Rita Lee, liberator of brazilian music
She sang about Brazil, represented it as an international star with more than 60 million albums sold worldwide — unforgettable hits — and she fought for women’s rights and for animal rights.
Rita Lee Jones was born on December 31, 1947, in São Paulo to a Brazilian mother and an American-Brazilian father. She went to a French lycée and was fluent in French, Portuguese, English, Spanish and Italian. After learning classical piano, she asked her family for a drum kit. Music interested her more than anything else, and as a teenager she formed her first groups, including a vocal trio in 1963, which had success backing singers. The following year, this trio merged with a male trio to form the group O’Seis.
When three members left to pursue their studies, only Rita Lee and the brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista remained, the former playing bass and keyboards, the latter electric guitar. And so in 1966 the rock group Os Mutantes was born, revolutionising Brazilian music at the end of the 1960s with its psychedelic pop approach and its avant-garde audacity amid the tropicalist revolution, alongside Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa.
A convinced feminist, Rita Lee soon felt crowded in the group and acted on her need to break free as a solo artist. In 1972, she formed Tutti Frutti with Lúcia Turnbull, and began expressing her eccentricities and wild irreverence. Her voice was sensual and playful, able to adapt to any rhythm, from the softest to the most energetic, as on her famous “Agora Só Falta Você.” Among the group’s four albums, Fruto Proibido (1975) would go down in Brazilian rock history.
Her lyrics explored themes that had been taboo in a straitlaced Brazil, where it was still frowned upon to talk openly about drugs, homosexuality, sex or police repression. Rita Lee did as she pleased, provoking conservatives with her androgynous stage outfits. This spiced up her songs, which she wrote alone and then with her husband Roberto de Carvalho, with whom she published several albums in the 80s. She collaborated with the future writer Paulo Coelho on a number of songs, including “Arrombou a Festa,” which sold 200,000 copies.
In 1980, she wrote the song that brought her international fame and success: “Lança Perfume,” a danceable, almost disco hit that praised a local drug people sniffed at night. She then added several hits in Brazil: “Mania de Você,” “Doce Vampiro,” “Desculpe o Auê” — all of which were the fruit of her musical roots in her country, mixed with her universal vision of rock.
Her career subsequently declined, and Rita Lee devoted herself to writing children’s books and acting. Still, she sold over 350,000 copies of a live acoustic album recorded for a Brazilian TV show in 1991, and Mick Jagger asked her to open for the Rolling Stones on their Brazilian tour. In 2012, she released an unexpected final album, Reza. She published a touching autobiography in 2016, revealing her personal trials and faith in life, and shedding light on the intensity of her personality and her work.
Rita Lee joined Sacem in 2003 as an author and composer.