Icon of the romantic song and with six decades of musical career behind him, 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 of over 140 million copies. On April 19, ‘O Rei’ will turn 80 years old.
“The muse is sometimes a situation, a person we see or hear. My main muse for song making is life. I am an attentive observer of what is happening in front of me and the stories of others. I observe life with the details, as my song says; in life we have what it takes to make a song ”.
Considered the foremost singer-songwriter in Brazilian music, Roberto Carlos is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in Latin music, thanks to the hundreds of songs he composed over six decades of his career, in which he has at least one album. included. year to 2019.
With more than 140 million records sold, winner of a Grammy 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 earned him the same year. of the Latin Grammy Award as ‘Person of the Year’ and of a tribute to the Recording Academy in Las Vegas (USA).
“To speak of Brazil is to speak of Roberto Carlos,” said the academy’s president, Gabriel Abaroa, who emphasized that “his immense talent, passion and dedication to his art have made him one of the greatest voices and one of the best. best composers of Latin American music ”.
The Brazilian singer-songwriter’s musical legacy is indisputable, and he is, by his own merits, one of the greatest representatives of melodic singing, both in Portuguese and Spanish, thanks to hits such as’ Amada Amante ‘,’ Amigo ‘,’ Lady Laura ‘,’ Lady ‘,’ The cat who is sad and blue ‘or’ One million friends’.
“Love stories are always the same. The way to talk about love is different than before. The love you feel for a woman, for a person, is always the same. The way of speaking is different. In the past there was a bit more lyricism and romance. in love songs, ” the singer-songwriter said in one of his latest interviews with Efe.
ROMANTIC SONG ICON.
Roberto Carlos Braga Moreira was born on April 19, 1941 in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Espírito Santo (Brazil); and it was in his hometown that an event took place that would mark his life: when he was six years old, he was run over by a locomotive and as a result of the accident part of his leg was amputated, for which the singer became a songwriter forced to wear a prosthesis.
However, neither this traumatic event nor the embarrassment that characterized him prevented him from quickly standing out for his musical gifts, playing songs from all his musical references on the radio.
As a teenager, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing in various music groups and met the composer Erasmo Carlos, the Brazilian’s musical partner in the best years of his career.
In the beginning of his recording, in the late 50s, he tried bossa nova, a genre that had made João Gilberto a worldwide phenomenon, but which Roberto Carlos failed to do, something he did with pop and rock thanks to his participation in various television programs during the decade of the 1960s.
This made Roberto Carlos an idol for young Brazilians and one of the main references of the ‘Jovem Guarda’, a cultural movement particularly influenced by rock and the ‘Beatle phenomenon’ that engulfed the world in the mid-decade. rejected by the most dedicated young people who defended Brazilian popular music at the time.
The turning point in the Brazilian singer-songwriter’s career was marked by the prestigious San Remo Festival, one of the most important musical events in the world, in which Roberto Carlos was the winner in 1968 with ‘Canzone per te’, although it would. . being another song in Italian, ‘Gatto nel blu’, which would eventually become one of the emblems of his career, especially when he published his version in Spanish in 1972.
The victory at the San Remo Festival immediately made Roberto Carlos one of the foremost icons of romantic singing, a prerequisite that the legend of Brazilian music continues to this day, as he demonstrated with his latest album, ‘Amor sin Límites’, published in 2019, which contains ten songs in Spanish, including ‘Esa Mujer’, which he sings in duet with Alejandro Sanz.
If in the 1960s his lukewarmness towards Brazil’s 1964 military coup was controversial, his support for current President Jair Bolsonaro has also been controversial in recent years, and during his career other issues have been such as the veto of versions of some of his songs or his approval of the censorship of the movie ‘Je vous salue Marie’, by Jean-Luc Godard, in 1986.
As early as 1980, his religious beliefs and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) (the same one for which he only wears blue and white) had led him to refuse to record the song ‘Se eu quiser falar como Deus’, for which Gil had composed. him., because the lyrics contain words like “devil” and “terrible,” said historian Paulo César de Araújo in the singer’s biography, which led to a long legal battle.
“OCD makes me a patient man, demanding and very detailed in the things I do. I correct and repeat as often as necessary until I am satisfied, which is why I think this problem sometimes helps ”, said the artist about this.