Tag: Jorge Ben

Sunday April 25, 2021

I sit in the yard staring at the sun on the western horizon, singing along to “Hermes Trismegisto E Sua Celeste Tábua De Esmeralda,” listening carefully to the sung nature of the Portuguese, longing to read Christopher Dunn’s book Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture.

The song’s author Jorge Ben is an interesting figure in occult or hermetic terms, having penned not one but two songs about legendary Egyptian sage Thrice-Greatest Hermes: the one above from 1974, and a second one, the one below, called “Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu” from Ben’s fabulous 1976 album África Brasil.

Wednesday May 13, 2020

The baby falls asleep to Parliament Funkadelic, Spaceship Earth reimagined as the Mothership Connection. “Are you hip to Easter Island?” asks singer George Clinton late in the song. “The Bermuda Triangle? Well all right / Ain’t nothing but a party.” Time to live light years in the future, in a time-space proposed by Afrofuturists. “One Nation Under a Groove.” Re-constitute the social order and make it funky: “Feet don’t fail me now!” Out of fear of its wrath, I refrain from playing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry & The Upsetters’s “War Ina Babylon,” opting instead to play Bob Marley & The Wailers’s beautiful “Redemption Song” as the baby wakes. Afterwards, we dance around, her in my arms, me on my feet, to Jorge Ben’s Africa Brasil — on which I discover to my surprise a song called “Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu.” Later, by myself, I climb to the room above the garage and bliss out to J Hamilton Isaacs’s Circumzenithal Arc.