Rita Lee Jones, Brazil’s million-providing “Queen of Rock” who acquired an intercontinental subsequent by way of her colourful and candid design and this sort of hits as “Ovelha Negra,” “Mania de Você” and “Now Only Lacking You,” has died at seventy five.
In any other case regarded as Rita Lee, she died at her house in Sao Paulo on Monday night, in accordance to a assertion posted to her formal Instagram account.
Her trigger of dying was not promptly disclosed. She experienced retired from phase performances in the early 2010s in what she afterwards attributed to bodily frailty, and was identified in 2021 with lung most cancers, even though her son declared a yr afterwards that she experienced defeated the ailment.
With a profession spanning 6 a long time, the Sao Paulo indigenous still left a long lasting mark with her irreverence, creativeness and compositions that contains messages that served introduce Brazilian modern society to feminism, when also candidly addressing her struggles with drug abuse.
Though she regarded her voice as “weak and a small out of tune,′ like a sparrow’s, she liked a lengthy operate of leading-providing albums, such as “Rita Lee” and “Rita Lee & Roberto de Carvalho,” and dozens of her tunes have been showcased in broadly viewed telenovelas in Latin The united states. The behemoth tv community Globo utilized her rendition of the tune “Poison Weed” (Poison Ivy) in 3 of its plans.
“I was not born to get married and clean underwear. I required the exact same liberty as the boys who utilized to engage in in the avenue with their toy cars and trucks,” she advised the Brazilian version of Rolling Stone in 2008. “When I obtained into tunes, I understood that the “machos” reigned complete, even additional in rock tunes. ‘Wow’, I stated, ‘this is the place I’m likely to enable my fangs out and, actually, give them a really hard time.’”
She was a singer and songwriter praised for her flexibility, actively playing at the very least 5 devices: drums, guitar, piano, harmonica and autoharp. She was also one particular of the initial Brazilian musicians to use electrical guitar.
Sooner or later, her acceptance prolonged past Brazil. She done in Portugal, England, Spain, France and Germany. In 1988, the British newspaper Day-to-day Mirror unveiled that then-Prince Charles admired her tune “Lança Perfume” and deemed her his preferred singer. She gained a Latin Grammy in the Greatest Portuguese Language Album group in 2001, for her album “3001."
Rita Lee rose to fame with the team Os Mutantes (The Mutants), starting off in 1966. Shades and creativeness, as effectively as irony and irreverence, have been Lee’s emblems from the commence, obvious in the flamboyant costumes she done in her reveals. By the mid-seventies, right after providing two hundred,000 copies of the album “Forbidden Fruit,” Lee started to be identified as the “queen of rock” on the tunes scene. Hits on “Forbidden Fruit” contain “Now Only Lacking You” and “Ovelha Negra,” lengthy performed on radio stations and Brazilian cleaning soap operas.
In an job interview with the tunes web site I Have Additional Data Than Buddies! in 2017, Lulu Santos, choose of the Brazilian variation of The Voice, recalled viewing Rita Lee engage in autoharp at a live performance.
“She introduced that point on phase, in people apparel... it was entirely mythological,” the musician stated. “There truly is a lineage of ‘girls’ tied to rock in Brazil, of which she is a genuine agent. But I see her as an factor that distances herself from the clichés of rock.” She, from her female stage of check out, sees the clumsiness of the worn-out cliché of the male rocker, the one particular who performs with his legs open up. She noticed suitable by way of him.”
She was one particular of the initial general public figures in Brazil to popularize feminist themes, this sort of as infusing the lyrics of her 1979 tune “Mania de Voce” (Mania for You) with woman sexuality and satisfaction. Equivalent tunes adopted, this sort of as “Amor e Sexo” (Appreciate and Sexual intercourse) which contrasted the two in depth and “Lança Perfume” (Spray Fragrance), an ode to unbridled hedonism.
Afterwards in daily life, she grew to become a vegan and animal legal rights activist. For a long time, she retained her hair vivid crimson and typically wore matching lenses, a well-liked glance that she discarded in latest several years as she authorized her grey to develop out. She settled in 2015 to reinvent herself as a white butterfly.
In her autobiography, posted the subsequent yr, she did not shy from describing the sexual abuse she endured as a kid at the palms of a male who experienced occur to deal with her mother’s stitching equipment.
She also referred to herself as a “rebel” and “hippie communist," and wrote of sneaking out the home windows of her home as a teen to engage in, currently being arrested throughout the dictatorship for possession of cannabis, and her several stints in rehab clinics for medicine and liquor.
“I understand that my greatest tunes have been composed in an altered point out, and my worst as well. I only regret my hold off in noticing that the ‘medicine’ experienced lengthy considering that expired,” she wrote. “My era endured the claustrophobia of a brutal dictatorship, and utilizing medicine was a way to breathe airs of liberty.”
In an job interview with the tv system Fantastico in 2020, she described that bodily frailty experienced prompted her to depart the phase 8 several years previously.
“Getting aged, for me, was a shock, simply because I have never ever been aged in my daily life,” she advised the exhibit. “I was still left seeking to reside my aged age absent from the phase, devoid of sharing it with the general public.”
A general public wake will be held at the planetarium in Sao Paulo on Might ten, in accordance to the Instagram publish.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared 3 times of mourning and lamented the reduction of “one of the largest and most amazing names in Brazilian tunes.” He praised on his formal Twitter profile “an artist in advance of her time,” and her feeling of humor.
She is survived by her 3 little ones and her spouse, with whom she shared a forty four-yr musical partnership. In 2021, they produced a new tune, Adjust, with each other, and a remix of some of the singer’s largest hits.
Several years just before, she imagined her potential dying, as if prophesying:
“I will be in heaven,” she wrote, “with my soul current actively playing my autoharp and singing to God, ‘Thank you, Lord, lastly sedated.’ Epitaph: She was never ever a fantastic instance, but she was fantastic individuals.”
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