After her defiant femininity outraged many in Brazil, she lived through a military dictatorship and was boycotted for years. But after more than 30 albums, she explains how she kept going
At 78, Joyce Moreno is one of Brazil’s musical icons, but for decades that status seemed far from assured: this headstrong singer, guitarist and composer was frequently viewed as a threat by her country’s establishment. Aged 19, the reaction to her song Me Disseram – which began “I was told my man didn’t love me” – almost torpedoed her career before it even started. “I’d often heard the expression ‘my man’ sung by Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, so for me it was normal,” she says. “But I was a beach girl from Ipanema, writing and singing in the first person. People were shocked.”
Then, inspired by trailblazing actor Leila Diniz (“her liberal attitudes lost her jobs”), Moreno refused requests that she “dress like a sexy bimbo”, and endured male critics who thought her music “too good to have been written by a woman”. When, in 1980, she discovered that her label had given another female singer the blueprints for songs she had written, she “looked for a lawyer, of course” and successfully sued; in her memoir she claims she was then boycotted by Brazil’s major record companies for a decade.
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