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By Steven Grattan and Eduardo Simões
SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Famend Brazilian rock singer and songwriter Rita Lee, an icon of the Tropicalia inventive motion, died on Tuesday after a two-year battle with lung most cancers, her household mentioned. She was 75.
“We announce the dying of Rita Lee at her residence in Sao Paulo late final night time, surrounded by all of the love of her household, as she at all times needed,” a press release posted on the singer’s Instagram account mentioned, inviting the general public to her wake on Wednesday.
Her dying introduced an outpouring of tributes from artists, politicians and celebrities who cheered her trailblazing function in Brazilian rock.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva known as her “an artist forward of her time” and “one of many best and most sensible names in Brazilian music.”
Rita Lee Jones de Carvalho was born on Dec. 31, 1947, in Sao Paulo, to a dentist of U.S. descent and a Brazilian pianist with Italian ancestry.
She was central to Brazil’s politically charged Tropicalia motion, which emerged in defiance of a army dictatorship beginning in 1964, and her work on the time was usually censored.
With greater than 20 albums recorded and 55 million information offered, her songs touched on points associated to feminism and intercourse in an period when such points had been taboo.
Lee gained fame within the Sixties with the band Os Mutantes, fashioned with Arnaldo Baptista and Sergio Dias, enjoying alongside legends of Brazilian pop music equivalent to Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso to worldwide acclaim.
Kicked out of Os Mutantes by Baptista, whom she had been married to, for supposed inventive variations, Lee performed with the band Tutti Frutti within the Nineteen Seventies.
That band broke up in the direction of the top of the last decade, main Rita to begin her solo profession, and he or she performed usually along with her husband Roberto de Carvalho, the daddy of her three youngsters.
Rita Lee was recognized with lung most cancers in 2021 and had been present process therapy since then.
(Reporting by Steven Grattan and Eduardo Simoes; Modifying by Bernadette Baum and Richard Chang)