Singer Rita Lee, world famous with her hit “Lança Perfume” (1980), died at her residence in Sao Paulo on Monday evening at the age of 75.
Rebel, visionary and source of inspiration for several generations of women, Rita Lee was the “queen” of Brazilian rock, with forays into the tropicalist movement, although she preferred to call herself the “Patron Saint of Freedom”.
The singer and songwriter, known worldwide with her hit “Lança Perfume” (1980), died at her residence in Sao Paulo on Monday evening May 8, her family announced on social media on Tuesday. She had been suffering from lung cancer since 2011.
A prolific career
Born in the Brazilian economic capital on December 31, 1947, in the middle class, Rita Lee Jones began singing covers of the Beatles and other Anglo-Saxon artists in the all-female group of Teenage Singers.
But it was with the psychedelic rock trio Os Mutantes, formed in 1966, that she rose to fame, at the height of tropicalism, a libertarian movement that revolutionized Brazilian music in the midst of the military dictatorship (1964-1985). It was alongside Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, leaders of this movement, that Rita Lee discovered her “Brazilian side”.
“They gave me advice on how to make Brazilian music. Because before, I only sang foreign titles, other artists”she explained in the documentary Ovelha Negra (black sheep), released in 2007 and directed by Roberto de Carvalho, his partner in life and in music for more than 40 years. Rita Lee left Os Mutantes 1972 to join the group Tutti Frutti, before devoting herself primarily to her solo career.
“The Only Girl in Rock”
Rita Lee was a pioneer of the Brazilian music scene. Her extravagant outfits and her songs that talk unbridled about love, sex and freedom, have made her a symbol of feminism. “I was the only girl in a group of guys who had a mantra to rock, you have to have balls. Me, I had my uterus and my ovaries and I felt like their equal, whether they wanted it or not. No”, she wrote in her 2016 autobiography.
Among his greatest successes, besides Launched Perfume : Ovelha Negra (1975), mania de você (1979) and Love and sex (2003). Her look was also her trademark: medium-length hair with a radiant complexion (often in red) and glasses with colored lenses.
Acclaimed by the greatest
Rita Lee has won the sympathy of artists of all styles, including the father of Bossa Nova, Joao Gilberto, with whom she recorded the duo Joujoux and Balangandans. “Joao Gilberto taught me that I was a rocker with the voice of a Bossa Nova singer”, she confided in 2019, after the death of the latter. In fifty years of career, she has released more than 30 albums, received 7 Latino Grammy nominations, winning Best Brazilian Rock Album in 2001, for 3001.
She has long kept the link with the great rock groups of the 60s, opening the first concert of the Rolling Stones in Brazil, in 1995, and launching a Beatles covers album Bossa Nova version in 2001.
“Patron Saint”
Rita Lee retired from performing in 2012, at the age of 64, citing a “physical fragility”. She had since lived as a recluse in her country house in the state of São Paulo, alongside her husband and her animals, another of her great passions. In the latest images shared on her social networks, she appeared short hair, dressed in colorful sweaters.
True to her rebellious soul, she revealed in 2022 to the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stones magazine that the role of national “Queen of Rock” attributed to her by Brazilians of all ages did not quite suit her: “I like to be called Patron Saint of Liberty rather than Queen of Rock which to me is cheesy”.