101 songs that marked Portugal #84: ‘Nova Lisboa’, by Dino D’Santiago (2018)
101 songs that marked Portugal is a section that aims to honor the songs, composers and performers that marked the history of Portuguese music in Portugal. Without rigid chronological order, they are a personal portrait (with a focus on the petite histoire) of the author. More than a contextualization of an inventory of known facts, it is above all an association of stories and many unrecorded ones. They are stories with stories beyond the music. Sometimes the wrong side of songs. Especially the wrong side of the songs.
‘New Lisbon’, Dino D’Santiago (2018)
The rise of Silva Araújo, a wholesaler in the city of Mindelo, took place when, on a (rare) rainy day, he could not find an umbrella throughout the city. Having to content himself with a cork helmet, an island thus designed to order 100 umbrellas – so that he could serve, even if he only estimated to sell (for his own) ten per year, the capital of São Vicente. By mistake, he added a zero to the order and found himself with his warehouse crammed with 10,000 umbrellas – which he predicted he would never get in life, cursing his luck. But fate rewarded (at least in fiction) those who make mistakes and it started to rain in Mindelo. First a light rain, which the radio was quick to report that ‘it was raining torrentially’, and then a heavy storm, which lasted eight days, a ‘beautiful and useful rain, soaking the ground, the streets and the streets’. Napumoceno managed to sell his 10,000 umbrellas and from then on became one of the most influential merchants in the city. The episode is described in the novel “The Testament of Senhor Napumoceno da Silva Araújo”, by Germano Almeida, and describes the greatest drama of the fortunate islands: the drought. The drought, having been at the center of the Claridade Movement, in the 1900s, influenced the theme of a truly Cape Verdean literature (and not Portuguese or colonial).
In addition to the drought and its harmful consequences, the dichotomy ‘willingness to leave having to stay’ / ‘willingness to stay having to leave’ manifested itself as the aggregating material of Cape Verdean literature, extending to the very good music that was produced during decades by B. Leza, Eugénio Tavares or Manuel de Novas.
The new generation of Cape Verdean emigrants, in Portugal, the Netherlands or the United States, has continued for decades to express the regrets of their references. It was, however, a generation of descendants of Cape Verdeans born in future Portugal that already created other new plots and resistance by a compound of nonconformity.
Dino D’Santiago was one of those Luso-Cape Verdeans who don’t belittle themselves as their references, feel exuberantly Portuguese and who weren’t enough of a narrator, a drama that plagued generations before his. He felt part of an acculturated country and thought himself capable of summarizing the musical urbanity that now infiltrates the country where he was born and the Creole of his origins. Together with the best – Kalaf Epalanga, Branko or the Londoner Seiji – to produce a sound that, like a tropical feast, shares roots, latitudes and harmonies.
In 1989, at the age of six, Dino D’Santiago went to Cape Verde for the first time. The stay in the land where his parents had been born, in the interior of the island of Santiago, was traumatic. The lack of potable water and electricity, the thatched roofs, the climb to a chapel where the rosary was prayed at the end of the afternoon, the extreme poverty, were traumatic that Dino would only return to ‘his’ land for 22 years – to make peace with his genetics, to dilute the nostalgia for a place he thought was not his own, to reconcile with the Creole and to establish its sound – based on soul, funk, funaná, batuque, electronics, afro-house and hip-hop, like a tattoo where many pasts fit.
That night on May 12, 2018, at the Altice Arena, in the Eurovision Song Contest (as retribution for Salvador Sobral having won Eurovision the previous year), Branko was invited to show what Portugal had to offer musically. And language language Saraago Tavares, Pluónio, Mayra Andre Dino Dino to show off the new mestizo that was served here in the village.
