Fado is one of the most offbeat music genres in the country.
It started spontaneously, records say, in the bars streets of 19th Century Lisbon, sung by drunken sailors, thieves, and prostitutes. The scum of the capital city in the 1800s.
There was nothing intellectual about it. It wasn’t planned or created. It was simply a way for them to express their daily routines, concerns, and sorrows.
Music is a way to exorcise your demons, and it’s a different part of you at work. You can bend some rules, adopt a new personality.
However, I had never thought of Fado in this way, but that’s because I only knew half of the story.
The Fado I knew was the established art form: commercial, intellectual, loved by the wealthy upper-class. I thought it was overly patriotic and subversive.
I’m part of the so-called post-revolution generation. Anything that reminds me of that time of censorship when the “typically Portuguese” was used as political propaganda, doesn’t sit right with me.
Amalia Rodrigues was caught in this whirlwind at one point. On the one hand, she was the great Fado diva who made the genre famous abroad. On the other hand, she was seen as a symbol of the former dictatorship and what the regime stood for.
Despite her star quality, she was adored by everyone. She had a distinctive languishing way of singing that will be forever associated with Fado. And ultimately, she was the one who elevated Fado to the status of World Music hit in the 1990s.