I don’t necessarily recommend this song to people looking for good Bossa Nova music. I recommend Joao Gilberto, Caetano Veloso or Gilberto Gil. This song is not the most pleasing to listen to as it becomes disturbing with the traffic noise in the middle. I guess that uneasy feeling is intentional. Apparently this song has some complexity to those who understand Portuguese (I am American with limited Portuguese vocabulary). I read the book “A Simple Brazilian Song’ by James Woodall that had some interesting information on this song:
“Construcao has been labeled a protest song. Chico has always denied that he wrote this or any other song with the specific idea of ‘protest’ in mind; but both ‘Apesar de voce’ and ‘Construcao’, written around the same time, clearly contain his poetic assessments of life under the generals — Construcao more obliquely than Apesar."
The book goes on to quote this scholarly analysis of the song by Charles Perrone ‘Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song’:
“The text has forty-one lines of twelve syllables, all of which end in proparoxytone, that is, a word stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. A pattern of preterites organizes the text as two series of quatrains and a sextain comprised of verses from each of the four quatrains, with both series and sextain followed by an isolated single-line refrain. The strophes of the two series are differentiated only by the changing of the line-final word. Four new words are introduced in the second series, and the words used in the first now modify a different line. In the sextain, there is another substitution or switch at the end of each line.”
If you understand this completely, you are smarter than I.
I don’t necessarily recommend this song to people looking for good Bossa Nova music. I recommend Joao Gilberto, Caetano Veloso or Gilberto Gil. This song is not the most pleasing to listen to as it becomes disturbing with the traffic noise in the middle. I guess that uneasy feeling is intentional. Apparently this song has some complexity to those who understand Portuguese (I am American with limited Portuguese vocabulary). I read the book “A Simple Brazilian Song’ by James Woodall that had some interesting information on this song:
“Construcao has been labeled a protest song. Chico has always denied that he wrote this or any other song with the specific idea of ‘protest’ in mind; but both ‘Apesar de voce’ and ‘Construcao’, written around the same time, clearly contain his poetic assessments of life under the generals — Construcao more obliquely than Apesar."
The book goes on to quote this scholarly analysis of the song by Charles Perrone ‘Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song’:
“The text has forty-one lines of twelve syllables, all of which end in proparoxytone, that is, a word stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. A pattern of preterites organizes the text as two series of quatrains and a sextain comprised of verses from each of the four quatrains, with both series and sextain followed by an isolated single-line refrain. The strophes of the two series are differentiated only by the changing of the line-final word. Four new words are introduced in the second series, and the words used in the first now modify a different line. In the sextain, there is another substitution or switch at the end of each line.”
If you understand this completely, you are smarter than I.