Transa

Artist: Caetano Veloso
Label: Polygram Int'l
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 042283851122
EAN: 0042283851122
ASIN: B00000GAC1

Release Date: 1998-03-25

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Listmania:

My favourite albums in no particular order
Twenty South-American Essentials
1970-73. Brazilian Music at its best moment ever .
FREE YOURSELF!
self food
MPB for a Desert Island
Brazilian gems you won't find in your local store

Tracks:

You Don't Know Me
Nine Out of Ten
Triste Bahia
It's a Long Way
Mora Na Filosofia
Neolithic Man
Nostalgia (That's What Rock'n Roll Is All About)

Similar Items:

Caetano Veloso (Tropicália)
Caetano Veloso (1969)
Caetano Veloso (A Little More Blue)
Jóia
Tropicália 2

Customer Reviews:

That's what saudade is all about.......2006-12-09

Saudade meaning longing in Portuguese,it must have invaded Caetano while creating this album.He was about to return to Brazil from exile when he embarked in this project.Eventually a cult disc and not a commercially succesful LP,TRANSA(making love)has its ups and downs.The English language tracks are a mixed bag while the Portuguese language songs are definite hits.Mora na Filosofia is my favorite.Not the best work of Veloso,but not the worst either.

Sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime.......2006-03-19

This record is a masterpiece of tropicalia music. The Context: The tropicalia poet has been sent into exile in London by the forces of repression and artistic control in Brasil.

London, 1970: at the height of hippie culture. Surrounded by the sounds of 1960's British rock, the harsh noise of the English language, with the warmth of tropical Brasil and the soft Portuguese language only dreams and memories in a primitive, neolithic, rock-dominated nightmare of exile. He wakes up in the morning, singing an old Beatles song. It is a long way back to his homeland.

At home, in Brasil, the Poet is a star. In England he is a just a long-haired South American man with a guitar and a funny accent. He hears his voice among others... just a common man. His presence in London goes unnoticed. ... "You don't know me..." he says and "You won't see me." He feels anonymous and the feeling pervades these songs.

He has no idea when or if he will ever be allowed to return to his homeland. He might as well learn to play rock chords and sing in English. But it is awkward. He cannot take the hippies or the rock-&-rollers completely serious. He is an outsider to their ideas and life style. He mocks them: "You sing about waking up in the morning but your never up before noon!"

And he cannot escape his memory and his language. Bits of Portuguese surface up from his subconscious, even as he struggles to sing and write in this new, rhyme-less language. Verses in Portuguese force themselves into his English songs. The sound of cuicas and bossa nova chords intervene, even as he tries to play his guitar in the English style. But the sounds of Brasil, and the sounds of Portuguese words, come across as hallucinations, chunks of dream, trance-inducing (trance, a play on words on the title "transa", which is itself a word full of sexual, sensuous overtones).

The Poet goes into the streets of London. He walks down the street and hears a tropical sound: but it is just reggae, not the samba and bossa nova sound of his home land. He remembers a lesson from his days as a school boy, another poet 300 years his elder, Gregorio de Mattos, whose outrageous art earned him the nickname "Hell Mouth" and earned him an exile in Angola. "Triste Bahia" becomes a sort of seance, a dialogue of exiled poet to exiled poet, across the cosmos and the centuries, a communion of language and rhythms that evoke a homeland, Bahia, from which they have both been expelled.

So much for the context, now for the music. It is amazing how dreamy it is while maintaining a bare, minimalist production. No lush tracks recorded one on top of the next. Just a man, a microphone, an acoustic guitar, some background percussionists, and a bassist. If you close your eyes it almost sounds like you are in the sound studio with Caetano as he plays. And how he plays! Every one of these tracks is an amazing typically tropicalia journey to the limits of the accepted, conventional norms of mainstream music. Each starts off soft and conventional, and then builds, builds, repeats, repeats, until finally you are overwhelmed with the absolute force of the noise coming out of your speakers. And then silence. And typically a return to the beginning again.

Overrated Caetano Album.......2005-10-24

I thought I was a Caetano fan until I bought Transa (I have Cualquer Coisa, which I like very much except for the Beatles cover tunes). And the reason I bought Transa was all the glowing amazon.com reviews. Though the music is good, the lyrics are very repititious and insipid (especially the English lyrics). I mean: "Nine out of ten movie stars make me cry...I'm alive" That's bad enough once, but repeated ten times more, it's painful. I want more Caetono Veloso, but which records I don't know.
Transa is almost unlistenable...but maybe I just have a low tolerance for repititious lyrics. Good luck!

Caetano Veloso, a genius..........2003-09-12

I became an addicted listener to Caetano Veloso when I was around 15. Twenty years have passed but my great genius of the Brazilian music still keeps visiting my home day after day and heartbeats assault me nervously whenever a new cd springs up or a show calls for me. To tell the truth, I still can't help feeling excited with Caetano Veloso, really.

The 'Transa' record goes back to 1972 and it's among those Top10 records of our lives which I would take to that desert island all of us have already been invited to visit. 'Transa' was recorded during the London phase of Caetano, when he and Gilberto Gil were forced to exile for political and dictatorial reasons. It is a superb record, full of a wide musical richness, where silence achieves a never-heard dimension. Marked by solitude and also by the fact that he was living in a foreign country, 'Transa' shows a Caetano with traces of musical psychedelism, geniously seasoned with musical flavours from Northeast of Bahia, his homeland. The father of Tropicalism gave birth to an album with a strong identity, strongly winking at the European sound (many of his songs are sung in English), with several references to rock (one of the flagships of Tropicalism), to the Beatles ('woke up this morning / singing an old, old Beatles song' , in 'It's a Long Way') , but still deeply Brazilian. It's a record made by an unknown singer in the London of that time, a record by someone that lived in a country that he didn't know and that wouldn't dare to expect his music being fully understood by those to whom he would open the door of his talent. Solitude and depression that he was facing at that time blurred some musical freshness, categorically evidenced in some of his Brazilian albums. There is no room for doubt when Caetano sings: 'You don't know me / bet you'll never get to know me / you don't know me at all.', in the opening track.
'Transa ' is a conceptual album about homesickness, about absence, about his anguish imprisoned in European walls, about nostalgia and its own marks engraved on music, on his Popular Brazilian music, on rock'n roll which Tropicalism merged with to expand and that definitely changed everything about the sound produced in Brazil. As Caetano sings in 'Nostalgia', the last track of the record: 'That's what rock'n roll is all about / I mean, that's what rock'n roll was all about.'
The best justice that we can do to 'Transa' is, obviously, listening to it from the bottom of our hearts.

Brilliant Brazillian Rock.......2003-06-26

Caetano tambiýn estuvo en el exilio. Y artýsticamente parece que le hizo muy bien. No he escuchado, hasta el momento, mýs material sobre aquýl perýodo pero "Transa" es sin duda una joya. Dentro de su buenas canciones, para mý destacan dos que son representativas: "You Don't Know Me" y "Mora na filosofia". La primera, como me dijo un amigo, "parece Lou Reed". Es rock tradicional britýnico setentero, pero con la cadencia del samba y un aura melancýlica que es la que acompaýa al resto del ýlbum. El segundo tema en cuestiýn es casi ýpico, largo, bien logrado, triste y ýnico. En este disco, a diferencia de varios otros de la discografýa de Caetano, se presenan pocos temas pero largos, con secciones instrumentales prolongadas. Sin recargos, simple, directo, improvisado y complejo a la vez. "Transa" es una obra maestra que sigue la lýnea comenzada por el mismo Caetano y seguida por Os Mutantes.

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