Rita Lee, the towering Brazilian musician who co-founded Os Mutantes and was known as the country's 'Queen of Rock,' has died at age 75.
“Lee,” in reference to Confederate General Robert E. Lee.) Lee started playing music at a young age, even asking her parents for a drum set, in lieu of participating in a debutante ball as a teenager.
In 1966, Lee formed Os Mutantes with brothers Arnaldo Baptista and Sérgio Dias Baptista. After meeting Gilberto Gil, they were soon looped into the budding Tropicália movement, which blended British and American pop rock and psychedelic rock with Brazilian and African influences. The music was also fiercely political, emerging largely in protest to Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s.
“’Our whole thing was playing pranks and defying authority, but you had to be careful in those days because friends were disappearing or being forced into exile, and the cops would often come in and bust up our shows,” Lee told in a 2002 interview. ”We had to be creative but evasive to avoid the repression, and so we’d tell each other, ‘Let’s make this song complicated so that nobody understands it.’”Tropicália: ou Panis et Circenses
. The group released four more LPs before Lee left the group in 1972, citing her “search of Brazil, Brazil, Brazil,” as her bandmates started to pursue a more “progressive rock direction” that was “more foreign influenced.”
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