Porto Santo: biografia cultural e espetacularização de uma canção

Résumé

The Madeiran popular music singer Max was one of the most cherished Portuguese light music performers in the 1950’s and 1960’s. His song Porto Santo (1953) is one of his greatest hits on stage and as a vinyl record. When revisiting the lyrics, a nuanced vision emerged, stripped of romantic and nostalgic emotionalism, revealing a daily life brimming with uncertainties. The song originally stemmed from a jingle to promote a commercial product on the radio – mineral water extracted from one of the few freshwater springs found on that small semi-arid island. The song’s national success can be explained by its arrangement in keeping with the cosmopolitan trends of the time. However, it had enough flexibility to be later incorporated into “Portuguesification” – the government policy of the time – by which commercial music was ruled. The song has recently been recycled as a sonic emblem for an island searching for cultural identifiers and struggling against an overwhelming wave instigated by tourism. In this cultural biography I suggest the application of Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle.