Rita Lee, the legendary Brazilian musician, composer and founding father of the trailblazing band Os Mutantes, has died at 75, prompting emotional tributes to Brazil’s undisputed “Queen of Rock.”
Lee was recognized with lung most cancers in 2021.The pioneering artist and feminist icon, who bought greater than 55 million information throughout a six-decade profession, went into remission final yr however died at her house in São Paulo on Monday night time, Could 8.
“At this second of profound disappointment, the household thanks everybody for his or her affection and love,” learn a message on Lee’s Instagram account, inviting followers to a public wake on the metropolis’s Parque Ibirapuera, certainly one of Latin America’s largest parks.
Information of Rita Lee’s dying sparked an outpouring of emotion and reverence in direction of one of the vital vital figures in up to date Brazilian music.
“I’m a wreck. The Biggest has left us … There’ll by no means be one other Rita Lee,” tweeted the Brazilian rock singer Pitty.
Brazil’s tradition minister, the singer and composer Margareth Menezes, hailed her as a “revolutionary girl.”
“The world has misplaced one of the vital distinctive and unimaginable individuals who ever existed,” certainly one of her sons, João Lee, wrote on social media. “What an intense and spectacular life you had. Admired and cherished by so many individuals. So forward of your time.”
Rita Lee’s big home following was matched by a military of worldwide followers, seemingly starting from the Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain to King Charles III.
In 1988, the Day by day Mirror reported that in a British embassy banquet in Paris, the then Prince of Wales had requested for a Rita Lee document to be performed. When the suitable LP discovered its approach on to the turntable, the longer term king “already knew the phrases by coronary heart,” the British newspaper claimed.
Rita Lee Jones de Carvalho’s first forays into the world of music did little to trace on the stardom to come back. As a younger lady born in São Paulo to an American father and a Brazilian mom, she took classical piano classes however, in accordance with one newspaper report, suffered from stage fright and moist herself throughout one audition.
Slightly than retreat from performing, nonetheless, Rita Lee threw herself into music, founding the seminal psychedelic-rock group Os Mutantes in 1966 with Arnaldo Batista and Sérgio Dias.
“[The group] has come from one other planet to take over the world,” the singer-songwriter declared in her first interview with the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
She was proper. The subversive, LSD-fuelled trio turned a key a part of Brazil’s Tropicália motion which, spearheaded by composers Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, blended conventional Brazilian music with electrical devices and overseas sounds.
“The underside line is that we had been gentle years forward of everybody else,” Rita Lee remembered in a 2001 interview with the New York Instances.
An instantaneous sensation in Brazil, it took Os Mutantes a number of many years to seek out worldwide fame and recognition – however ultimately it got here. Kurt Cobain met the group throughout a 1993 journey to Brazil, hailing their “revolutionary” sound and the “guts” they confirmed producing such daring music through the 1964-85 navy dictatorship.
Lee left Os Mutantes in 1972 however not earlier than serving to produce a staggering catalogue of classics together with “Balada do Louco, ” “Child” and “Ando Meio Desligado.”
As a solo artist, the red-haired rocker recorded a succession of equally profitable and irreverent hits reminiscent of “Amor e Sexo” and “Lança Fragrance.” Her greater than 40 albums included a 2001 bossa nova-infused homage to The Beatles referred to as Right here, There and In every single place.
In her 2016 autobiography, Rita Lee wrote what she hoped can be her epitaph. “She was by no means a great instance,” she wrote. “However she was a great particular person.”