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I’ve said it before: The meaning conveyed in lyrics sung or written by the likes of Concha Buika, Chico Buarque, Tite Curet Alonso, rapper Keny Arkana, and Martinho Da Vila transcends differences in language. Implied in Buika’s smokey contralto are a thousand candles leading to a midnight grotto where the lover who will one day betray you worships your body on a bed of scarlet petals; Alonso’s syncopated couplets contain all the energy and questions of a leftist newspaper. The percussive rhymes of Arkana penetrate the heart and belly with the rhythms of rebellion and the promise of liberation. Chico Buarque is a cerebral mystic like Jung whose cool tenor evokes desperate women trapped in urban labyrinths. Da Vila’s honeyed alto is steeped in the history of samba in Rio, which goes back to the street bands of the 1920s, and he speaks of only one thing with a thousand faces: love.
— Carol Cooper on the best non-English-language pop of 2011 in her Pazz & Jop postmortem. I’m such a sucker for this sort of proselytization.
