A striker typically plays further up the pitch from midfielders and defenders. They are sometime called forwards or attackers. We're talking about football here, by the way - and not American football, but the sport North American English speakers insist upon calling "soccer".
Why the soccer lesson up front?
Because this 1976 song is about a striker.
The song, considered by many to be the greatest ever written about a sport, was considered by Rolling Stone to be one of the 500 greatest songs of all time, a list dominated by English-language songs. This song is very much in Portuguese.
You might have noticed that I called this a "1976" song. It was. It's on his album África Brasil, which is an absolutely incredible album. However, the song rose to fame in 1989, when David Byrne included it on Brazil Classics Vol. 1, and this video made the heavy rotation on VH1.
He was known as Jorge Ben until the late 1980s, and changed his name allegedly because a chunk of the royalties for this song accidentally went to singer George Benson. I don't know if that's true, but if you look at the title of this post, I ain't taking any chances with his royalties.
Jorge Ben Jor is WELL into his 80s.
He STILL performs. Here he is - aged 84, two years ago - performing the song, and playing the lead guitar, and bringing the energy! But also, this is 11 songs into his set! And he kept going!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment