Parameters for critical reading of the song in Chico Buarque's late work

Abstract

The work focuses on the constitution of the self of the song in two songs from the album Caravanas (2017), by Chico Buarque: “Tua cantiga” and “As Caravanas”. It is assumed that the album can be conceived as a strong synthesis of both the Brazilian song system and Chico Buarque's own work prior to the 2000s. Thus, in many ways, Caravanas is a commentary on two sociocultural symptoms of Brazil contemporary: i) the “death of the song”, as a form of a properly aesthetic reaction to the end of the integrating fantasies of the nation’s imagination and ii) the “social fracture”, as a founding fantasy of Brazil’s modern imagination. The two songs are configured as maximum expressions of the problems that surround these two symptoms. The aesthetic problems of voice construction in each of them are, therefore, scope privileged to see, through literary and song forms, the dynamics of the contemporary social process underway in the country. Among these elements, the fictionalization of the lyrical self, the poetic address, the specific modes of song intonation and the presence of archaic poetic-musical elements, ritualistic elements from the Western literary tradition and others extracted from the great culture of the black diaspora that founded the song form itself in Brazil.