It was bad times. It was bad times. But at the same time, I think that the opposite of that was, that / it was very creative. 

 

  The military coup split the Brazilian music scene. Many leading Brazilian performers had left the country to take advantage of the continuing bossa nova craze in the United States. Those who remained were divided between musicians who ignored politics and left-wingers, who argued that bossa nova should change to represent the realities of the new Brazil.

 

  The form was OK. But now we have to add something, and that was the content, some content in the, that we just couldn't speak only about love and flower, and the smile. Bossa nova would only talk about the sea, and we thought that we should have more social content inside the lyrics.

 

Nara Leao, who'd been known as the Muse of bossa nova, became the face of this new protest movement. Instead of singing about love and the sea, she now chose songs about hardship or a lament written by a black singer from the northern farmlands.

 

  They used to call her the Muse, but that's wrong, she's not the muse. She was a musician. She could play, she could sing.   

 

  The left-wingers championed what they saw as authentic Brazilian music, music of the people, that came from the city slums, the favelas, or the countryside, and had no foreign influences. During the '60s, these favelas doubled in size, as more migrants moved from the countryside to the increasingly industrialised city.