Friday, August 6, The Vogue theatre

Seu Jorge is lucky that he's the charismatic showman that he is: few performers would have been able to get away with the dull array of songs that he performed at The Vogue on August 6th in Vancouver. The acclaimed Brazilian singer/actor was performing songs from his new album with Almaz, a four-person unit of his fellow Brazilian musicians. Unfortunately, the band was like a dark cloud obscuring the excellence of Seu Jorge's solo performances.

Many people here know Seu Jorge through his David Bowie covers in the 2004 movie The Life Aquatic and as the sniper "Knockout Ned" in the gangster flick City of God. But to Brazilian music fans, many of whom showed up in droves to see the performance, Seu Jorge is known as the man who revived samba music and brought it to new audiences worldwide.

Seu Jorge's soulful voice and lyrics often speak of his experiences of the street: born Jorge Maria da Silva, he grew up in a poor favela on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. His family life rapidly deteriorated after his younger brother was killed in a gang shootout, after which he became homeless and addicted to drugs for three years in his teens.

Life took a dramatic turn, however, when he was sleeping outside a theatre one night. Its members opened its doors to him and taught him to play music. It was there that the young Jorge began playing songs for the theatre's production, joined the band Farofa Carioca, and made samba/rock music that would result in two successful solo albums in Brazil. As implied by the title of his second album, Cru ("raw"), Jorge's songs are often simple and unadorned, free from the excesses of modern pop music.

Since 2010, Seu Jorge has been on tour with Almaz, which includes members of experimental rock group Nacao Zumbi and a producer for the City of God soundtrack. Their style is edgy and experimental, which sounds good on paper, but was underwhelming onstage.

Seu Jorge's show with Almaz often sounded noisy and congested: the echoing effect used for his vocals was fine for the first three minutes of his performance, but it droned on for about half the concert, making him sound like a banshee floating through the streets of Rio at night. Whoever composed the songs seemed determined to make every track (most of them covers of past Brazilian hits) resemble a hallucinatory drug trip -- most songs sounded dark and coldly dispassionate, to the point that even "Tempo de Amor" (Time of Love) sounded more ominous than romantic.

Thankfully, the fans were loyal enough to sway and dance to just about anything the band played, but Seu Jorge's new offerings were nothing like the catchy, danceable samba songs that built his career. Whereas much of Seu Jorge's older songs were evocative of sunlit beaches and working-class neighbourhoods, the songs he played with Almaz conjured images of aimless, drunken meanderings downtown in the dead of the night.

This isn't to say that his music wasn't "good" -- the members of Almaz are all talented, and the new album has been well-received by critics as well as his increasing base of hipster listeners. The songs feel less genuine than his older original material that spoke directly to listeners about favela life, beautiful women, and the rich-poor divide. For most of the show, Seu Jorge didn't really even look like himself, sporting dark sunglasses and a douchy tee made him look like a lanky version of Kanye West. It's possible that Seu Jorge wanted to take things in a new direction, but on the surface, it looked like the band was responsible for this sudden shit -- excuse me, shift -- in his music.

As the show wrapped up and the crowd began its encore calls, I had the vague sense that the concert would have been much better if Seu Jorge performed alone. This sense turned into a conviction when Seu Jorge returned to the stage by himself for an encore and began to sing -- suddenly, it seemed like for the first time this evening that the venue was reverberating with memorable music.

This was the Seu Jorge I had come to hear. He played three songs solo, including his early hit "Carolina," which impatient fans had been screaming for him to play for the last 40 minutes.

Yet during "Carolina," the members of Almaz began to join in one by one with their instruments, and the song got progressively worse with each person contributing to the music. The drums were too loud and were completely out of place, and by the time the whole band got together, it had mostly degenerated back into the generic rock/funk that was playing for the first part of the concert.

They did perform excellent cover of the Tribo Massái’s song together, "Pai Joao," a dance song that seemed to bring the best out of both Seu Jorge's energetic vocals and electric guitars. To end the evening on a high note, they played the song one last time before leaving the stage with roaring applause. Most of the audience seemed thrilled to have seen the concert, with some calling for him to come back for yet another encore. But for the most part, I felt that the concert would have been far more successful if he had performed by himself and left his experimental band back home.

By Jenny Uechi

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It's funny how people's perceptions are so often shaped by circumstance.

Whether intentional or not, our thinking is always mediated by where and how we've grown up, the experiences and interactions we've shared with others, and our own biases and interests.

That's why it's a very common (and perfectly valid) argument that the first step toward real social change must be a shift in our collective attitude. The idealist inside me likes to believe that people are not inherently malicious or spiteful or, if you'll pardon me, Naughty by Nature; that much of the time we'd go out of our way to help those around us.

Obviously though, it's not that simple, and social injustices of every kind abound in our communities every day. Particularly in Vancouver, where the class division is so immediately visible, it's really easy to avert your eyes, walk on by and shrug your shoulders at a situation that often seems far too big to tackle.

We might see these injustices as relatively new problems, signs that our generation has lost touch with the warm, neighbourly mindset of the "good ol' days". However, the issues surrounding homelessness are indeed far more complex than the tabloid stereotypes of drugs and crime we are so often fed through mainstream media.

Chicago street paper Streetwise recently published a fascinating interview with social justice activist Jeff Olivet, who traces the roots of homelessness as a social condition of North American society and culture. His history goes back beyond the Great Depression, even past the Civil War - all the way back to 17th-century daily life in the original 13 colonies, where "wars fought between the settlers and the Native Americans displaced people on both sides[, and] many of those new settlers became displaced in the big port cities."

As Olivet guides us through the state of homelessness during the urbanization of America, the industrial Revolution, and every major war since colonization, we begin to see that as a sociological issue, it's as old as the hills, and the dichotomy between those who can't be bothered to help and those who dedicate their lives to helping has existed for centuries.

It's not that we're taught specifically to discriminate against less fortunate people, it's more that we are conditioned to rationalize ignoring them in favour of our own important affairs. It's also that we're just not taught to dig deeper and understand that every person has an elaborate history and a valuable perspective. But that's sort of the American dream, isn't it? You gotta look out for number one.

Read the interview here.

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