![]() ![]() GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Lee left the band in 1972 for a solo career. MONTANA RAY: She was really central to that movement and was hounded by the apparatus of the state police. Lee told The New York Times in 2001 that artists had to, quote, "be creative, but evasive, to avoid the repression." Montana Ray, a Spanish and Portuguese translator who teaches at NYU, says Lee refused to conform at a time when the regime demanded it. It was a countercultural scene that flourished during Brazil's military dictatorship. GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Combining rock, psychedelia and pan-Latin rhythms, the tripped-out trio formed part of the Tropicalia movement. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PANIS ET CIRCENSES") She played the piano from an early age and co-founded Os Mutantes as a teenager in the 1960s. ![]() But Lee became known for progressive politics as much as for music. ![]() Her father descended from American confederates who fled the South after the Civil War. GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Rita Lee Jones de Carvalho was born in Sao Paulo. ![]() OS MUTANTES: (Singing in non-English language). ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO, BYLINE: Rita Lee once told a Brazilian newspaper that her band, Os Mutantes, quote, "came from another planet to take over the world." That's kind of what it sounded like. NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento has this appreciation. Brazil's queen of rock, Rita Lee, passed away this week. ![]()
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