogue, broadcast in the voices of the group MPB4.
From 1969 onwards, Aldir developed a partnership with César Costa Filho, a composer of whom he was a colleague at the Movimento Artístico Universitário (MAU). Through the partnership with César, Aldir's verses gained the voices of singers such as the aforementioned Clara Nunes, Maysa (1936 – 1977) and Elis Regina (1945 – 1982) – from 1972 onwards, the great interpreter of Aldir's partnership with João Bosco, to whom Aldir was introduced that same year, 1969, by a mutual friend.
Launched in 1972 with the song “Agnus sei” in the “Disco de Bolso” of the newspaper “O Pasquim”, Aldir Blanc’s partnership with João Bosco embodied the soundtrack of the fight against repression. Composers who formed one of the fundamental duos of MPB in the 1970s, João Bosco and Aldir Blanc, created a work that fell like a viaduct over the Brazilian dictatorship. As partners, Bosco and Blanc allied themselves with the people in the inglorious struggles of those trying to survive in the not-so-gentle motherland of the 1970s when the cuíca was already rumbling with both hunger and fear.
From the Rio trench, for example, Aldir fired “Mercy Shot” in 1977 with artillery that premonitorily hit the violence that would dominate the communities of the departed city portrayed lyrically, but far from postcards. Two years later, in 1979, the duo composed the opening anthem, “The drunk and the equilibrista”, released in the recurring voice of Elis.
In everyday marital battles, samba subjects such as “Incompatibility of Geniuses” (1976) and “A Level de...” (1982), the poet chronicler sided with the wittiness with which he mercilessly portrayed the human soul.
A doctor who abandoned his profession after the death of his twin daughters in January 1974, a tragedy that traumatized Aldir Blanc and heightened the strangeness of the aloof temperament of an artist who had since become increasingly reclusive, the lyricist never stopped in time.
Following the dissolution of the musical link with João Bosco, symptomatically broken in the mid-1980s when the dictatorship began to agonize, Aldir established an important partnership with his neighbor Moacyr Luz – a proudly suburban Carioca and Tijucano like the lyricist – from the second half of the 1980s.
Then, with Guinga, the lyricist created one of the most sophisticated works of Brazilian music in the 1990s, generating a songbook that enchanted the greatest MPB performers, especially singer Leila Pinheiro, who dedicated an album to the duo's repertoire 30 years ago, “Catavento e girassol” (1996).
A bohemian Salgueirense, the lyricist radiated Rio and Brazil with raw poetry that combined lyricism and acute social awareness. In any trench and with any partner, the tough lyricist always placed fine writing on the right side of history. That is why, in a beautiful response to time, the octogenarian bard's work lives on firm and strong. Aldir Blanc present!
