For me, Regina’s joyous, defiant burble is the idea at the heart of the song: that there is a kind of bliss in surrendering to life’s flow that lies beyond any human attempt at defining its meaning. Listening to it recently, I was reminded of “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a 1979 Robert Hass poem in which a speaker confronts the semiotic notion that assigning words to objects degrades them, that “each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea.” “Talking this way,” he realizes, “everything dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, woman, you and I.” Everything dissolves, too, in the “Águas de Março”: sticks, stones, trees, people, pouco sozinho. Yet as a rushing river carves a canyon, each particular in Jobim’s stream shapes the luminous clarity of a general idea—the ever-present “it,” a concept informed by seasons and animals and anatomy but never quite made concrete. By the end of the song, it feels pointless to try and capture “it” in language: Whatever “it” is, it’s closer to Regina’s laugh than any words in Portuguese or English can describe. Taxonomizing life with language, the moment seems to suggest, is uproariously vain. Even the music itself eludes capture, and sits in the space between—take, for example, the opening plinks of a deliciously desafinado piano, chirping like a thrush caught between keys.
Elis & Tom wasn’t an immediate success. The record reportedly sold only 40,000 copies in Brazil; after a few performances together, Regina and Jobim parted ways, Regina careening toward a cocaine habit, and Jobim toward a second marriage with a woman younger than Regina. In 1985, struggling to support his family, Jobim licensed the rights to “Águas de Março” to Coca-Cola for a six-month contract that happened to overlap with the “New Coke” fiasco. An advertiser’s job is far more literal than the artist’s, and the opportunity the admen saw in “Águas de Março” is obvious enough: The tune was catchy, international in an era when globalization was in vogue, yet malleable enough that, with some smoothing-down, it could become convincingly all-American. And the punchline was teed up. Never once in “Águas de Março” does Jobim flip the order of his “It is…” sentences to “…is it.” But for Coke, funneling this list of images towards one definitive and shiny declaration—Coke Is It!—was the commercial’s raison d’être.
While Coke was weathering backlash for changing its formula, Jobim faced censure among fellow artists for “selling Brazil to Coca-Cola.” It was hardly surprising that artists would be upset—the United States had legitimized the junta, and Coca-Cola was a globally recognized symbol of consumerism that artists internationally and at home in Rio regularly subverted for political critique. The ease with which Jobim’s composition slotted into American capitalist culture may have proved the suspicions of left-leaning Brazilian youth that bossa nova was a maddeningly apolitical artform, lacking the cultural urgency of MPB songs like Regina’s 1979 hit “The drunkard and the tightrope walker,” a rallying cry for the re-democratization of Brazil. And what Jobim sold was larger than Brazil—he’d cashed in on the open-ended promise of “it,” scrubbing his collaged landscape of life so that Madison Avenue could redraw it in their image.
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