Podres Poderes
Caetano Veloso
Rotten Powers
While men exercise
Their rotten powers
Motorcycles and beetles advance
The red lights
And miss the green ones
We are fools
I wanted to want to scream
Seven hundred thousand times
How beautiful they are
How beautiful the bourgeois
And the Japanese are
But everything is much more
Will we never do anything but confirm
The incompetence of Catholic America
That will always need ridiculous tyrants
Will it be, will it be?
What will it be, what will it be?
Will this stupid rhetoric of mine
Have to sound, have to be heard
For another thousand years
While men exercise
Their rotten powers
Indians and priests and queers
Blacks and women
And teenagers
Celebrate carnival
I wanted to want to sing in tune with them
To be silent out of respect for their trance in ecstasy
To be indecent
But everything is very bad
Or else every peasant and every foreman
With their stupidity will shed too much blood
In the marshes, in the cities
In the backlands and in the plains
Will only the Paschal hermetisms
And the tones, the thousand tones
Their sounds and their brilliant gifts
Save us, will save us
From this darkness and nothing more
While men exercise
Their rotten powers
Dying and killing from hunger
From anger and thirst
Are so often
Natural gestures
I want to bring my vagabond singing closer
To those who watch over the joy of the world
Going deeper
Tins and goods and such
Will we never do anything but confirm
The incompetence of Catholic America
That will always need ridiculous tyrants
Will it be, will it be?
What will it be, what will it be?
Will this stupid rhetoric of mine
Have to sound, have to be heard
For another thousand years
Or else every peasant and every foreman
With their stupidity will shed too much blood
In the marshes, in the cities
In the backlands and in the plains
Will only
The Paschal hermetisms
And the tones, the thousand tones
Their sounds and their brilliant gifts
Save us, will save us
From this darkness and nothing more
While men
Exercise their rotten powers
Dying and killing from hunger
From anger and thirst
Are so often
Natural gestures
I want to bring
My vagabond singing
Closer
To those who watch
Over the joy of the world
Going deeper
Tins and goods and such!
Going deeper
Tins and goods and such!
Going deeper
Tins and goods and such!