Chico Science e Nação Zumbi
Da Lama ao Caos

THE REVIEW

Before this land, now called Brazil, became a Portuguese colony, it was all covered by immense forests.

Where this city, called Recife, now stands, there was an immense mangrove forest.

Before there was mud (a lama), now there is chaos.

Where in the mud the "carangueijos" were born, today in chaos there are "gabirús".

Chico Sciençe is a quantum musical artist, able to condense in fifty minutes of music and words the past, present, and future of this city, compressing in a twelve-centimeter disc part of the Americas and Africa. He develops, in the perspective of the nineties, a tendency toward contamination derived from the tropicalist movement. No samba or bossa nova but distorted guitar in the sign of more aggressive rock, urban vocal style with hip-hop cadence, all supported by a powerful rhythmic base. No drums but percussion marking the rhythms of the state of Pernambuco, predominantly "maracatú" but also "embolada", "cóco" and "ciranda" , immaterial riches imported by slaves from the black continent. The magic that comes out of this perfect alchemy is an original and simple music, two adjectives that go hand in hand only in certain masterpieces.

The idea of this space-time combination is born as a side effect of globalization and criticizes its dark sides, lays them bare, throws them in the listener's face through direct and fertile lyrics, denying the weak attitude of self-pity and escaping the gratuitous and sterile aggressiveness of many rappers. It also embraces that tropical lightheartedness, like subtle irony, to be able to coexist with a present too hard to swallow. Chico wishes that something would be born, a new idea, a different conception of the city and its inhabitants, he wishes that everyone would carry within them their own history with its contrasts. He wishes that everyone would sing that the crabs have become rats, that the lost natural paradise today is a hell of dirt, that those poor dark faces living on the outskirts have built the palaces where the rich get richer to the rhythm of the whip, that the monetary wealth is in the hands of a few heirs of colonialism but the true spiritual and cultural wealth has an Afro-Brazilian heart.

Chico Science with his band, "Nação Zumbi," encounters great public success in a few years, also thanks to the most powerful tool of the contemporary era: the television. In fact, one of his songs is included as the soundtrack of a telenovela (it should be clarified that here everyone follows them, young and old, women and men) and it is immediately on everyone's lips. However, this should not mislead about the validity of this work, on the contrary, it should make one reflect on the exceptional communicative abilities of an artist who managed like few others to bring together many elements with extreme naturalness. This is a record that could please everyone, good for reflection and good for a party, pleasing to the hardest rockers and lovers of black music, to those who love simple and immediate things and to those who are looking for an innovative and complex sound.

"Da lama aos caos", from '94, together with the subsequent "Afrociberdelia" is the legacy Chico Science leaves us before crashing with his Fiat Uno.

A masterpiece that is inevitably sung in Portuguese and often draws on a regional culture that is difficult to understand for those who do not know the history of this land. This is right and consistent with his project and takes nothing away from its potential for universality.

Modernizar o passado                                                                         Modernize the past
É uma evolução musical                                                                    It is a musical evolution
Cadê as notas que estavam aqui?                                         Where are the notes that were here?
Não preciso delas...                                                                          I don't need them...
Basta deixar tudo soando bem aos ouvidos                                         Just let everything sound good to the ears

"Chico Science"