Rita Lee – “Agora E Moda”
Rita Lee started her career in a wedding dress, banging cymbals and belting out Brazilian psych brilliance with Os Mutantes, the weirdest (and arguably best) of the Tropicalia acts of the late 60s. Despite her strengths as a singer, the boys in the band didn’t think she was pulling enough weight as an instrumentalist, so they ousted her from the group in ‘72. It was a harsh blow, leading her to question whether she even wanted to make music anymore, but within a year she was back at it, putting out records under her own name. Her music continued to evolve, changing with the times, as this track from her 1978 album Babilonia shows. “Agora E Moda” (“Now and Fashion” in Portuguese) adopts the low end theories of American funk and R&B, pairing a bass-heavy groove with her own breathy enunciations, and when she commands us at the end of each verse to “dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, dance,” it’s pretty damn hard to resist.
– Spoolwork