Rita Lee Jones, Brazil’s million-selling Queen of Rock who gained an international following through her colorful, heartfelt style and hits like “Ovelha Negra,” “Mania de Você” and “Now Only Missing You,” has died at 75 years.
Known as Rita Lee, she died at her home in her native Sao Paulo on Monday night, according to a statement posted on her official Instagram account.
Her career spanning six decades, she left a lasting mark with her irreverence, creativity, and compositions containing messages that helped usher feminism into Brazilian society, while also being candid about her fight against drug abuse.
Although she considered her voice to be “weak and a little out of tune,” like that of a sparrow, she enjoyed a long string of best-selling albums, including “Rita Lee” and “Rita Lee & Roberto de Carvalho,” and dozens of her songs. songs were featured in highly rated telenovelas in Latin America. The giant television network Globo used her interpretation of the song “Poison Weed” in three of its programs.
“I was not born to get married and wash underwear. I wanted the same freedom as the boys who played in the street with their toy cars,” he told the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone in 2008. “When I got into music, I realized that the ‘machos’ reigned supreme, even more in the rock I said ‘wow, this is where I’m going to get my fangs out and literally give them a hard time.’”
She was a singer-songwriter praised for her versatility, playing at least five instruments: drums, guitar, piano, harmonica, and autoharp. She was also one of the first Brazilian musicians to use the electric guitar.
Eventually, his popularity spread beyond Brazil. She performed in Portugal, England, Spain, France and Germany. In 1988, the British newspaper Daily Mirror revealed that the then Prince Charles admired her song “Lança Perfume” and considered her his favorite singer. She won a Latin Grammy in the category of best Portuguese-language album in 2001, for “3001”.
Rita Lee rose to fame with the group Os Mutantes (The Mutants), beginning in 1966. Colors and creativity, as well as irony and irreverence, were Lee’s hallmarks from the beginning, evident in the extravagant costumes with which he made in his presentations. In the mid-1970s, after selling 200,000 copies of the Forbidden Fruit album, Lee began to be called the Queen of Rock on the music scene. Hits from “Fruto Proibido” include “Now Only Missing You” and “Ovelha Negra”, long played on Brazilian radio stations and soap operas.
In an interview with the music website I Have More Records Than Friends! In 2017, Lulu Santos, a judge on the Brazilian version of The Voice, recalled seeing Rita Lee play the autoharp in a concert.
“She brought that thing onstage, in those clothes…it was completely mythological,” the musician said.
There really is a lineage of ‘girls’ linked to rock in Brazil, of which she is a legitimate representative. But I see it as an element that moves away from the clichés of rock. She, from her feminine point of view, sees the awkwardness of the well-worn cliché of the male rocker, the one he plays with his legs spread. She was able to see through him.”
One of the first public figures in Brazil to popularize feminist issues, her 1979 song “Mania de Voce” (mania for you) addresses female sexuality and pleasure. Similar tracks followed, such as “Amor e Sexo” (love and sex) in which she contrasted the two in detail and “Lança Perfume” (perfume spray), an ode to unbridled hedonism.
She later became a vegan and an animal rights activist. For decades, she kept her hair bright red and often wore matching glasses, a popular look she’s shed in recent years by allowing gray to grow. In 2015 she decided to reinvent herself as a white butterfly.
In her autobiography, published the following year, she openly described the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a man who had come to fix her mother’s sewing machine.
She also referred to herself as a “rebel” and “hippie communist,” and wrote about sneaking out of the windows of her house as a teenager to go have a good time. She was arrested during the dictatorship for marijuana possession and spoke of her multiple stints in drug and alcohol rehab clinics.
“I admit that my best songs were written in an altered state, and so were my worst. I am only sorry for my delay in realizing that the ‘medicine’ was long expired,” she wrote. “My generation suffered from the claustrophobia of a brutal dictatorship, and taking drugs was a way to breathe the air of freedom.”
In an interview with the Fantastico television show in 2020, she explained that physical frailty had prompted her to leave the stage eight years earlier.
“Getting old, for me, was a surprise, because I had never aged in my life,” he told the show. “I was left wanting to live my old age away from the stage, without sharing it with the public.”
A public wake will be held at the Sao Paulo planetarium on May 10, according to the Instagram post.
She is survived by her three children and her husband, musician Roberto do Carvalho, with whom she shared a musical partnership for 44 years. In 2021, they released a new song together, Change, and a remix of some of the singer’s biggest hits.
Years before, he imagined his death, as if prophesying:
“I’ll be in heaven,” she wrote, “with my present soul playing my autoharp and singing to God, ‘Thank you, Lord, finally sedated.’ Epitaph: He was never a good example, but he was good people.
