We live in an age of falsification, fraud, and the adulteration of facts.
We seek information and find misinformation; lies spread in 30-second amateur videos or in exaggerated speeches by big businessmen and politicians. We seek substance and find artifacts; we are driven to consume quickly, without thinking, without questioning, forced to replicate formulas and follow models in a desperate search for validation and success.
We believe in messiahs, we memorize homilies, in the vain hope that faith, not necessarily religious, will help us find the path. We thank social security, God, subsidized interest rates, and a simple and humble life, free from superfluous things like culture and citizenship, which only serve, we are told, to retard the development of the nation and undermine the solidity of the family. When the tide is favorable, we embark on pilgrimages and festivals, we hang our quilts in the window, and we sing and dance, for we have always been a joyful people, and sadness, as we well know, pays no debts. In the euphoria of this current recreational period (prec), we transform our towns and cities into amusement parks, we grant the international elite a charter on the western shores of Portugal, we sell our souls in restaurants and fado houses, amidst counterfeit dishes of local cuisine and memories invented for the English to see.
We have been brave, adventurous, idealistic, utopian, reckless, anarchist, popular—but not populist—in solidarity, activists, like that time the wave rose in Timor. We have been strong in love, courageous, bold, and ambitious, like when we leaped across the border and resisted, clandestinely, the longest dictatorship in Europe. And even original, when we made a revolution with carnations.
Now everything is fake, low-cost, souvenirs; we are reduced to the lowly condition of obedience and service, to the technical capacity of imitation. By our own will or by the demands of others, we are, at the same time, authors and victims of our own counterfeiting.
Contrafação is Luta Livre’s third album, following Técnicas de Combate (2021) and Defesa Pessoal (2023). It features ten songs of mockery and malice based on the adventures and misadventures of a Portuguese man in Portugal. Ten simple songs, with easy melodies, accompanied by guitar and synthesizer, capable of lulling the body and mind of even the most unsuspecting listener. They are neither acoustic nor electric, neither modern nor traditional, neither large nor small, neither classical nor popular; they are what they are, without artifacts, free of hypertension; there is an imperfect fado and a morna full of gratitude, a corridinho without respect and a malhão (a malão), but there is also a ballad of redemption, two love songs, and a prayer.
Contrafação is available on all digital platforms and in CD format, for sale exclusively on Bandcamp and at Drogaria Central – Loja de Discos, in Almada.
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