Icon of the romantic song and with six decades of musical career behind him, the Brazilian singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos is the most successful artist in his country and one of the most important names in Latin music, with sales exceeding 140 million of copies. On April 19, ‘O Rei’ turns 80 years old.
“The muse is sometimes a situation, a person we see or hear. My main muse for making songs is life. I am an attentive observer of what is happening in front of me and the stories of others. I observe life with details , as my song says; in life we have what it takes to make a song “.
Roberto Carlos is considered the most important singer-songwriter in Brazilian music and is without a doubt one of the greatest names in Latin music, thanks to the hundreds of songs he has composed over six decades of career, during which he has recorded at least one record a year until 2019.
With more than 140 million records sold, a Grammy winner for best Latin pop album in 1989, ‘O Rei’ received the Billboard Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 in recognition of an outstanding artistic career, a cultural impact that also he earned this same year the distinction of the Latin Grammys as ‘Person of the Year’ and a tribute from the Academy of Recording in Las Vegas (USA).
“Talking about Brazil is talking about Roberto Carlos,” said then the president of the academy, Gabriel Abaroa, who stressed that his immense talent, passion and dedication to his art have made him one of the most great and in one the best composers of Latin music “.
The musical legacy of the Brazilian singer-songwriter is unquestionable, and is by its own merits one of the greatest representatives of melodic song, both in Portuguese and Spanish, thanks to hits such as ‘Dear Lover’, ‘Friend’, ‘Lady Laura’ , ‘Little Woman’, ‘The Cat Who Is Sad and Blue’ or ‘A Million Friends’.
“Love stories are always the same. The way you talk about love is the same as before. The love you feel for a woman, for a person, is always the same. The way you talk is different. There used to be a bit more lyricism and romance in love songs, “the singer-songwriter commented in one of his last interviews with Efe.
ROMANTIC SONG ICON.
Roberto Carlos Braga Moreira was born in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Espírito Santo (Brazil), on April 19, 1941; and it was in his hometown where an event took place that would mark his life: when he was six years old, he was hit by a locomotive and, as a result of the accident, part of his leg was amputated, so the singer-songwriter was forced to wear a prosthesis.
However, neither this traumatic event nor the shyness that characterized him prevented him from soon beginning to stand out for his musical talents, performing songs on the radio of some of his musical references.
In adolescence he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing in various musical formations and met the composer Erasmo Carlos, a Brazilian musical companion in the best years of his career.
In his early days, in the late 50’s, he tried the bossa nova, a genre that had made João Gilberto a global phenomenon, but with which Roberto Carlos failed to succeed, which he did with pop. and rock thanks to his participation in various television programs during the 1960s.
This made Roberto Carlos an idol for young Brazilians and one of the main references of the ‘Jovem guarda’, a cultural movement notably influenced by rock and the ‘Beatle phenomenon’ that swept the world in the middle of that decade and that was rejected by the most committed youth who at that time claimed Brazilian popular music.
The turning point in the Brazilian singer-songwriter’s career was marked by the prestigious San Remo Festival, one of the world’s leading musical events, in which Roberto Carlos won in 1968 with ‘Canzone per et’, all and that it would be another song in Italian, ‘Gatto nel blu’, which would end up being one of the emblems of his career, especially when in 1972 he published his Spanish version.
The victory at the San Remo Festival immediately made Roberto Carlos one of the main icons of romantic song, a condition that the legend of Brazilian music maintains to this day, as he showed with his latest album, ‘Amor sin Limits’, released in 2019, and which includes ten songs in Spanish, including ‘Esta Dona’, which he sings in duet with Alejandro Sanz.
If in the 1960s his lukewarmness over the military coup in Brazil in 1964 was controversial, in recent years his support for current President Jair Bolsonaro has also been controversial, and throughout his career others issues such as the veto on versions of some of his songs or his support for the censorship of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1986 film ‘Je vous salue Marie’.
Already in 1980 his religious convictions and his obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) (the same for which he only wears blue and white) had led him to refuse to record the song ‘Es eu quiser falar com Deus’, which Gil had composed it to him, because the letter contained words like “diablo” and “horrible”, according to explains the historian Paulo Caesar de Araújo in the biography on the singer, who took to them to one long a judicial battle.
“OCD leads me to be a patient, demanding and very detailed man with the things I do. I correct and repeat as many times as necessary until I am satisfied, so I think this problem sometimes helps,” said the artist. in this respect.