Eternal Rhythm - Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges's Clube da Esquina
In 1972, Brazil was under lock and key. The military dictatorship had tightened its grip with AI-5, a brutal decree that made censorship the law and dissent a crime. Newspapers were redacted with black bars. Musicians disappeared or fled. Fear was the national tempo. But in the hills of Minas Gerais, a group of young artists started humming a different tune—one stitched together from memory, exile, and the distant glow of imagined freedom.
The result was Clube da Esquina, an album as radical as it was melodic. Milton Nascimento—already a national treasure with a voice that floated somewhere between earth and the divine—teamed up with 19-year-old prodigy Lô Borges to build not just a record, but a refuge. In a country where even metaphors could be dangerous, this was protest in code. And if you didn’t speak the language, the music would still get you there.
Unlike the confrontational tone of Tropicália, which had drawn the regime’s ire a few years earlier, Clube da Esquina whispered instead of shouted. It hid its resistance in harmonies, in textures, in the aching nostalgia of songs like “San Vicente” and the restless groove of “Cravo e Canela.” The record was packed with Brazilian rhythms—samba, baião, choro—but filtered through the lens of jazz, prog rock, and The Beatles. It was cosmopolitan without losing its roots. A middle finger wrapped in a lullaby.
Censorship couldn’t pin it down. The lyrics were dreamlike, impressionistic—landscapes of longing, spiritual detours, coded memories of what Brazil used to be before the tanks rolled in. It was political in the way exile is political. Nascimento, Black and raised by a white adoptive family, understood life at the margins. Borges, still a kid, gave the record its restless youth. Together, they mapped out an alternate Brazil—one full of light, ambiguity, and grace.
The “corner club” wasn’t real, not in the physical sense. It was an idea. A resistance cell disguised as a jam session. A vision of what art could be when the walls closed in. It welcomed everyone—Wagner Tiso’s lush arrangements, Toninho Horta’s jazz guitar, Beto Guedes’s soft vocals. No one was the star, and that was the point. In a dictatorship that demanded hierarchy, Clube da Esquina offered communion.
Today, the album is canon. But back then, it was misunderstood—too dense, too weird, too quiet. Only later did people hear it for what it was: not an escape from the political darkness, but a beacon cutting through it. Clube da Esquina wasn’t chasing approval. It was building a secret world—and daring you to find your way in.
Buy Clube da Esquina here
