Construção

Chico Buarque came home from Italy in March 1970, after more than a year of voluntary distance from the repression of Brazil's military dictatorship. The song he released the following year told one ordinary story: the last day of a construction worker, from kissing his wife goodbye in the morning to his fatal fall from the building, after which his death is little more than a nuisance to the traffic and the weekend. The craft is what made it famous. Every line has twelve syllables and ends on a word stressed on the third-to-last syllable, and when the story repeats, Buarque swaps those final words around, by his own account like pieces on a game board, so each pass sees the same day from a new angle. Rogério Duprat's arrangement circles over just two chords at first, as if laying slab on slab, while MPB-4 sing in the chorus. Buarque insisted in a 1973 interview that he had not set out to write a protest song; the emotion, he said, was in the wordplay, and putting a human being into that game like a brick was what moved people. Tom Jobim reportedly cut the lyrics out of a newspaper and pasted them into a notebook. In 2001 a Folha de S.Paulo poll ranked it the second greatest Brazilian song ever, and Rolling Stone Brasil put it at number one in 2009. Written in one of the hardest years of the dictatorship, it remains the clearest example of how Brazilian songwriters made form itself say what could not be said outright.