Caetano Veloso
Poderes Podres

While men exercise their rotten powers

Motorcycles and vespas run red lights

And miss the green lights

We are boors

Could it be that we will do nothing but confirm

the incompetence of Catholic America

that always needs ridiculous tyrants?

Could it be, could it be what will be, what will be, what will be

And while men exercise their rotten powers

indigenous people, priests, queers, blacks, and women

and teenagers have a carnival

I wish I could sing in tune like Ellis

remain silent in front of her trance

in ecstasy

be indecent

but everything is very evil

Or every paisano and foreman

with their stupidity will make blood flow

too much

in the wetlands, in the cities, and caatingas

in the Gerais?

Could it be that just the hermetic pascoali

the tones, the thousand tones, his sounds and his brilliant gifts

will save us, save us from this darkness?

And nothing else?

While...

killing with hunger, with rage, and with thirst

are often natural gestures*.

Poderes Podres (1984)

We are one year away from the fall of the military regime, established in Brazil in 1964.

Caetano can afford an explicit text, devoid of those ingenious subtleties of Brazilian songwriting, necessary not to make political messages too obvious.

Poderes podres is not a photo that captures a historical moment, but an immanent portrait of the South American giant, whose text is so sharp that it dispenses with comments.

Finding yourself listening to this song, with the serious political situation that the country is going through, has its explosive effect.

The representative democracy with which we should live for a long time no longer even tries to hide its intrigues, it is systemic practice.

Many Brazilians who no longer believe in it, and who do not even believe that art can save us (Caetano references Hermeto Pascoal, Elis Regina, and Chico Buarque), gently demand the return of a military dictatorship, capable of clearing away corruption and all the atrocities of deceitful democracy.

The media complex that supports the Brazil project of the ruling elite managed to divide the country into two factions that we can define as left (pro Lula) and right (against Lula). The fourth power has a devastating force, the field of empty minds is much more fertile than the Italian one, divide to govern, bread and circuses... rhetoric.

Brazil is by nature a conservative country.

one of the last to abolish slavery

one of the last to build universities

the highest concentration of capital in the hands of a few families

The sad reality shows itself raw and relentlessly destroys that hopeful image I had built during the Lula period. They tried and were put out of the game by the same weapons of justice sharpened by their government against the impunity of the political system.

Brazil the country of the future...

But the future is black.