Years of Lead, copper songs: poetics and politics in Chico Buarque and Fabrizio De André
Chico. De André. Song. Years of Lead.
Chico Buarque and Fabrizio De André are two iconic artists from their respective cultures. Although they belong to very different contexts from peripheral capitalism, it is possible to draw some parallels between their educations and careers that lead to deeper reflections about the Brazilian and Italian song systems. In this sense, the objective of this work is thinking about the political function of music and the aesthetic performance of historical events, specifically within the context known as “years of lead”, in which songs are responsible for a militancy that is now exhausted. Following a comparative literature methodology, we approximated songs taken from two albums by each author, observing the relationship between the artist, intellectual and bourgeois, and national life in each context and interpreting the function of music in relation to reality, as an agent of history, as a tool for describing history and as a source for its study. Our theoretical bases were the studies of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and György Lukács, in addition to other contemporary scholars who claim the same critical tradition. We conclude that the song played a determining role in social life both at the time, contributing to the enlightenment of the masses, as well as today, being cultural baggage of an imperitable collective imagination.