Wotcha,
Hope all well witchu. Lockdown continues same as it ever was, except for a quick trip to Gaby's parents' for an excellent Easter Sunday lunch of baked cod and pudim. We've swapped running up the stairs to running round the outside area of the building - variety is the spice of life and all that - and I've been catching up on my reading and mixtape-making.
At this point it behooves me to document a very Brazilian phenomenon sweeping the nation in these troubled times. Big names in the national music scene are keeping the confined masses entertained via the medium of livestreamed shows on Facebook and Instagram, which are being broadcast into folks’ living rooms on an almost nightly basis. The idea is to get people to stay home, and raise money for homeless charities, which is very noble indeed.
The first high-profile case was Gustavo Lima, who apparently played for about five hours straight one night from his house, although Gaby doesn’t really listen to his music so it passed us by. This set the pace for other artists who, out of an excess of free time and (presumably) competitiveness, have tried to outdo each other with their respective set times and amount of songs played.
Then came the live set by national treasures Jorge e Mateus, which ran for about four hours one Saturday night and was apparently streamed by an unprecedented amount of Instagrammers, beating Beyonce’s previous record. And it was perfectly fine, just one three-minute blast of catchy sertanejo after another – a live band was out of the question, due to social distancing etc, so it was basically just the two of them singing along to a karaoke-esque backing track, with awkward silences between songs and even-more-awkward product placement and thanking of the event’s many sponsors.
I skipped the next few due to work; sertanejo stalwarts Marilia Mendonça and Marcos e Belutti turned in sets that were equally impressive in their Springsteen-esque length, but the general feeling was one of diminishing returns - until Bruno e Marrone tore up the rule book last week.
I should explain here that I’ve always found the concept of Bruno e Marrone hilarious even under normal circumstances. They’re a duo in the loosest sense of the word: Bruno is the lead vocalist and songwriter, with a genuinely amazing Tom Jones-esque baritone, and Marrone is… well, no one really knows what Marrone brings to the table, probably not even the man himself.
He hangs about onstage lip-syncing the lyrics, egging the crowd on and occasionally playing an accordion that may not even be plugged in. Sometimes he doesn’t even show up to gigs, because he’s scared of flying, and hardly anyone notices. The general vibe is either of a competition winner who has hung around for decades after the event and can’t believe his luck, or a mascot that no one has the heart to let go, or a blackmailer who has a lot of dirt on Bruno.
Also, Bruno’s lung-busting vocals aside, their music shoots for faded romanticism but usually ends up sounding a bit cheesy and sad – Gaby’s take is that it sounds like the soundtrack to a half-empty bar, as you mull over your third divorce and eye up the dregs of the night from across the room. There’s a word for it in Portuguese, “brega”, which basically means "extremely kitsch". It was quite edifying, and funny, to find out they both look a bit like the character in this fictional bar in real life.
Anyway, their live set started off much like the others, from what looked like the garage of one of their houses, with drones flying overhead and fridges of Brahma beer conspicuously displayed to the cameras. It quickly became obvious that they’d instructed their agent to accept all and any sponsorship deals in the run-up to the event, as the sponsored messages started to take up as much air time as the songs – not helped by Marrone forgetting his reading glasses and getting the company names wrong half the time. They also seemed obsessed with getting everyone to stop watching on pirate channels, so they could ascertain the real number of viewers.
Then, in an inspired move, Bruno started to get progressively and totally hammered on beer and cachaça, helping himself from the keg at the back of the stage. The sponsored spiel started getting more and more abstract, veering into ruminations on capitalism and communism, and often just awestruck musings (“[squinting at cue cards off-camera] Big thanks to Sadia who have donated 800 tonnes of eggs to the coronavirus effort… Jesus, that’s a lot of eggs [long, awkward pause]”). Despite Bruno’s frequent urgings, Marrone and the back-up guitarist refused to match his alcohol consumption, which led to some amazing unintentional physical comedy and uncertain looks at the camera, not unlike Tim from “The Office”.
About 4 hours in, the set began to gather steam as the group’s big hits were rolled out, and word got around that Bruno was making an absolute spectacle of himself on live TV (while still belting out the hits like an absolute pro, it has to be said), leading to a leap in viewing figures. Bruno slow-danced with his wife, got his young kid to sing a song very, very badly, almost wiped out the onstage display of Brahma and the cameraman, casually revealed that Marrone only has one testicle in a completely unprompted stream of consciousness, and broke down in tears as he told his musical partner of 30 years that he loved him - to which Marrone, mortified, muttered “thanks”. Then, a mere 4 ½ hours after they began, they were off and the broadcast ended. But we’ll always have the memes.
Speak soon!
Frodders