At home (in Portugal and across Europe) or in the audience at Parque das Nações, they were the ones who turned to Shazam to transport engaging songs, that contemporary narrative, to their playlist. Shazam couldn’t dictate its origin – because the songs were an exordium that was still becoming plural that year. One of the songs was ‘Nova Lisboa’ (lyrics by Kalaf Epalanga and performed by Dino D’Santiago) – the joke to add to that celebration. ‘New Lisbon’ was, is, the periphrasis of an acculturated Portugal. From a Creole Portugal. From a mestizo Portugal. Of a Portugal that expresses its various meanings in its new dialect. From a Portugal that transports Luanda, São Paulo, Praia, Bissau or Maputo. But also from a Portugal where Fela Kuti, Youssou N’Dour or Salif Keïta fit. From a Portugal that absorbs Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and eccentric Europe. Branko, Sara Tavares, Plutónio, Mayra Andrade and Dino D’Santiago were the messengers of the CPLP sounds and what unites the CPLP to the world. They were builders of stories, plots, aggregates of planned dreams. They wanted to share the will of everything that has to be said and that perhaps is not here yet. They understood what the multicultural world was, what a multicultural Lisbon was, the Lisbon of an epicenter that creates trends and makes a new song sound – one, in short, New Lisbon.
Lisbon is today a city of ghettos, but also of elites. From caps with the inside-out peak, to Adidas sneakers with bright colors and effusive gestures. But Lisbon is also a city of thick socks tucked into Crocs, spoken of by strangers. With blond hair and maps of its geography aboard a tuk-tuk. From evenings listening to fado around bottles of Mateus Rosé (lovely wine they have). There is no longer the Lisbon of Belarmino Fragoso, Kilas or Tony Morgon. There is no longer the Lisbon of movie neons at Restauradores, Parque Mayer, and the Ritz Club. There is no longer a Lisbon of good rascals, of marialvas, of hair combed with glitter. There is no longer the Lisbon of Cardoso Pires. by Dinis Machado. Of Cesario Verde. From cabarets, from trading sessions and late nights in dens of doom. But there is another Lisbon. A ‘New Lisbon’. A Lisbon that, not knowing how to do it, will be diluted through new nuclei, new sounds and new languages – establishing its identity in the present that will vary.
Dino D’Santiago tries to leave a legacy of this Lisbon of limits. Of a Lisbon that is also very much his. From a plural, Lusophone country, composed of many dialects and cultures. From a country that is also very much his. Dino D’Santiago knew how to sift through his past. His past in a fishermen’s neighborhood in Quarteira and vacations in Cova da Moura. He would cross the 25 de Abril bridge and at Arco do Cego he would take a taxi that would take him to Amadora, to Cova da Moura – a neighborhood with multi-storey houses, with associations such as the Moinho da Juventude with several floors. A neighborhood where it was spoken. A neighborhood that was a piece of Cape Verde, as if Lisbon had its Morabeza bonsai. A neighborhood that little Dino D’Santiago saw as a neighborhood for lucky people – right there on the outskirts of Lisbon – with running water and electricity, unlike his own, to the south, with flat plywood houses. It was necessary to purify this past, these pasts, to produce a specialized Lisbon that unfolds for the future.
Dino D’Santiago. Dino D’Quarteira. Dino D’Porto. Dino D’Lisbon. Claudino Pereira – who could have adjusted his name to what he chose – united. He is the son of African immigrants. Black. It shakes him like injustices. Awareness of inequalities. Like asymmetries. But they celebrated contrasts rather than accentuating them. He asks everyone to join the circle with him – so that we are part of the same circle. He is, in short, an anthropologist who uses music to reflect on what unites us. A trendsetter based in Lisbon.
He helped to sound the creole sound of which his city is made. The creole sound that one should (always) make a family of friends. ‘Nova Lisboa’ is the song that illuminates or rescues our rhythmic roots. That illuminates the emancipation of a contemporary country, with exotic musical matrices and with a future that Dino D’Santiago is helping to bring closer.
Where did all these people come from, I don’t know
They say we’re in fashion, ma ‘n ka krê sabê
Ali ‘sta tudu dretu, but I’m not in that
To sell the sodade or the morabeza
listen too: ‘Djonsinho Cabral‘ (2013). From his first album, “Eva”, is an original song from Os Tubarões, by Ildo Lobo, emphasizing the musical genetics of Dino D’Santiago.